Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
980-1037 · Islamic Philosophy · Prominent
Ibn Sina was a Persian philosopher and physician. Imagine being created full grown, floating in the dark, touching nothing and feeling nothing: you would still know that you exist. He used that flying man to show you know yourself without the body. In everything else, what a thing is and that it is come apart, and existence is borrowed from a Necessary Being whose essence is its existence.
Signature
The position Avicenna is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Identity
- leans Unchanging
- Beginning of Things
- Emanation
Positions on the 10 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- leans Purposeful (75 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain (79 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- The Divine
- leans Describable (29 on a 0–100 scale from Describable to Indescribable)
- Universals
- leans Realism (25 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Identity
- leans Unchanging (25 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- leans Inherent (79 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Nature of Reality
- leans Unity (21 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Ground of Being
- leans Transcendence (79 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- leans Objective (75 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Polity
- leans Illiberalism (25 on a 0–100 scale from Illiberalism to Liberalism)
10 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Avicenna refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Non-Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Government
- Epistocracy
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Knowledge
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Good Real, Evil Privative
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Indirect Realism
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Pure Reason / Receptive Intellect
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Natural Law
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Divine Providence
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Emanation
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Block Universe
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Authority
- Divine Revelation / Rational Expertise
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Language
- Representation
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Law
- Natural Law
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Ascent of the Soul
What happens at death? - Role of Emotion
- Obstacle to Reason
What is the proper role of emotion? - Human Nature
- Imago Dei
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- The Divine
What is your primary bond and loyalty?