Ibn Sina · Philosophy Atlas

Intellectual setting

Ibn Sina inherited Arabic translations and transformations of Aristotle, late Platonism, and earlier Islamic philosophy. Working as physician, administrator, and court scholar amid political fragmentation, he recast those materials into a system intended to demonstrate how logic, science, metaphysics, and revealed religion cohere without becoming identical.

Key ideas

Essence and existence

What a thing is can be considered apart from whether it exists, while existence is necessary in itself only for the ultimate cause.

The Necessary Existent

Contingent beings require causes, and the explanatory sequence terminates in a being whose existence is necessary through itself.

Self-awareness

The flying-person thought experiment probes a person's immediate awareness of self apart from ordinary bodily sensation.

Prophetic intellect

Prophecy belongs within his psychology and epistemology as an exceptional capacity to receive and imaginatively express intelligible knowledge.

Legacy

Avicennian concepts organized later philosophy and theology in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Latin. Supporters, commentators, and critics—including al-Ghazali—often framed their own positions through close engagement with his system, so that criticism helped extend rather than end his reach.

Connections

Influenced by al-Fārābī (documented influence): Ibn Sina reports using al-Fārābī's work to understand Aristotle's Metaphysics, and later Avicennian philosophy developed in direct engagement with al-Fārābī.

Influenced by Aristotle (documented influence): Ibn Sina worked through the Arabic Aristotelian tradition while revising its logic, psychology, natural philosophy, and metaphysics into a distinctive system.

Influenced al-Ghazali (documented influence): Al-Ghazali's philosophical summaries and critiques engage a recognizably Avicennian system, making Ibn Sina a direct intellectual source even where rejected.

Influenced Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (documented influence): Fakhr al-Dīn met the works of Ibn Sīnā at Nishapur and responding to them became the central project of his own writing, producing a revisionist Avicennan logic; the response is critical, and he does not consistently take the Ashʿarite side against falsafa either.

Influenced Ibn ʿArabī (probable influence): Ibn ʿArabī builds his metaphysics around wujūd, existence, a term that had come to the centre of philosophical discourse with Avicenna; he writes as a Sufi rather than within falsafa, so the vocabulary is taken up and redirected rather than inherited whole.

Influenced Mullā Ṣadrā (documented influence): Mullā Ṣadrā studied the Peripatetic works of Avicenna and his student Bahmanyār, and his doctrine of substantial motion begins from Avicenna's account of radical contingency; the structure is Avicennan even where the conclusions are not.