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Thinkers

Ibn Sina (Avicenna)

Islamic · Middle East · 980 to 1037

Persian scholar who joined Greek philosophy with Islamic thought, and argued for the mind as a being distinct from the body.

What it is

Ibn Sina (died 1037), known in Europe as Avicenna, was a physician and philosopher of the Islamic world who built a comprehensive system of philosophy and science that included the teachings of revealed religion. He is probably the most significant philosopher of the Islamic tradition and one of the most influential thinkers of the period before the modern age. His medical book, the Canon, was a standard medical text for centuries, and his philosophy shaped the thinking of medieval Europe.

He was born in Afshana, a village near the city of Bukhara in Central Asia, in the 970s or about 980; the sources differ. He worked as a physician and a courtier in several cities of Iran and spent his last years in Isfahan. He died in 1037.

The main ideas

  • One system for all reality. Ibn Sina brought together the scientific and philosophical thinking of Greek antiquity and early Islam into a single, rationally ordered system. He tried to explain all of reality, and to do it in a way that fit with religion.
  • God as the Necessary Existence. His philosophy begins with questions about being. In his view God is the one being that must exist, and everything else depends on God. From this he built accounts of the soul, the intellect and the cosmos.
  • Logic and knowledge. Logic is a main part of his system, and he gave knowledge a strongly empirical basis: the senses are the way knowledge begins.
  • The soul and the intellect. He wrote extensively on the rational soul and on how the mind knows.
  • Medicine and science. Apart from philosophy he contributed to medicine, the natural sciences, music theory and mathematics.

What it looks like in practice

Picture someone who wants to understand how a person comes to know anything at all. Ibn Sina would start from the senses, which are where knowledge begins, and then ask how the mind works on what the senses give it, using logic as the tool. The habit is to join careful reasoning with attention to experience, and to ask how the whole picture fits together, including what religion teaches.

Books and moments

  • The Canon of Medicine was taught in universities in Europe until the seventeenth century, in Latin translation, and it remained in use in the Islamic world as well.
  • His philosophy influenced European thinkers from the twelfth century, when his works began to be translated into Latin.
  • His career took him from Bukhara across Iran to the court at Isfahan.

Questions and criticism

  • Accepted, revised or refuted? Reactions to his system in the Islamic world ranged from acceptance to revision, refutation and replacement by other ways of thinking. How to weigh them is still discussed.
  • Philosophy and religion. His effort to make philosophical sense of religious teaching raises the question of how far reason and revelation can be joined in a single system.
  • Which tradition is he in? Scholars place him within the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic traditions, and his relation to Neoplatonism is mixed.

Close neighbours

Ibn Sina worked within the Aristotelian tradition and shaped Latin scholastic thought, including that of Thomas Aquinas, who wrote a few centuries later. The pages on Aquinas and Aristotle describe the thinkers he is closest to.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 9 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced

  • Ibn Tufayl · Ibn Tufayl took the title and central figure of his story from an Avicennan tale.
  • John Duns Scotus · Scotus adapted Avicenna's account of being and of common natures.
  • Moses Maimonides · The Guide for the Perplexed uses Avicennan arguments for the necessary being.
  • Mulla Sadra · Mulla Sadra reworked Avicenna's ideas about what it means for things to exist.
  • Nasir al-Din al-Tusi · He defended and explained Ibn Sina's thought against his critics.
  • Suhrawardi · Suhrawardi began from Avicenna's system and then criticised it in favour of illumination.
  • Thomas Aquinas · Aquinas took over Avicenna's distinction between what a thing is and that it is.

Influenced by

  • Al-Farabi · Avicenna said that he understood Aristotle's Metaphysics only after reading al-Farabi.
  • Al-Kindi · Avicenna inherited the Arabic philosophical vocabulary that al-Kindi helped to set.
  • Aristotle · Ibn Sina built on Aristotle as read through earlier Arabic translators.

Reacted against by

  • Al-Ghazali · Al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers attacked Avicenna's views.
  • Averroes (Ibn Rushd) · Averroes argued that Avicenna had drifted from Aristotle's own teaching.

Runs parallel to

  • René Descartes · His floating-man thought experiment is often compared to Descartes' arguments about the mind. (scholars disagree about this link)

Other Islamic thinkers

Sources we used

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