Kalam understood ‘Being’ as the immediately given...

Kalam understood ‘Being’ as the immediately given, allowing no inference beyond a single contingent datum to any necessary properties, correlatives, continuators, or successor. The result was a stringent atomist occasionalism resting ultimately on an early version of logical atomism.

Avicenna preserved Aristotlean naturalism alongside the idea from scriptures of the world that arguably states that any finite being which although could be a chance event in itself, was a necessary output of its cause. He adapted al-Farabi’s Neoplatonic emanationism to this schematization.

He naturalized his own distinctive version of the kalam argument from contingency in philosophy, which stated that any being must be the necessary ‘Being’, and it was therefore simply the ultimate cause of all other things. Avicenna found refuge at the court of one ‘ Alaal-Dawla ’, who bravely resisted the military pressures of Mahmud against his lands around Isfahan. He made the philosopher and savant his vizier.

Avicenna completed his famous philosophic work the ‘Shifa’ (known in Latin as the Sufficientia) and his ‘Qanun fi Tibb’ - the Galenic Canon here. The latter remained in use as a medical textbook until finally it was brought down by the weight of criticisms during the Renaissance.

Avicenna’s philosophy was the central target of the polemic critique of the Muslim theologian al-Ghazali (1058 -1111 AD) in his ‘Incoherence of the Philosophers’, mainly on the ground that the philosopher’s retention of the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the world was inconsistent with his claim that God was the author of the world.

Al-Ghazali argued that Avicenna’s affirmations about causation being necessary and that God’s knowledge was universal made miracles impossible and divine governance too impersonal to deserve the name. Yet, Avicenna’s philosophic works (numbering over a hundred in Arabic and Persian) continued to exercise a major influence on Muslim and Jewish philosophers and (through Latin translations) on philosophers in the West (Audi, 2001).

One of his arguments concerning the nature of the soul postulated that if a fully grown man suddenly came into existence while remaining suspended in empty space, with eyes covered and limbs separated - this ‘flying man’ would have no sensation, but nevertheless he would be aware of his own being and his self. The argument anticipated the cogito of Descartes.