Avicenna Live: The Immediate Context of Avicenna’s Intellectual Formation

A_LIVE explores a unique set of essential yet hitherto widely neglected source texts for the immediate context of the intellectual development of the Muslim polymath Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 428/1037) and offers a new digital approach to the study of diverse and difficult textual corpora.

Avicenna is the most influential philosopher of the Arabic-Islamic intellectual tradition and is justifiably regarded as one of the most important philosophers of all time. He is often considered a philosophicalwunderkind, as Mozart to music, who very early had completed his education and perfected his understanding of reality. Yet, Avicenna was also an eager student of his teachers and became, in turn, a dedicated teacher to his own students – leading to the key-question of A_LIVE: to what extent have Avicenna’s personal relations with his peers influenced the formation and formulation of his own philosophy? Did he, perhaps, reform and reformulate his thoughts in light of the interactions he had with his senior and junior contemporaries?

Modern scholarship on Avicenna has often evaded such questions, frequently referring to his autobiography, in which his mature self-declared that he never changed his mind after his eighteenth birthday: “everything which I knew at that time is just as I know it now; I have not added anything to it to this day.” What is more, scholars appear to be either unaware of the existence of a number of sources that would allow the examination of Avicenna’s possible indebtedness to and interaction with his peers, or – if aware – were deterred by the challenges involved in examining these sources systematically. As a result, the immediate context of Avicenna’s intellectual development remains a surprisingly understudied area of research despite its enormous potential for new insights not only into particular parts of his oeuvre but into his philosophy as a whole. – This situation is the premise of A_LIVE and its point of departure.

A_LIVE is the first systematic approach to a unique selection of essential yet hitherto widely neglected source texts that enable us to trace Avicenna’s engagement with his contemporaries. Bringing to life his personal interactions with both the generation of his direct teachers and the generation of his direct students, A_LIVEaims to reappraise Avicenna’s innovations in light of his own development and, thereby, to provide a new vantage point for the study of Avicenna and for all future investigation on the history of philosophy in the Islamic world. At the same time, A_LIVE will make an important contribution to the Digital Humanities by furnishing an open-source online platform that will facilitate the community-based translation of particularly intricate textual sources.

As such, A_LIVE consists of four subprojects:

• A_LIVE¹ analyses a unique manuscript which is almost entirely unknown to the scholarly community and which contains the philosophical writings of the Christian philosopher and physician Abū Sahl al-Masīḥī (d. 401/1010), who was one of Avicenna’s closest teachers during his formative years.
• A_LIVE² investigates another manuscript, this time one which is famously known but which has received only one-sided attention, having been employed to trace the development of late ancient Greek thought – not, however, to understand the Arabic philosophical tradition or, in particular, Avicenna.
• A_LIVE³ focuses on a fascinating collection of “discussions” (ar. mubāḥaṯāt) which Avicenna had with his students and which has been widely left aside in scholarship due to its inherently challenging complexity, even though it has been known as constituting perhaps the most pertinent research task in the field of Avicenna studies.
• A_LIVE⁴ studies the writings of Avicenna’s “star student” Bahmanyār ibn Marzubān (d. 458/1066 or as early as 430/1038), which generally have been disregarded on account of their supposedly unoriginal nature and alleged lack of sophistication, despite the fact that their author asserts to have written them as an outcome of conversations he had with the master himself.

Individually, each of the four subprojects targets a clear lacuna in the state of the art; collectively, they explore the ways in which the immediate intellectual context of Avicenna may have shaped his philosophy, urging him to review, rethink, or even revise his thought on several occasions.

After five years of thorough research, A_LIVE will be able to tell whether Avicenna’s works ought to be considered as a monolithic manifesto of a remarkably steadfast and imperturbable, perhaps even stubborn, genius or as the dynamic vision of a living being – a philosopher of flesh and blood – engaged in close interaction with his intellectual environment.

Project Lead

• Andreas Lammer

Research Associates

• Hanif Amin Beidokhti
• Peter Tully

IT Developer

• Andreas Schneider