Avicenna
980 – 1037 · Persia
Known for: Persian physician and philosopher, author of The Canon of Medicine
“Physician to the courts of Persia, teacher of Europe for six hundred years.”
Biography
Avicenna, known across the Persian and Arabic world as Ibn Sina, was born around the year 980 in the village of Afshana in Transoxiana, near Bukhara, into a Persian family whose father served the Samanid administration. The family soon settled in Bukhara, then a rival to Baghdad as the cultural capital of the Muslim world. His parents saw his gift early and hired tutors: he had memorised the Quran by the age of ten, learned arithmetic from an Indian greengrocer, studied Hanafi jurisprudence under Ismail al-Zahid, and read Porphyry's Isagoge with the philosopher al-Natili, who soon told him to carry on alone. He worked through Ptolemy's Almagest and Euclid's Elements by himself and was at home in the Greek sciences by eighteen. At seventeen he was already treating the Samanid ruler Nuh II, an appointment that opened the palace library to him.
The Samanid state fell in 999, and the rest of his life was spent moving between the courts of Persia and Central Asia, at Gurganj, Gorgan, Rey, Isfahan and Hamadan, serving rulers as physician and at times as vizier, and writing at night and on the road. Of roughly 450 works attributed to him, some 240 survive, about 150 of them on philosophy and 40 on medicine, mostly in Arabic and several in Persian. The Book of Healing is an encyclopedia of logic, natural science, mathematics and metaphysics; The Canon of Medicine gathers Greek and Persian medicine into one ordered system, tested against his own observation at the bedside, and treats anatomy, drugs, diagnosis and the causes of illness in five books. In philosophy he was the great Aristotelian of the Islamic world, distinguishing essence from existence and proposing the thought experiment of the floating man, who, suspended without any sensation, would still know that he exists.
Avicenna died in 1037, a little past fifty, and was buried at Hamadan, where his tomb is visited to this day. By the twelfth century translators in Spain had carried his medicine into Latin, and The Canon became a set text at Montpellier, Padua and other European universities, still prescribed as late as 1650. His metaphysics passed as directly into the schools of Christian Europe, where Thomas Aquinas argued with him and learned from him, and into the later Islamic tradition, which took his questions for its own. He was among the last thinkers able to hold the whole learning of an age, medicine and logic, astronomy and theology, mathematics and poetry, in one mind and one body of work.