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

Instruction and education have no age. The philiawisdomethics science is a method permitting to search the arts of good life. The principle of philosophical action, of philosophical arts, reside in an analytical mind, of wondering, either of question, contrary to all acquired sciences. The philosopher does not make himself a connoisseur, but as a human being that wants to know something very well. To avoid falling in believes that have no issue, illusions and appearances, he use reason or intellect. To know himself better, he does not search truth by someone else, but through himself. To uninitiated, philosophical science is an unimportant subject, and the philosopher a schizophrener. Those that hate the philosophical arts, consider it as a simple abstract reflexion, which has no link with the visible life. From the moment that philosophy requires to situate oneself out of the world, before all self exteriorisation, it is as such a way to deny life. The real philosopher has no other interest than to learn how to get out of the world, and to live as he is not in the world, according to Emperoy. Legends, anecdotes, on anti-philosophers show that they were persons living out of the Marge of reality.

The volume is full of thought-provoking insight which will prove a stimulus both to further study and to scholarly disagreement.

When William of Ockham lectured on Lombard’s Sentences in 1317-1319, he articulated a new theory of knowledge. Its reception by fourteenth-century scholars was, however, largely negative, for it conflicted with technical accounts of vision and with their interprations of Duns Scotus. This study begins with Roger Bacon, a major source for later scholastics’ efforts to tie a complex of semantic and optical explanations together into an account of concept formation, truth and the acquisition of certitude. After considering the challenges of Peter Olivi and Henry of Ghent, Part I concludes with a discussion of Scotus’s epistemology. Part II explores the alternative theories of Peter Aureol and William of Ockham. Part III traces the impact of Scotus, and then of Aureol, on Oxford thought in the years of Ockham’s early audience, culminating with the views of Adam Wodeham. Part IV concerns Aureol’s intellectual legacy at Paris, the introduction of Wodeham’s thought there, and Autrecourt’s controversies.

Table of contents - Plato, Knowledge and Opinion, from 'Republic'; - Augustine, Three Things True and Certain, from 'City of God'; - Aquinas, Whether Faith is More Certain than Science . . . ? from 'Summa Theologica'; - Descartes, Meditations I, II, VI, from 'Meditations'; - Leibniz, On the Method of Distinguishing Real from 'Imaginary Phenomena'; - Hume, Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy, from 'Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding'; - Reid, Reflections on the Common Theory of Ideas, from 'Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man'; - Husserl, First Meditation; the Way to the Transcendental Ego, from 'Cartesian Meditations'; - Moore, Certainty, from 'Philosophical Papers'; - Wittgenstein, On Certainty, from 'On Certainty'; - Reichenbach, The Search for Certainty and the Rationalistic Conception of Knowledge, from 'The Rise of Scientific Philosophy'; - Malcolm, Do I Know I Am Awake? from 'Dreaming'; - Bouwsma, Descartes Evil Genius, from 'Philosophical Essays'; - Smullyan, Dream or Reality, from 5000 B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies; - Octavio Paz, Certainty, a poem from 'Configurations'.