Avicenna Quotes on Knowledge
Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980–1037) developed the most systematic Islamic philosophical psychology and epistemology in the Healing (al-Shifa) and the Pointers and Reminders. The famous floating man thought-experiment argues that a person created in mid-air, deprived of all sensation and bodily awareness, would still be aware of their own existence as a thinking thing — establishing the soul's substantial existence independent of the body in an argument anticipating Descartes by six centuries. The doctrine of the active intellect as the giver of forms supplies Avicenna's account of how universal concepts are abstracted from particular sense-impressions, and the framework dominated philosophical psychology in both the Islamic world and the medieval Latin West.
Quotes
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Attributed to Avicenna:
“Medicine is the science by which we learn the various states of the human body in health and not in health, and the means by which health is likely to be lost and, when lost, is likely to be restored.”
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Attributed to Avicenna:
“The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes.”
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Attributed to Avicenna:
“The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion, and men who have religion and no wit.”
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Attributed to Avicenna:
“Whoever has, throughout his life, observed the impressions on his soul made by his loves and hatreds, his desires and aversions, will not doubt that the soul is something other than the body.”
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“On Medicine, ( c . 1020)”
The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes , is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes. Therefore in medicine we ought to know the causes of sickness and health. And because health and sickness and their causes are sometimes manifest, and sometimes hidden and not to be comprehended except by the study of symptoms, we must also study the symptoms of health and diseas -
“Those who deny the first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped.”
Metaphysics , Book I -
“Metaphysics , Book I”
Those who deny the first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped. -
“An ignorant doctor is the aide-de-camp of death.”
As quoted in Familiar Medical Quotations (1968) by Maurice B. Strauss -
“Medicine considers the human body as to the means by which it is cured and by which it is driven away from health.”
As quoted in The Pursuit of Learning in the Islamic World, 610-2003 (2006), by Hunt Janin, p. 75.