Avicenna: The Physics of the Healing Bk I/II

Avicenna The Physics of The Healing : New,
2 Volume Set - Hardback with Dustjacket,
*[A5+] Total - 1168 pages,
Bi-lingual; A Parallel English - Arabic Text,
by ibn Sina (Avicenna),
Transl. & Annotated by Jon McGinnis,
Published by Brigham Young Univ. Press.
Part of Al-Hikma : Islamic Translation Series.

 
 

Now in Stock JANUARY 2025
 
 
 
Description :
 

Avicenna’s 'Physics' is the very first volume that he wrote when he began his monumental encyclopedia of science and philosophy, The Healing.


Avicenna’s reasons for beginning with Physics are numerous: it offers up the principles needed to understand such special natural sciences as psychology; it sets up many of the problems that take center stage in his Metaphysics; and it provides concrete examples of many of the abstract analytical tools that he would develop later in Logic.
 

While Avicenna’s Physics roughly follows the thought of Aristotle’s Physics, with its emphasis on natural causes, the nature of motion, and the conditions necessary for motion, the work is hardly derivative. It represents arguably the most brilliant mind of late antiquity grappling with and rethinking the entire tradition of natural philosophy inherited from the Greeks as well as the physical thought of Muslim speculative theologians. As such, Physics is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding Avicenna’s complete philosophical system, the history of science, or the history of ideas.

 
 
 
 
 

Review :

A complete English translation is highly welcome and gives a major boost to the study of Avicenna and medieval Arabic philosophy. . . . The translation is excellent."
---Ayman Shihadeh | Muslim World Book Review.


 
 
 
About Avicenna :

He is Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina however is better known in Europe by the Latinized name “Avicenna.” He is probably the most significant philosopher in the Islamic tradition and arguably the most influential philosopher of the pre-modern era. Born in Afshana near Bukhara in Central Asia in about 980, he is best known as a polymath, as a physician whose major work the Canon (al-Qanun fi’l-Tibb) continued to be taught as a medical textbook in Europe and in the Islamic world until the early modern period, and as a philosopher whose major summa the Cure (al-Shifa’) had a decisive impact upon European scholasticism and especially upon Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274).


Primarily a metaphysical philosopher of being who was concerned with understanding the self’s existence in this world in relation to its contingency, Ibn Sina’s philosophy is an attempt to construct a coherent and comprehensive system that accords with the religious exigencies of Muslim culture. As such, he may be considered to be the first major Islamic philosopher. The philosophical space that he articulates for God as the Necessary Existence lays the foundation for his theories of the soul, intellect and cosmos. Furthermore, he articulated a development in the philosophical enterprise in classical Islam away from the apologetic concerns for establishing the relationship between religion and philosophy towards an attempt to make philosophical sense of key religious doctrines and even analyse and interpret the Qur’an.


Late 20th century studies have attempted to locate him within the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic traditions. His relationship with the latter is ambivalent: although accepting some keys aspects such as an emanationist cosmology, he rejected Neoplatonic epistemology and the theory of the pre-existent soul. However, his metaphysics owes much to the "Amonnian" synthesis of the later commentators on Aristotle and discussions in legal theory and kalam on meaning, signification and being. Apart from philosophy, Avicenna’s other contributions lie in the fields of medicine, the natural sciences, musical theory, and mathematics. In the Islamic sciences ('ulum), he wrote a series of short commentaries on selected Qur’anic verses and chapters that reveal a trained philosopher’s hermeneutical method and attempt to come to terms with revelation. He also wrote some literary allegories about whose philosophical value 20th and 21st century scholarship is vehemently at odds.


His influence in medieval Europe spread through the translations of his works first undertaken in Spain. In the Islamic world, his impact was immediate and led to what Michot has called "la pandémie avicennienne." When Imam al-Ghazali led the theological attack upon the heresies of the philosophers, he singled out Avicenna, and a generation later when the Shahrastani gave an account of the doctrines of the philosophers of Islam, he relied upon the work of Avicenna, whose metaphysics he later attempted to refute in his Struggling against the Philosophers (Musari‘at al-falasifa). Avicennan metaphysics became the foundation for discussions of Islamic philosophy and philosophical theology. In the early modern period in Iran, his metaphysical positions began to be displayed by a creative modification that they underwent due to the thinkers of the school of Isfahan, in particular Mulla Sadra (d. 1641).
 
 
 
 
 

Table of Contents

Volume 1

---Foreword to the Series,
---Foreword to the Volume,
---Acknowledgments,

---Translator’s Introduction,
---A Note on the Source Texts,
---Sigla and Conventions,


First Book

---On the Causes and Principles of Natural Things

---Preface 

---Chapter [1]. 
------Explaining the means by which to arrive at the science of natural things from their first principles,

---Chapter [2].
------Enumerating the principles of natural things by assertion and supposition,

---Chapter [3].
------How these principles are common,

---Chapter [4].
------Examination of what Parmenides and Melissus said regarding the principles of being,

---Chapter [5].
------On defining nature,

---Chapter [6].
------On nature’s relation to matter, form, and motion,

---Chapter [7].
------Of certain terms derived from nature and an explanation of their status,

---Chapter [8].
------On how the science of physics conducts investigation and what, if anything, it shares in common with the other sciences,

