ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the meaning of life through a neo-Avicennist perspective that reflects on the entailments of meditations on the question of being by Avicenna. It recovers the speech acts from the illocutionary propositions of Avicenna as a pre-modern thinker, to disclose their latent intentions, while eschewing prolepsis, parochialism, or anachronism. Avicenna took the question of being to be the most fundamental in his philosophical thinking, as mediated via his logical and ontological consideration of the modalities of necessity, contingency-possibility, and impossibility. Avicenna's analysis of the ontological modalities of being is entangled with his account of the connection and distinction between essence qua quiddity and existence qua being. The question of being is closely connected with Avicenna's 'flying person' thought-experiment. The Avicennian rational soul that is distinct from the body, despite being individuated by it, is immortal and survives bodily death. The meaning of embodied life can be onto-theologically grasped as being-towards-what-grants-being within inner-worldly being-towards-corporeal-death.
