Avicenna

 1) Biography: 

This famous scientist, Avicenna, was born in the hamlet of Afshana, near Bukhara, now in Uzbekistan, in approximately 980 A.D., where his mother was born. Abdullah, his father, was an Ismaili attorney from Balkh, which is now part of Afghanistan. Ibn Sina acquired his early schooling in his hometown and the Quran by the age of 10. He had outstanding intellectual abilities, as shown by his ability to surpass his professors at the age of fourteen. He studied logic, Euclid, and Ptolemy’s Almagest during the following five years, focusing on Muslim law, philosophy, and natural science. 

Ibn Sina was a very devout individual. Ibn Sina was perplexed by Aristotle’s metaphysics work when he was young, to the point that he prayed to God for guidance. He finally got the answers to his problems after reading a guidebook by the famed philosopher Al-Farabi. 

He began studying medicine at the age of sixteen and by the age of eighteen had established himself as a respected physician. During this period, he healed Nuh II, Samanid Ruler, of a disease for which many known doctors had given up hope. The Amir wanted to thank him for his efforts, so the young physician sought permission to utilize his fully stocked royal library. 

When Ibn Sina was twenty-two years old, his father died, and he travelled to Jurjan, near the Caspian Sea, where he taught on logic and astronomy. He also met Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, a well-known contemporary. Later, he went to Rey and subsequently Hamadan (both in modern-day Iran) to write and teach his works. He also treated Shams al-Dawla, the Emir of Hamadan, of a serious sickness when he was there. 

He travelled from Hamadan to Isfahan (today in central Iran), where he completed his epic works. Nonetheless, he continued to travel, and his health was harmed by too much mental work as well as political upheaval. He spent the final ten years of his life in the service of a military commander named Ala al-Dawla Muhammad. During his campaigns, he worked as a physician and general literary and scientific counsellor to him. He died at Hamadan, Iran, in June 1037 A.D., at the age of 58. 

Ibn Sina’s philosophy is an endeavor to develop a coherent and complete theory that complies with the religious demands of Muslim culture. He was primarily a metaphysical philosopher of being concerned with comprehending the self’s existence in this world in relation to its contingency. As a result, he may be regarded as the first significant Islamic philosopher. 

 2) Main Contributions to Science: 

Ibn Sina, often known as ‘Avicenna,’ was a real polymath who contributed to fields as diverse as medicine, psychology, and pharmacology, as well as geology, physics, astronomy, chemistry, and philosophy. He was a poet, an Islamic scholar, and a theologian, among other things. 

His renowned work Al Qanun Fi Al-Tibb was his most significant contribution to medical research (The Canon of Medicine). This book is a massive five-volume medical encyclopedia with over a million words. It is made up of medical information acquired from both ancient and Islamic sources. “The Book of Healing,” a scientific and philosophical encyclopedia, is his other significant work. 

His renowned work Al Qanun Fi Al-Tibb (The Canon of Medicine), sometimes known as the “Canon” in the West was first translated into Latin in the twelfth century, and until the mid-seventeenth century, it remained the standard medical text at European colleges. 

“The Book of Healing,” a scientific and philosophical encyclopedia, was his other significant achievement. This book was written with the intention of ‘healing’ the soul. Logic, natural sciences, mathematics, and metaphysics were divided into four sections. He devised his own logic system, Avicennian logic, in his work. He suggested that Venus was closer to the Sun than the Earth in astronomy. He devised a device for determining a star’s coordinates. He did a number of astronomical studies and declared the stars to be self-luminous. Avicenna introduced the arithmetical notion and use of “casting out of nines” in mathematics. Ibn Sina was also a poet, a religious figure, and a musician. Avicenna authored around 400 works in all, over 240 of which have survived. 

3) His Influence on European Thinking: 

“Avicenna was a greater philosopher than physician, but Al-Razi a better physician than philosopher,” British Orientalist and recognized expert on Persia Edward G. Browne said in 1919–20, a finding that has been repeated many times since. However, an 800-year-old decision raises the question of how a current assessment of “better” is reached. To understand these men’s philosophical and scientific perspectives today, many things are required. The culture of the Abbsid Caliphate (750–1258), the last reigning dynasty in the Islamic world, was based on the principles of the first Muslim community. As a result, their cultural values differed from those of the twentieth-century West and their Hellenistic forefathers. Their worldview was theocentric (centered on God), not anthropocentric (centered on humanity), as was the case in Greco-Roman times. Their cosmology was a synthesis of the natural, supernatural, and preternatural worlds. 

God was centered in Avicenna’s cosmology as the Creator—the First Cause, the essential Being from whom the 10 intelligences emerged and whose unchangeable nature and existence ruled over them. The Active Intelligence, which descended from the First Intelligence, interacted with humanity by its holy light, a symbolic feature derived from the Quran. 

Kitb al-shif, a four-part encyclopedia encompassing logic, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics, is Avicenna’s most significant philosophical and scientific achievement. Avicenna tried a wide uniform categorization of knowledge since science was linked with wisdom. Nature, 

for example, is treated in the physics part in the framework of eight major disciplines, including general principles, celestial and terrestrial bodies, and fundamental elements, as well as meteorology, mineralogy, botany, zoology, and psychology. 

