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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Comparative Study of Shared Views of Muslim and Non-Muslim Scholars on Philosophy and Education Chapter 5: Comparative Study of Ibn Sina and Edwards’s Shared Views on Philosophy Introduction Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (980-1037 AD), the Persian (Iranian) philosopher and physician, has been regarded as the greatest of the medieval Islamic philosophers. He served as court physician for the Sultan of Bukhara.
Avicenna was deeply influenced by Aristotle, yet, maintained a Muslim faith. He was best known for his distinction between essence and existence, in which the essence of an existing thing had to be explained by their existing cause (s), whose reality was higher than the philosophical and theological perspective (Pojman, 2003). Avicenna as a Persian philosopher, scientist and physician, was widely called ‘The Supreme Master’. He held an unsurpassed position in Islamic philosophy.
His works, including the Canon of Medicine, that were cited throughout most Medieval Latin philosophical and medical texts, had been subject of more commentaries, explanations, and reviews than any other Islamic philosopher. They inspired generations of thinkers, including many Persian poets. His philosophical work especially - Healing: Directives and Remarks and Deliverance - defined Islamic peripatetic philosophy, one of the three dominant schools of Islamic philosophy.
His contribution to science and philosophy was extraordinary in scope. It was thought that he was the first logician to define temporal modalities in prepositions. He contributed to diagnosis and identification of many diseases, and the use of specific number of pulse beats in making diagnosis (Honderich, 2005).
His autobiography described him as an intuitive student of philosophy and other Greek Sciences, who could not see the point of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, until he read a tiny essay by al-Farabi (870-950 AD), which showed him what it meant to seek the nature of ‘Being’ as such.
It was in metaphysics that Avicenna made his greatest contributions to philosophy, brilliantly synthesizing the rival approaches of the Aristotelian-Neo-Platonic tradition with the creationist monotheism of Islamic dialectical theology (Kalam). Aristotle sought and found ‘Being’ in its fullest sense in that which was changeless in nature (above all, in the cosmos as a whole).