- Length
- 480 pagesMarmura, The Metaphysics of The Healing, Brigham Young, 2005 - the metaphysics alone, Arabic with facing translation
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
The Book of Healing
The most influential philosophical system produced in Arabic, and the one that gave both Islamic theology and Latin Europe their vocabulary for talking about existence. Its distinction between what a thing is and that it is runs from Baghdad through Aquinas and Scotus into the modern period.
- Date
- c. 1020-1027
- Author
- Ibn Sina
- Region
- Hamadan and Isfahan, Iran
- Language
- Arabic
- 1150 Latin, Gundissalinus and collaborators The psychology and metaphysics at Toledo; the version Europe read Consensus
- 1952 English, Fazlur Rahman The psychology; in copyright Attested
- 2005 English, Michael Marmura The metaphysics, Arabic with facing translation; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Answered — Drew a named later reply, but was not itself a reply
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Absorbed — Its argument became assumption and stopped being cited
- Years to the reply
- 68 years
The system was absorbed so completely into both Islamic theology and Latin scholasticism that arguments taken from it were used for centuries by people who did not know their source.
What the book says
An encyclopaedia of everything a philosopher needed to know, in four parts - logic, natural science, mathematics and metaphysics - and the healing of the title is of the soul's ignorance rather than of the body. The metaphysics is where the philosophy is. Ibn Sina begins from a distinction that would occupy Europe for six centuries: what a thing is, and that it is, are separable. A triangle's nature can be understood entirely without knowing whether any triangle exists, so existence is not part of what a thing is but something added to it. From this comes the central proof. Everything whose existence is separable from its essence is merely possible, and merely possible things need a cause; a chain of such things, however long, is still a chain of things that need causing; so there must be something whose existence is not separable from what it is, and that is the Necessary Existent. The natural science includes the argument the book is best known for outside specialist circles: imagine a man created fully formed, suspended in air, in the dark, his limbs apart so that he touches nothing, with no memory and no sensation whatever. He would affirm his own existence and would affirm nothing else. Self-awareness, Ibn Sina concludes, does not come through the body.
What it argues
That existence is not part of any thing's nature except one. Everything we encounter might not have been, and what might not have been requires something to account for its being - not merely to have started it off, but to sustain it, since the possibility does not go away once the thing exists. Chains of such things cannot terminate in another merely possible thing, so there is a Necessary Existent whose essence is to exist and which requires nothing. From that single being everything else proceeds by a necessary emanation through a series of intellects, which is how Ibn Sina reconciles a philosophically demanded necessity with a religiously demanded dependence. God knows particulars, he argues, but knows them universally, through their causes rather than by observing them.
What answered it
al-Ghazali, seventy years later, in the most consequential attack on philosophy written in Arabic - and the attack was possible only because al-Ghazali had first mastered the system well enough to expound it. Ibn Rushd then answered al-Ghazali, and the three books together are the section's clearest demonstration of what a reply structure looks like. In the Latin world the reception was different: the arguments were absorbed and modified rather than refuted, and Aquinas's real distinction between essence and existence begins here.
How it argues
By demonstration, in the strict sense the Arabic tradition inherited from Aristotle's logic: premises that are necessary, conclusions that follow. The prose is technical, dry and unrelenting, and its confidence is the point - the claim is not that these things are plausible but that they are proved. The flying man is the one passage that argues by getting the reader to try something, and it stands out for that reason; Ibn Sina uses it to establish that the soul is known to itself directly, which is a conclusion the demonstrations elsewhere would take pages to approach.
The moment
Eastern Iran and Iraq in the early eleventh century, in the fragmented aftermath of Abbasid decline, with Ibn Sina serving as physician and administrator to a succession of local rulers, being imprisoned once and fleeing more than once. He had absorbed the Greek material that the translation movement had made available in Arabic and was working from al-Farabi's foundation. His medical encyclopaedia became the standard European medical textbook for five hundred years; this is the philosophical companion to it.
How it travelled
In pieces, in two directions. In the Islamic east the Shifa' became the framework of philosophical theology, so thoroughly that later Ash'arite theologians arguing against philosophy did so in Avicennan terms. In the west it went through Toledo: the psychology and the metaphysics were translated into Latin in the twelfth century and entered the universities alongside Aristotle, so that a European student reading the Physics read Ibn Sina's account of it too. The flying man reappears, without attribution and possibly without contact, in the seventeenth century as a thought experiment about a mind that can doubt everything but itself.
The strongest objection
al-Ghazali's, and it is about the status of the proofs rather than their conclusions. Ibn Sina claims demonstration, and demonstration is a high standard: it requires that the premises be necessary and the inference valid. al-Ghazali's method is to grant the vocabulary and show that at point after point what has been offered is a plausible account rather than a proof - most sharply on causation, where the observed regularity of fire burning cotton is shown to establish sequence and not necessity. The objection does not show that Ibn Sina is wrong. It shows that he has not proved what he claims to have proved, which for a system built on demonstration is the more damaging result.
Why read it
Not entire - almost nobody has. The metaphysics in Marmura's edition, and within it the treatment of necessary and possible existence, is the part that matters and can be read on its own. The flying man passage is a page and is one of the half-dozen most reproduced thought experiments in philosophy.
- First printed
- 1593
- First in English
- 1952
- Digitised
- Partial
Enormous, and rarely printed or read entire. The logic, the psychology and the metaphysics circulated separately from early on, and the Latin tradition knew mainly the last two.
Marmura's edition of the metaphysics and Rahman's of the psychology are the standard English versions and are in copyright. There is no complete English Shifa'.
Where it stands
Absorbed. Almost nobody defends the emanationist cosmology, and the essence-existence distinction, the modal argument from contingency and the account of self-awareness are all live topics in metaphysics and philosophy of religion, usually under other names and often without the source being noticed.
On quoting this book
The Arabic is public domain; every usable English translation is modern and in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether Ibn Sina's God is genuinely the God of Islamic doctrine or a philosophical construct wearing the name was the question al-Ghazali pressed and it has never been settled. Whether the flying man is meant as a proof of the soul's immateriality or as a way of drawing attention to something already known is disputed by his interpreters. And the relation between the Shifa' and his later works, particularly the more compressed and possibly more radical Pointers, is argued - some scholars hold that his mature position differs from the one the Latin tradition received.