The volume brings together seventeen studies on Avicenna by Dimitri Gutas, written over the past twenty-five years. They aim to establish Avicenna’s historical and philosophical context as a means to determining his philosophical project and the orientations of his thought. They deal with his life and works, his method, his epistemology, and his later reception in the Islamic world, ending with a programmatic essay on the state of the field of Avicennan studies and future agenda. Occasioned by issues raised in Gutas’s monograph on Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (whose second edition has just appeared), they form a substantive complement to it. For this reprint, a number of the essays have been reset and accordingly revised and updated. Provided with exhaustive indexes of names, places, subjects, and technical terms, the volume constitutes a new and major research tool for the study of Avicenna and his heritage.

Through close study of Avicenna's statements and major works, Dimitri Gutas traces Avicenna's own sense of his place in the Aristotelian tradition and the history of philosophy in Islam, and provides an introduction to reading his philosophical works by delineating the approach most consistent with Avicenna's intention and purpose in philosophy. The second edition of this foundational work, which has quickened fruitful research into the philosopher in the last quarter century, is completely revised and updated, and adds a new final chapter summarizing Avicenna's philosophical project. It is also enlarged with the addition of a new appendix which offers a critical inventory of Avicenna's authentic works, updating the work of Mahdavi (1954) with additional information on all manuscripts and important editions and translations. Its usefulness enhanced, the book provides primary orientation to Avicenna's philosophy and works and constitutes an indispensable research tool for their study.

the philosophers in the West, none, perhaps, is better known by name and less familiar in actual content of his ideas than the medieval Muslim philosopher, physician, minister and naturalist Abu Ali Ibn Sina, known since the days of the scholastics as Avicenna. In this book the author, himself a philosopher, and long known for his studies of Arabic thought, presents a factual account of Avicenna's philosophy. Setting the thinker in the context of his often turbulent times and tracing the roots and influences of Avicenna's ideas, this book offers a factual philosophical portrait. It details Avicenna's account of being as a synthesis between the seemingly irreconcilable extremes of Aristotelian eternalism and the creationism of monotheistic scripture. It examines Avicenna's distinctive theory of knowledge, his ideas about immortality and individuality, including the famous "floating man argument", his contributions to logic, and his probing thoughts on rhetoric and poetics.

This volume examines many aspects of the philosophy of Avicenna, the greatest philosopher of the Islamic world.

Through close study of Avicenna's statements and major works, Dimitri Gutas traces Avicenna's own sense of his place in the Aristotelian tradition and the history of philosophy in Islam, and provides an introduction to reading his philosophical works by delineating the approach most consistent with Avicenna's intention and purpose in philosophy. The second edition of this foundational work, which has quickened fruitful research into the philosopher in the last quarter century, is completely revised and updated, and adds a new final chapter summarizing Avicenna's philosophical project. It is also enlarged with the addition of a new appendix which offers a critical inventory of Avicenna's authentic works, updating the work of Mahdavi (1954) with additional information on all manuscripts and important editions and translations. Its usefulness enhanced, the book provides primary orientation to Avicenna's philosophy and works and constitutes an indispensable research tool for their study. Winner of the I. R. Iran World Award for the Book of the Year 2014

This is the second, revised and updated, edition of this foundational work introducing a reading of Avicenna's philosophical works that is consistent with his intention and purpose in philosophy. Its usefulness is enhanced with a new appendix offering a critical inventory of Avicenna's authentic works that incorporates and updates Mahdavi (1954).

In how many ways can things be said to be one, how is oneness itself to be defined, and what is its relation to essence and existence? This book engages with these core questions by examining the works of Avicenna (d. 1037 CE), who is widely regarded as the most important philosopher of the Arabic tradition. In this monograph - the first that is exclusively devoted to Avicenna’s henology and to Arabic henology in general - the author analyzes the place and meaning of oneness in Avicenna’s general metaphysics and theology and devotes particular attention to how this notion relates to Avicenna’s theory of quiddity. He contextualizes Avicenna’s doctrines in light of three major intellectual currents (ancient Greek philosophy, early Arabic philosophy, and Islamic theology or kalām) and also offers the first detailed analysis of oneness in the Bahshamite tradition. The book challenges the prevailing interpretation of Avicenna’s henology and adduces new textual evidence to show that Avicenna developed an innovative theory of oneness that expresses the essential reality and self-identity of a thing. This foundational sense of oneness is applied to all the pure quiddities and, in an eminent and prior way, to God.