ABSTRACT

This work engages in a constructive, yet subtle, dialogue with the nuanced accounts of sensory intentionality and empirical knowledge offered by the Islamic philosopher Avicenna.

This discourse has two main objectives: (1) providing an interpretation of Avicenna’s epistemology that avoids reading him as a precursor to British empiricists or as a full-fledged emanatist and (2) bringing light to the importance of Avicenna’s account of experience to relevant contemporary Anglo-American discussions in epistemology and metaphysics. These two objectives are interconnected. Anglo-American philosophy provides the framework for a novel reading of Avicenna on knowledge and reality, and the latter, in turn, contributes to adjusting some aspects of the former.

Advancing the Avicennian perspective on contemporary analytic discourse, this volume is a key resource for researchers and students interested in comparative and analytic epistemology and metaphysics as well as Islamic philosophy.

chapter |8 pages

Introduction

Avicenna and the Sellarsian account of experience

chapter 3|16 pages

Perennial philosophy

Against scientism and reason-nature dualism

chapter 4|30 pages

Avicenna on knowing the unknown

Meno's paradox and the sensory foundations of knowledge

chapter 5|28 pages

The mind's involvement in sense perception

Avicenna on sensory intentionality and the unity of being

chapter |7 pages

Conclusion

On Avicenna and the so-called common medieval view