Bilge Sever Kıyak

This article reinterprets Avicenna’s “Flying Man” not as a strict metaphysical proof, but as a experiential and heuristic exercise. By examining the three main versions Shifāʾ Nafs I.5, Nafs V.7, and Ishārāt X), it shows that the thought experiment first establishes an immediate self-awareness, and then, starting from this finding, points to the non-corporeality of the soul. Avicenna brings the faculties of imagination and estimation into play to have the reader construct a scenario in their own mind. With sensory ties withdrawn, the reader directly experiences their own existence, and thus the process serves an instructive function. This experiential reading treats the Flying Man as an inward turn that makes the basic experience of the soul’s self-awareness visible, thereby linking it to Avicenna’s discussions of selfhood and the nafs-body relation in his philosophy of mind. From this perspective, the Flying Man is not a straightforward demonstrative proof (burhān), but a tanbīh, that is, a guiding indication. The first and reliable result of the experiment is self-awareness, non-corporeality is a secondary, subsequent step that emerges at the level of implication rather than as a conclusive proof. In this way, by foregrounding the experiential dimension of the experiment, its place within Avicenna’s philosophy of mind becomes clearer.

This article examines whether Avicenna can be characterized as a strict follower of Aristotelian hylomorphism with respect to his understanding of the human rational soul (al-nafs al-nāṭiqa), by exploring the multilayered meanings that hylomorphism acquired in Ancient and Late Antique traditions. First, the concept of hylomorphism is analyzed, and followed by a discussion of the post-Aristotelian shift among commentators from the notion of “form” to that of separable “actuality”. It is shown that this transformation allowed the soul to be conceived not as a fully intrinsic form but as something with a more transcendent function. Shaped by Neoplatonic influences, this approach laid the groundwork in later centuries for conceiving the soul as a substance that can be partially separable from the body. The scope of this study includes not only Avicenna’s biological and psychological works, but also key metaphysical passages from the Book of the Metaphysics of the Healing and al-Ishārāt wa’l-tanbīhāt, analyzed in relation to their Aristotelian background. The aim is to show that while Avicenna preserves the explanatory power of the matter–form doctrine in accounting for the functions of life, he departs from hylomorphism in defining the nafs that thinks and knows universals. Methodologically, the article closely examines Avicenna’s concepts of form and actuality through textual and conceptual analysis and relates them to the Peripatetic and Late Antique debates on soul, form, and actuality (entelecheia). The main finding of the study is that by replacing the concept of form with that of actuality, Avicenna redefines the ontological status of the nafs. For vegetative and animal life-activities, the nafs is the first actuality of an organic body and operates through bodily organs. However, regarding the rational nafs, actuality takes on a dual function. On the one hand, the nafs actualizes bodily capacities instrumentally, while on the other, it represents a non-material subject that is aware of itself. The Flying Man thought experiment shows that self-awareness does not depend on bodily perception, while the sailor-ship analogy demonstrates that the body is merely an instrument through which the soul performs its actions, and not its constitutive form. Consequently, Avicenna maintains the explanatory role of hylomorphism for vital activities but abandons it when intellectual acts and self-awareness are at issue. The article concludes that labeling Avicenna a hylomorphist obscures his deliberate conceptual transformation. By privileging actuality over form, Avicenna positions psychology as a discipline that leads to metaphysics. Accordingly, the human being, though united with the body instrumentally in action, ultimately rests on a non-material subject that continues to exist after the body’s dissolution. This result reshapes traditional evaluations of his system and explains why the themes of immortality and the autonomy of intellect occupy a central place in his philosophy.