Forough Rahimpour

Human existence from the view of philosophy is a connection between self and body, and both of them build human identity. The place of the self is upper than the place of the body. So the majority of Muslim sages like Avicenna tried to introduce the self as the basis of human being in their anthropological topics and attempted to explain it in their ontological system. The main question of this article is: How much it deserves to pay attention to the knowledge of body and its effects in order to know the self from the view of Avicenna? The brief answer is that the knowledge of self is impossible without knowing body and its specifications in Avicenna's medical and philosophical views. The claim of this article is that many topics are related to the knowledge of body and its’ characteristics such as the introduction of self, proving the existence of self, self-immateriality, its substantive being, the difference between self and body, self cognition and proving vaporous spirit.

Many logicians have considered guess as one of the origins of certain principles, but they have not clarified this issue. In the works of Avicenna and consequently of his commentators, one can see meaning expansion in using this term. Avicenna brings the guess also in spiritual sciences and knows the prophecy as one of the fields of guess efficiency. Fakhr al-Din al-Razi as well as Avicenna emphasized on the role of the guess in revelation. Avicenna believed guess is related to Sacred Intellect which is above acquired Intellect, while Fakhr al-Din al-Razi held that guess is the highest level of Intellect in the sense possession and through three reasons did not consider guess as one of the certainties. According to the words of Avicenna about the relationship between revelation and certain guess, it reveals that the meaning of guess in soul discussions is mystical rather than logical.