ABSTRACT
At first sight there would seem to be little in common between Avicenna's and Maimonides' accounts of the human soul in general and of the intellect in particular. The difference is already obvious on a formal level. Avicenna in his works delivers a comprehensive account of the essence of the human soul and its immortality; he proves with painstaking thoroughness that the soul is a substance, not pre-existent, which originally emanated from the active intellect. As to the epistemological question of how the intellect acquires its knowledge, he argues that the acquisition of knowledge is not just an abstractive process, confined to the abstraction of forms, but also illuminative, sustained by the active intellect. Finally, he discusses at great length the different modes of immortality that the soul may attain, depending on its achievements in earthly life. 1 These discussions, presented mainly in such works as Kitāb al-Najāt, Kitāb al-Shīfā; al-Ishārāt wal-Tanbīhāt and Maʿrifat al-Nafs (the latter is attributed to Avicenna), cover broad areas and are sometimes rather clumsily worded. One can also detect inner contradictions, nonuniformity and philosophical difficulties in some of Avicenna's views. But the main point is that he explicitly and extensively made his views of the human soul known. 2
