It has long been a truism of the history of philosophy that intentionality is an invention of the medieval period, and within this standard narrative, the central place of Arabic philosophy has always been acknowledged. Yet there are many misconceptions surrounding the theories of intentionality advanced by the two main Arabic thinkers whose works were available to the West, Avicenna and Averroes. In the first part of this paper I offer an overview of the general accounts of intentionality and intentional (...) being found in the linguistic, psychological, and metaphysical writings of Avicenna and Averroes, and I trace the terminology of “intentions” to a neglected passage from Avicenna’s logic. In the second part of the paper I examine the way that Avicenna and Averroes apply their general theories of intentionality to the realm of sense perception. I offer an explanation of why Avicenna might have chosen to denominate the objects of the internal sense faculty of estimation as “intentions”, and I explore the implications of Averroes’s decision to attribute intentionality to the external senses and the media of perception. (shrink)

One of the chief innovations in medieval adaptations of Aristotelian psychology was the expansion of Aristotle's notion of imagination orphantasiato include a variety of distinct perceptual powers known collectively as the internal senses. Amongst medieval philosophers in the Arabic world, Avicenna offers one of the most complex and sophisticated accounts of the internal senses. Within his list of internal senses, Avicenna includes a faculty known as “estimation”, to which various functions are assigned in a wide variety of contexts. Although many (...) philosophers in the Arabic world as well as in the Latin West accepted Avicenna's positing of an estimative faculty, Avicenna's best-known critics, al-Ghazâlî and Averroes, found Avicenna's arguments in support of a distinct estimative faculty problematic. For different reasons, both Averroes and Ghazâlî raised the basic question of whether one needed to posit a distinct faculty of estimation to supplement the perceptual abilities of the other internal senses, and whether the notion of an estimative power as defined by Avicenna was internally coherent. Such criticisms suggest that the Avicennian conception of estimation is not entirely unambiguous, and that a correct understanding of Avicenna's motivations for delineating an estimative power requires a careful study of the diverse activities assigned to it throughout Avicenna's philosophical writings. (shrink)

This book is designed to remedy that lack.

In his Short Treatise and his Commentary on the Peri hermeneias, al-Fbī offers two different but related accounts of indefinite terms and the propositions that contain them. In both works he presents a series of different senses that an indefinite term may have, commencing with a sense in which such a term would be equivalent to a privative term, and concluding with a sense in which it would determine the logical complement of the corresponding definite term. I offer an interpretation (...) of this series according to which they reveal the workings of a fine analytical mind and a subtle teacher. (shrink)

This book provides the first systematic reconstruction of Ibn S n s concept of metaphysics, and, given the considerable influence his achievement had on the Islamic tradition as well as on scholastic philosophers, it is relevant to the ...

In the world of practical affairs the rights of individuals and the prerogatives of communities often lie in tension. Collectives pursue cultural aims at the expense of the minorities in their midst. Individuals assert their freedoms and deploy their wealth in ways that are inimical to the public interest. There is not one country in the world where some variation of this theme is not being played out. Recognizable communities clash with individuals, just as surely as other individuals do.