This study compares Avicenna’s and Thomas Aquinas’ conceptions of God, theological language, the nature of creative action and the beginning of the universe. It emphasizes the connection between their positions regarding theological language and their discussions of creation.

This book is an original and important study of philosophical issues in medieval Arabic poetics. Examining the commentaries on Aristotle's "Poetics by Avicenna" in the context of Aristotle's logical theory, the author shows how the philosophers justified the logical and moral power of poetic discourse.

Ibn Sina (980-1037), known as Avicenna in Latin, played a considerable role in the development of both Eastern and Western philosophy and science. His contributions to the fields of logic, natural science, psychology, metaphysics, theology, and even medicine were vast. His work was to have a significant impact on Thomas Aquinas, among others, who explicitly and frequently drew upon the ideas of his Muslim predecessor. Avicenna also affected the thinking of the great Islamic theologian al-Ghazali, who asserted that if one could show the incoherence of Avicenna's thought, then one would have demonstrated the incoherence of philosophy in general. But Avicenna's influence is not confined to the medieval period. His logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics are still taught in the Islamic world as living philosophy, and many contemporary Catholic and evangelical Christian philosophers continue to encounter his ideas through Aquinas's work. Using a small handful of novel insights, Avicenna not only was able to address a host of issues that had troubled earlier philosophers in both the ancient Hellenistic and medieval Islamic worlds, but also fundamentally changed the direction of philosophy, in the Islamic East as well as in Jewish and Christian milieus. Despite Avicenna's important place in the history of ideas, there has been no single volume that both recognizes the complete range of his intellectual activity and provides a rigorous analysis of his philosophical thinking. This book fills that need. In Avicenna Jon McGinnis provides a general introduction to the thinker's intellectual system and offers a careful philosophical analysis of major aspects of his work in clear prose that will be accessible to students as well as to specialists in Islamic studies, philosophy, and the history of science.

The eleventh-century philosopher and physician Abu Ali ibn Sina (d. A.D. 1037) was known in the West by his Latinized name Avicenna. An analysis of the sources and evolution of Avicenna's metaphysics, this book focuses on the answers he and his predecessors gave to two fundamental pairs of questions: what is the soul and how does it cause the body; and what is God and how does He cause the world? To respond to these challenges, Avicenna invented new concepts and distinctions and reinterpreted old ones. The author concludes that Avicenna's innovations are a turning point in the history of metaphysics. Avicenna's metaphysics is the culmination of a period of synthesis during which philosophers fused together a Neoplatonic project (reconciling Plato with Aristotle) with a Peripatetic project (reconciling Aristotle with himself). Avicenna also stands at the beginning of a period during which philosophers sought to integrate the Arabic version of the earlier synthesis with Islamic doctrinal theology (kalam). Avicenna's metaphysics significantly influenced European scholastic thought, but it had an even more profound impact on Islamic intellectual history—the philosophical problems and opportunities associated with the Avicennian synthesis continued to be debated up to the end of the nineteenth century.

Vol. 2: Published for the first time in English alphabetical order, vol. 2 (of the 5 original volumes) of "Canon of Medicine" (Law of Natural Healing), is an essential addition to the history of medicine as it holds a treasure of information on natural pharmaceuticals used for over 1000 years to heal various diseases and disorders. Fully color illustrated with a 150 page, 7000 word index of the healing properties of each of the entries, the text itself is an alphabetical listing of the natural pharmaceuticals of the simple compounds. By simple compounds, Avicenna includes the individual plants, herbs, animals and minerals that have healing properties. Avicenna lists 800 tested natural pharmaceuticals including plant, animal and mineral substances. The compiler has included the Latin, Persian and Arabic names of the drugs along with artistic renderings of the drugs as illustrations as well as Avicenna's Tables or Grid for each entry that describes the individual, specific qualities of simple drugs.