Seyed N. Mousavian

According to the common wisdom, among both contemporary scholars and classic interpreters, Avicenna is committed to ‘Co-origination’: The human soul is temporally originated with the human body. Against the common wisdom, we will argue that Co-origination is ambiguous and vague and thus its attribution to Avicenna is in need of clarification and precisification. The problem is broken down into two sub-problems: First, the problem of the origination of different souls/powers, namely the vegetative, animal and rational, in humans, and second, the problem of the relationship between these souls/powers. Based on our solutions to these two sub-problems, we will offer our own reading of Co-origination according to which Avicenna is not committed to the view that the human soul is originated with the ‘human body’ in its ordinary sense.

Avicenna’s view on “abstraction,” particularly on the initial acquisition of the intelligible forms corresponding to natural kinds, has been hotly debated in the recent scholarship. In this paper, after introducing the problem and quickly reviewing the literature, I will propose a new interpretation, called “Avicennan Abstraction,” according to which Avicenna’s epistemology of abstraction is explainable in light of his semantics of different types of “meaning” and metaphysics of causation, i.e., essential and accidental causes.