Celia Hatherly

Scholars disagree about whether Avicenna’s corporeal form exists in the elements as a numerically distinct substantial form. By translating texts that have not yet been brought to bear on this debate, I argue that it is. I also look at two attempts by contemporary scholars to show that the disunity of corporeal and elemental forms is incompatible with Avicenna’s understanding of substance. I argue that both attempts fail since the relationship between corporeal and elemental forms is such that the elemental form can exist in the corporeal form without turning the elemental form into an accident and without violating Avicenna’s rule that substances do not exist in a subject.

This article considers Avicenna’s insistence on the disunity between the souls of humans, animals, and plants and the mixed elemental bodies in which they inhere. In particular, it looks at (1) why Avicenna rejects their unity and (2) why this rejection, pace some contemporary scholars, is compatible with the status of these souls as substances. I show that both points derive from the causal role that these souls and the elements play in the coming to be and passing away of mixed elemental bodies.

Avicenna's proof for the existence of God (the Necessary Existent) in the Metaphysics of the Salvation relies on the claim that every possible existent shares a common cause. I argue that Avicenna has good reason to hold this claim given that he thinks that (1) every essentially ordered causal series originates in a first, common cause and that (2) every possible existent belongs to an essentially ordered series. Showing Avicenna's commitment to 1 and 2 allows me to respond to Herbert Davidson's and Richard Swinburne's claim that Avicenna's proof for the Necessary Existent is incomplete and fallacious