Review of Mohammad Azadpur, Analytic Philosophy and Avicenna: Knowing the Unknown. The Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies, 6.1 (2021), 102-107. (original) (raw)
Recent years have witnessed a revival, and even a defense, of traditional, non-modern epistemologies. One thinks of Robert Pasnau's After Certainty, which shows what is wrong with contemporary epistemology by arguing that the narrow epistemic ideals to which modern philosophers subscribe are unattainable. 1 In a similar vein, in his recent Platonism and Naturalism, Lloyd Gerson defends Platonism against the anti-representationalism (the possibility of attaining truthful representations in the sciences) of Richard Rorty by establishing the explanatory role of the superordinate first principle of all, the Idea of the Good. 2 In its own way, Mohammad Azadpur's groundbreaking book makes a strong case for Avicenna's (d. 1037) anti-naturalist account of perception vis-à-vis some of the limitations of contemporary Anglo-American discussions in empirical knowledge and sensory intentionality. In particular, the book engages in a constructive dialogue between Avicenna and such major twentieth-century analytic philosophers as Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell. Judged from its philosophical sophistication and philological precision, the book must be regarded as a major study of Avicenna that sheds new light on the contemporary relevance of one of the greatest thinkers of all time. Since the book presents a highly nuanced account of Avicennian epistemology, I shall first provide a sketch of its chapter outlines, before proceeding to engage with some of its key arguments.
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The philosopher and physician Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn 'Abdallah ibn Sina (d. 1037 C.E.), known in the West by his Latinized name Avicenna, was one of the most influential thinkers of the Islamic and European Middle Ages. Yet for a great number of scholars today Avicenna's thought remains inaccessible. Because he wrote almost all his works in Arabic, Avicenna seems remote to historians of medieval European philosophy who are able to read only the Latin translations of those works. And because he expresses his subtle and complex ideas in the technical terminology of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism, Avicenna seems remote to Islamicists who have little or no background in the history of ancient and late-antique philosophy. By addressing some of the most fundamental issues in Avicenna's psychology, epistemology, natural philosophy and metaphysics, the contributors to this book hope to make Avicenna's thought more accessible to Latinists and Islamicists alike. After a brief...
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