ABSTRACT
So far in this work it has been argued that a classical ‘essentialist’ understanding of philosophy’s provenance is one that Avicenna eschewed. He replaced it with a new outlook in which the functions of language and logic as constructed human tools for understanding the world and for describing it were shown to be constrained both by what the world is (nothing in it of itself necessitates its being associated with anything else); and by what language and logic can in fact do (our discourse falls short of depicting what there is). His observations in language, psychology, epistemology and ontology were shown to confirm this new trajectory in philosophy he was systematically trying to project. In the preceding chapter this trajectory was tested under modal lights, where the notions of necessity and essentialism are most prominent. It was shown that while necessity has an important role to play in the system, this seemed to be more associated with causality than with essentialism: already here, then, we begin to have a view of why – if it is not an essentialist explanation – the world is what it is. In this chapter I shall try to bring together a synthesis of Avicenna’s logical, ontological and epistemological theses as I have presented them in this work. In a sense, I now look again at the contents of the past chapters in a new light, once again highlighting the wedge Avicenna drives between our knowledge and the world, and which makes an empirical verification of our knowledge impossible. I devote Section 1 to a consideration of ontology in the framework of the possibility/necessity distinction (Physics). I devote Section 2 to a consideration of logic in this framework (knowledge). In Section 3, I raise and answer a fundamental question which arises from considerations in the first two sections. Here, the underpinning of Avicenna’s trajectory will finally find an explanation (causality). This should not surprise us. What might is how Avicenna ultimately draws on faith in God’s Providence to suggest how logic and Physics are brought together.