The subordinate sciences, in order of importance, as designated by Avicenna, are medicine, astrology, physiognomy; the study of the correspondence of psychological characteristics to physical structure, oneiromancy; the art of dream interpretation, talismans; objects with magical power to blend the celestial forces with the forces of particular worldly bodies, giving rise to extraordinary action on earth, theurgy; the “secrets of prodigies,” whereby the combining of terrestrial forces are made to produce remarkable actions and effects; and alchemy, an arcane art studied by Avicenna, although he ultimately rejected its transmutationism (the notion that base metals, such as copper and lead, could be transformed into precious metals, such as gold and silver). According to Avicenna, numbers and arithmetic, geometry and geography, astronomy, and music are the four main branches of mathematics. 

Avicenna saw logic as a tool for philosophy, as well as an art and science concerned with second-order notions. While he adhered to the Al-Farab and Al-Kindi traditions in general, he clearly separated himself from Baghdad’s Peripatetic school and used Platonic and Stoic teachings more freely and with a more autonomous mind. More crucially, his theology—the First Cause and the Ten Intelligences—allowed his philosophy to be readily translated into mediaeval European Scholastic thinking, with its commitment to God as Creator and the heavenly hierarchy. 

4) Main Works: 

Later Muslim philosophers were affected by Avicenna’s treatises in a variety of fields, including theology, philology, mathematics, astronomy, physics, and music. He wrote about 450 books on a broad variety of topics, of which only around 240 have survived. His remaining writings are divided into 150 volumes devoted to philosophy and 40 volumes devoted to medicine. The Book of Healing and The Canon of Medicine are two of his most well-known publications. 

Avicenna produced at least one alchemical book, while numerous more have been assigned to him incorrectly. His treatises Logic, Metaphysics, Physics, and De Caelo provide a comprehensive overview of Aristotelian doctrine, though Metaphysics differs significantly from the Neoplatonism known as Aristotelianism in Avicenna’s world; Arabic philosophers have speculated that Avicenna was attempting to “re-Aristotelianize” Muslim philosophy in its entirety, unlike his predecessors, who accepted the conflation of Platonic, Aristotelian, Neo- and Middle-Platonic works transmitted into the Muslim world. 

The Logic and Metaphysics have been published several times, the latter at Venice in 1493, 1495, and 1546, for example. Some of his shorter works on medicine, logic, and other topics are written in a poetical style (the poem on logic was published by Schmoelders in 1836). There are two encyclopedic treatises on philosophy that are often referenced. The larger, Al-Shifa’ (Sanatio), is nearly complete in manuscript in the Bodleian Library and elsewhere; a section on 

the De Anima was published as the Liber Sextus Naturalium in Pavia (1490), the long account of Avicenna’s philosophy given by Muhammad al-Shahrastani appears to be mainly an analysis, and in many places a reproduction, of the Al-Shifa’.. The An-najat is a condensed version of the work (Liberatio). Parts of the Latin versions of these books have been altered by the modifications that the monastery editors admit to making. There was also a (hikmat-al-mashriqqiyya, in Latin Philosophia Orientalis) described by Roger Bacon, the bulk of which was lost in antiquity and was pantheistic in tone, according to Averroes. 

5) The Canon of Medicine: 

The Canon, which is split into five volumes, demonstrates Avicenna’s proclivity for categorization. The first volume comprises four treatises, the first of which looks at the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) in light of the four humors proposed by Greek physician Galen of Pergamum (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile). Anatomy is also covered in the first treatise. The second treatise looks at the etiology (cause) and symptoms, while the third deals with hygiene, health and disease, and death’s inevitable conclusion. The fourth treatise contains a therapeutic nosology (disease categorization) as well as a review of regimens and nutritional therapies. The Canon’s Book II is a “Materia Medica.” “Head-to-Toe Diseases” is the subject of Book III. “Diseases That Are Not Specific to Certain Organs” (fevers and other systemic and humoral diseases) are covered in Book IV, while “Compound Drugs” are covered in Book V. (e.g., theriacs, mithridates, electuaries, and cathartics). Galen’s humoral pathology is expanded upon in Books II and V, which each include major compendia of around 760 simple and complex medications. 

Unfortunately, Avicenna’s original clinical notes, which were supposed to be an appendix to the Canon, were destroyed, and only an Arabic version remained in a 1593 Roman edition. Nonetheless, he clearly used Greek physician Hippocrates’ reduction procedures to cure spinal abnormalities, an approach that had been improved by Greek physician and surgeon Paul of Aegina. The application of pressure and traction to straighten or otherwise treat bone and joint abnormalities, such as spinal curvature, was known as reduction. The procedures were not utilized again until 1896, when French surgeon Jean-François Calot revived them. Wine, as suggested by Avicenna, was widely used as a wound treatment in mediaeval Europe. He also reported the “Persian fire” (anthrax) disease, accurately linked the sweet taste of urine to diabetes, and the guinea worm. 

Avicenna’s impact may still be seen in contemporary medicine. The double-blind clinical trial, for example, is often described as a purely modern phenomena driving evidence-based medicine. Medieval doctors, on the other hand, went to considerable lengths to base their treatments on credible facts, as medical historian Michael McVaugh pointed out. Avicenna was a key character in the Greco-Arabic literature that inspired doctors like Arnold of Villanova (c. 1235–1313), Bernard de Gordon (fl. 1270–1330), and Nicholas of Poland (c. 1235–1316) in the 13th century. The testing and confirmation of remedies within a framework of logical causality was made 

possible by Avicenna’s idea of a proprietas (a consistently successful medicine based directly on experience).