Avicenna

Life and work

Avicenna was born around 980 in Afshana, a village near Bukhara in Transoxiana.^[3][1] His father was a state functionary in the employ of the Persian Samanid dynasty.^[4] He studied the philosophical curriculum—logic, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics—largely by himself and achieved proficiency by age eighteen.^[4] Avicenna served various local rulers as physician and political counselor during his itinerant career.^[4]

He moved to Gurganj, then traveled west to Jurjan, Ray, Hamadhan, and finally Isfahan.^[4] In Isfahan he spent his last thirteen years in the court of ʿAlāʾ-ad-Dawla, where he enjoyed the appreciation he deserved.^[4] Avicenna died in 1037 in Hamadhan and was buried there.^[4][5] After his family relocated to Bukhara, a major scholarly hub, Avicenna received his education there and had committed the entire Quran to memory by the time he reached ten years of age.^[6][7]

The majority of his philosophical and scientific output was composed in Arabic, the scholarly language of the Muslim world at that time, while a number of key texts were written in Early New Persian.^[8][9] It is thought that Avicenna authored approximately 450 works, of which roughly 240 are still extant, including 150 on philosophy and 40 on medicine.^[8]

What the cited sources add

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that Avicenna is arguably the most influential philosopher of the pre-modern era.^[3] The same source notes that his impact in the Islamic world led to what Michot called "la pandémie avicennienne".^[3][1] The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reports that Avicenna combined Greek late antique and early Islamic philosophical thinking into a self-consistent scientific system.^[4] That source also states that in Latin translation his philosophy influenced medieval and Renaissance philosophers, and his medical Canon formed the basis of European university medical instruction until the 17th century.^[4]

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Avicenna wrote his two earliest works in Bukhara under the influence of al-Farabi.^[3][1]