Avicenna On the Three Faculties :
New,
*[A5] Paperback - 98 pages,
by Ibn Sina [d.428h],
Adapted by Laleh Bakhtiar,
From the Transl. of Cameron Gruner,
& Mazar H. Shah,
Kazi 'Great Books of the Islamic World Series.'
Description :
'Avicenna On the Three Faculties.' In this work Ibn Sina (Avicenna) in his Law of Natural Healing (Canon of Medicine), Lecture 5, describes the three faculties that are referred to in many different ways. They fall under general physiology.
The Faculties include :
*** Divine Spirit,
*** Preserve Species,
*** Preserve Individual Brain,
*** Liver,
*** Heart Intellect,
*** Attraction to Pleasure,
*** Avoidance of Pain Cognition,
*** Affect,
*** Behavior Nervous Energy,
*** Natural Energy,
*** Vital Energy.
There are three kinds of faculties or drives in the body and also three types of functions arising from them; vital (haywaniyya), natural or vegetative (tabiyya), and sensitive or animal (nafsaniyah).
This edition also contains Cameron Gruner’s extensive endnotes.
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).
*Dimensions : 21.8 x 14cm.