---Chapter [9].
------On defining the causes that are of the greatest interest to the natural philosopher in his investigation,

---Chapter [10].
------On defining each of the four kinds of causes,

---Chapter [11].
------On the interrelations of causes,

---Chapter [12].
------On the divisions of causal states,

---Chapter [13].
------Discussion of luck and chance: The difference between them and an explanation of their true state,

---Chapter [14].
------Some of the arguments of those who were in error concerning chance and luck and the refutation of their views,

---Chapter [15].
------How causes enter into investigating and seeking the why-question and the answer to it,

 

Second Book :

On Motion and That Which Follows It

---Chapter [1]. 
------On motion,

---Chapter [2]. 
------The relation of motion to the categories,

---Chapter [3]. 
------Concerning the list of those categories alone in which motion occurs,

---Chapter [4]. 
------Establishing the opposition of motion and rest,

---Chapter [5]. 
------Beginning the account of place and reviewing the arguments of those who deny and those who affirm it,

---Chapter [6]. 
------The various schools of thought about place and a review of their arguments,

---Chapter [7]. 
------Refuting the view of those who say that place is matter or form or any indiscriminate contacting surface or an interval,

---Chapter [8]. 
------The inconsistency of those who defend the void,

---Chapter [9]. 
------The essence of place and its confirmation and the refutation of the arguments of those who deny and are in error about it,

---Chapter [10]. 
------Beginning the discussion about time, the disagreement of people concerning it, and the refutation of those erring about it,

---Chapter [11]. 
------Identifying and affirming the essence of time,

---Chapter [12]. 
------Explaining the instant,

---Chapter [13]. 
------The solution to the skeptical puzzle raised about time and the completion of the discussion of things temporal, such as being in time and not in time, everlasting, eternity, [and the expressions] suddenly, right away, just before, just after, and ancient.
 

Volume 2

Third Book

---Concerning What Belongs to Natural Things Owing to Their Quantity.

---Chapter [1]. 
------The manner of investigation peculiar to this book,

---Chapter [2]. 
------On succession, contiguity, following immediately, interpenetration, cohesion, continuity, intermediate, limit, being together, and being separate,

---Chapter [3]. 
------The state of bodies with respect to their division and a report of the various arguments on which the detractors rely,

---Chapter [4]. 
------Establishing the true opinion and refuting the false,

---Chapter [5]. 
------Solution to the puzzle of those who prattle on about the atom,

---Chapter [6]. 
------On the interrelation of distance, motions, and times with respect to this topic, and an explanation that no first part belongs to them,

---Chapter [7]. 
------The beginning of the discussion about the finitude and infinitude of bodies and people’s opinions concerning that,

---Chapter [8]. 
------On the impossibility that either a body or magnitude or number in an ordered series is infinite, and that it is impossible that there be some infinite body that is moved either in its entirety or partiality,

---Chapter [9]. 
------An explanation of the way that the infinite does and does not enter into existence, and a refutation of the arguments of those who defend the existence of an actual infinite,

---Chapter [10]. 
------That bodies are finite with respect to influencing and being influenced,

---Chapter [11]. 
------That nothing precedes motion and time save the being of the Creator (may He be exalted) and that neither of the two has a first [moment] of its being,

---Chapter [12]. 
------Following upon the claim that there is a point of smallness at which natural bodies are divested of their forms and that, in fact, each one of them has a certain limiting point less than which its form is not preserved; likewise, following up on the claim that no motion is the lease, slowest, or shortest,

---Chapter [13]. 
------On the directions of bodies,

---Chapter [14]. 
------The natural direction of rectilinear motion.


Fourth Book

---On the Accidents of These Natural Things and Their Interrelations, as Well as the Things That Are Necessary Concomitants of Their Interrelations.

---Chapter [1]. 
------Of the subjects contained in this book,

---Chapter [2]. 
------On the numerical unity of motion,

---Chapter [3]. 
------On the motion that is one in genus and species,

---Chapter [4]. 
------Resolving the doubts raised against motion’s being one,

---Chapter [5]. 
------On motions that are and are not in concert,

---Chapter [6]. 
------On the contrariety of motions and their opposites,

---Chapter [7]. 
------Of the oppositions of motion and rest,

---Chapter [8]. 
------An explanation of whether one motion can really be continuous with another or whether that is impossible for them, such that there must be a state of rest between them,

---Chapter [9]. 
------On the motion that is naturally prior and a catalogue of the specific differences of motions,

---Chapter [10]. 
------The way in which space and other things are natural to the body,

---Chapter [11]. 
------On establishing that every body has as single natural space, and [on] the way space belongs to the body’s collective kind and to its individual instances as well as to simple and composite [bodies],

---Chapter [12]. 
------Establishing that every natural body has a principle of motion with respect to either place or position,

---Chapter [13]. 
------Accidental motion,

---Chapter [14]. 
------On forced motion and the mobile’s spontaneous motion,

---Chapter [15]. 
------The states of motive causes and the interrelations between the motive and mobile causes.


---Glossary of Arabic-English Terms.

---Subject Index.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Also see the works of Imam al-Ghazali,
 
 

 
*Single Volume Dimensions : 23.6 x 15.8cm
 
 
 
 
 
 
  • Shipping Weight: 2.695 kgs
  • 2 Units in Stock
  • Written by: Ibn Sina (Avicenna)

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