Gohlman avicenna biography

The most famous of the philosopher-scientists of Islam, Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn-Abd Allah ibn-Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, was born in Bukhara, Persia, and died in Hamadan. After a long period of kringirrande through Persia, he became the court physician of Shams al-Dawlah in Hamadan and composed the Kitab ash-shifa (The Book of Healing), a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopedia, and the Canon of medicin, among the most famous books in the history of medicin. Avicenna was a Neoplatonic thinker whose influence was felt throughout the Christian West during the mittpunkt Ages. Medieval thought reacted powerfully to the rediscovery, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of the work of Aristotle, which had already been exercising the intellects of Islamic thinkers for some time. Hence, many of the doctrinal disputes that arose in europe in the course of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centur

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AVICENNA ii. Biography

AVICENNA

ii. Biography

Sources. Avicenna’s biography presents the paradox that although more material is available for its study than is average for a Muslim scholar of his caliber, it has received little critical attention. The very existence of the autobiography and Jūzjānī’s biography, both retold, paraphrased, and elaborated upon, seems to have inhibited from the very beginning further research into additional sources and critical analysis of those available. The assessment first made by Ebn Abī Oṣaybeʿa in the middle of the 7th/13th century has been valid ever since for both Muslim and Western scholars: Avicenna “mentioned his personal circumstances and described his own life in a way that relieves others of describing it again” (Ketāb ʿoyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭebbāʾ, ed. A. Müller, Cairo, 1882-84, II, p. 2).

A comprehensive and critical study of Avicenna’s life will have to draw on the following four cate

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138 - The Self-Made Man: Avicenna's Life and Works

• P. Adamson (ed.), Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays(Cambridge: 2013). [for Avicenna’s life see the article by Reisman]

• P. Adamson, Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna): a Very Short Introduction(Oxford: 2023).

• W. Gohlman (trans.), The Life of Ibn Sina (Albany: 1974).

• L.E. Goodman, Avicenna (Ithaca: 2006).

• D. Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (Leiden:1988).

• J. Janssens, An Annotated Bibliography on Ibn Sīnā (Leuven: 1991); supplement published 1999.

• J. Janssens and D. De Smet (eds), Avicenna and his Heritage (Leuven: 2002).

• J. McGinnis (ed.), Interpreting Avicenna (Leiden: 2004).

• J. McGinnis, Avicenna (New York: 2010).

• D.C. Reisman (ed.), Before and After Avicenna (Leiden: 2003).

• R. Wisnovsky (ed.), Aspects of Avicenna (Princeton: 2001).