A Deliberation on Avicenna’s Philosophical Method

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, IRAN

Abstract

Scientific methods are tools for solving the problems of any science. In the new and contemporary era, the independent discussion of some of these popular methods gradually fueled the formulation of science methodology. Although the issue of the method of philosophy was also discussed in the past, today this discussion is followed in an emerging field called meta-philosophy. This article seeks to take an initial step in order to identify the coordinates of Avicenna’s philosophical method. Avicenna does not have an independent and exhaustive discussion of the method of philosophy, and therefore, to identify his philosophical method, one should use his implicit meta-philosophy and by reviewing his works, identify the methods that he actually used. In this article, after an introductory discussion on the method of science and philosophical methodology, I review Avicenna’s discussions on the method of philosophy. In the next step, with a look at the more or less common methods in analytical philosophy, four methods of comparative reasoning, conceptual analysis, logical analysis, and mental test will be selected as models and frameworks for discussion and some examples will be presented for the application of these methods in Avicenna’s philosophy. Recognizing Avicenna’s philosophical method in this framework shows that his philosophy is very similar to contemporary analytical philosophy in terms of method.

Keywords

References

  1. ابن سینا (1405)، منطق المشرقیین، قم: مکتبة آیة الله المرعشی.
  2. ابن‌سینا (1404)، الشفاء (الالهیات)، قم: مکتبة آیة الله المرعشی.
  3. ابن‌سینا (1377)، الحکومة فی حجج المثبتین للماضی مبدأ زمانیاً، تهران: انتشارات مؤسسه مطالعات اسلامی دانشگاه تهران – دانشگاه مک گیل.
  4. زمانیها، حسین (1393)، «روش فلسفی ابن‌سینا، الگویی در تحول علوم انسانی»، حکمت سینوی، سال 18، ش82، صص83-99.
  5. سعیدی مهر، محمد و وحید خادم زاده (1388)، «تحلیل ایدۀ "انسان معلق در فضا" بر اساس مدل منطقی سورنسن»، نامۀ حکمت، سال 7، ش2، صص129-152.
  6. گوهری، عباس و علی غزالی فر (1394) «درآمدی بر روش علمی و مؤلفه‌های آن در فلسفۀ ابن‌سینا»، پژوهش‌های معرفت شناختی، ش 9، صص89-112.
  7. نادری، رسول و حمید خدابخشیان (1386)، «روش‌شناسی فلسفۀ اسلامی»، معرفت فلسفی، سال پنجم، ش‌1، صص65-118.
  8. Avicenna (2010), The Physics of The Healing , Books I & II, translated, introduced and annotated by John McGinnis, Provo: Brigham Young University
  9. Black, Deborah L. (2008), “Avicenna on Self-awareness and Knowing that One Knows” in The Unity of Science in the Arabic Tradition: Science, Logic, Epistemology and their Interactions, Shahid Rahman, Tony Street and Hassan Tahiri (eds.) Springer.
  10. Brown, James Robert and YiftachFehige (2019), "Thought Experiments", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/thought-experiment/>.
  11. Daly, Chris (2010), An Introduction to Philosophical Methods, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.
  12. Daly, Chris (ed.) (2015) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  13. Gilbert Ryle, Gilbert (2009),"Chapter 23: Ordinary language", Collected Essays 1929-1968: Collected Papers, Volume 2 (Reprint of Hutchinson 1971 ed.), Routledge.
  14. Glock, Hans-Johann (2008), What Is Analytic Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  15. Hertogh, C. P. (2013), “Ibn Sina’s Flying Man: Logical Analyses of (religious) Thought Experience”, Journal of Islamic Philosophy, 9, pp. 54-74.
  16. Joll, Nicholas (2017), “Metaphilosophy”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/con-meta/
  17. Kirk, Ludwig (2014), “Methods in Analytic Epistemology” in Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory?, Matthew Haug (ed.) London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 217-240.
  18. Lazerowitz, Morris (1970), ‘A Note on “Metaphilosophy”, Metaphilosophy, 1(1): 91–91 (sic).
  19. McGinnis, Jon (2018), “Experimental Thoughts on Thought Experiments in medieval Islam” in Stuart, Michael T., YiftachFehige and James Robert Brown (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 77-91.
  20. Overgaard, Søren, Paul Gilbert and Stephen Burwood (2013), An introduction to Metaphilosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  21. Russell, Bertrand (1905), "On Denoting", Mind, 14, 479-493. Reprinted in Russell, Bertrand, 1973, Essays in Analysis, London: Allen & Unwin, 103-119.
  22. Sorensen, Roy A. (1992), Thought Experiments, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  23. Sosa, Ernest (2001), “G. E. Moore” in Blackwell Companions to Philosophy: A Companion to Analytic Philosophy, A. P. Martinich and David Sosa (eds.), 45-56.
  24. Stuart, Michael T., YiftachFehige and James Robert Brown (eds.) (2018), The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments, New York and London: Routledge.
  25. Williamson, Timothy (2007), The Philosophy of Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell.
  26. Williamson, Timothy (2020), Philosophical Method: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics