ABSTRACT
Avicenna’s ‘Flying Person Argument’ is given in the De anima ‘sixth art’ of the ‘Physics’ division of his Book of Healing ( Kita¯b al-Shifa¯ ) in support of his view that the soul ( nafs ) is a perfection of the living body and must be studied in connection with matter and motion in the physical sciences (Avicenna 1027: I.1, 11-12). This argument constitutes a thought-experiment in the cogito ergo sum genre to prove the existence of the soul. If one thinks hypothetically that he/she has been generated at a stroke as fully grown, albeit with sense-perceptions shrouded in such a way that nothing is perceived in a sensory manner – not the air bu eting one’s fl ying person, not one’s own limbs, organs, brain or heart, nor any other external body – then he/she would nonetheless have to a rm the existence of his/her soul. Self-consciousness is in this way a rmed to exist independently of bodily sensation or corporeality. Imagining the existence of bodily limbs is not evidence for possessing them, since imagining is fi lled with what has been experienced in prior sensation, which cannot be ascertained under the non-sensory conditions of the fl oating person. The self/ego/soul in question is thus not identical with its body nor reducible to it, but is rather self-disclosed by the unity of its self-consciousness in the immediacy of introspective self-refl ection (Avicenna 1000-37: III.1, 2. 319-24). This thoughtexperiment is meant to awaken the self to a rming its existence as distinct from the body, in a call to recollect the essence of its being from oblivion within embodied worldly distractions.
