ABSTRACT
Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), the famous polymath Persian philosopher who died in Hamadan in ad 1037, at one and the same time wrote philosophy in the traditional form used by major philosophers of that period – thus apparently expounding in his major work, Sufficiency, the philosophical corpus of Aristotle in the manner it was received at the time; and he also wrote esoteric and poetic texts, in which he is thought to have expressed his own genuine philosophy – one which (primarily because of the style used) is thought to have been at odds with the more scholarly and formal texts he wrote. The feeling that his own philosophy was of an esoteric, even mystical, nature and totally unlike his formally traditional work in Sufficiency (and other similar and earlier works) may be thought to be further corroborated by the fact that he declared his intention to embark on writing his own philosophy in an independent tome, having the title Oriental Philosophy – which, however, as a complete work he either did not write or is not extant. Only excerpts from a presumably preliminary work Oriental Logic, as well as from Physics, seem to have been accomplished. This has set contemporary scholars of Avicenna thinking in different directions: is ‘oriental’ (or ‘eastern’) meant to be contrasted with a Greek occident? Or is it meant to be contrasted with a Muslim occident (earlier Muslim philosophers who lived and worked in Baghdad – a region to the west of Persia, where Avicenna spent most of his time)? Or does ‘orient’ or ‘eastern’ perchance refer to a mystical source, such as that to do with light (a later philosopher, Suhrawardi, came to develop an entire philosophical system rooted in light that he called ‘oriental wisdom’)? Another question has been raised: do we have two Avicennas: an earlier, more traditional philosopher whom we can come to know about through reading his Sufficiency; and a later, or hidden, more mystical one, more visible in his other, especially the allegorical, works? In any case all such questions more or less took for granted that Avicenna’s ‘elusive’ thought (if it exists) must lie elsewhere than in his Sufficiency – this after all just being a run-of-the-mill exposition of Greek (primarily Aristotelian) philosophy.
