Hasan A. Yahya is an American Arab scholar, and a professor of cultures and sociology. He published 19 Arabic and 8 English books and 200 plus articles on sociology, psychology, politics, poetry, IQ Test Measurement and short stories in both Arabic and English. His articles may be found on articlesbase.com, Face book and other internet sites. His recent book published on Amazon titled: Therapy Cases: Mental and physical, 2008, and Lawlaki: Poetry Diwan, 2000 Bayt Min al-Shi'r al-Arabi. (all in Arabic on amazon- 2009). His recent activities reflects his talents and knowledge on youtube’s Dryahyatv.com. Dr. Yahya resides in Michigan, USA. He has four children and eight grandchildren.
Hasan A. Yahya, Ph.Ds
Abu ‘Ali al-Hussein (Ibn Sina) one of the Arab legends in Philosophy. Known in the west as (Avicenna) is one of the foremost philosophers in the Medieval Hellenistic Islamic tradition that also includes al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and al-Ghazali. His philosophical theory is a comprehensive, detailed and rationalistic account of the nature of God and Being, in which he finds a systematic place for the corporeal world, spirit, insight, and the varieties of logical thought including dialectic, rhetoric and poetry.
Ibn Sina was born in AH 370/AD 980 near Bukhara in Central Asia, where his father governed a village in one of the royal estates. At thirteen, Ibn Sina began a study of medicine that resulted in ‘distinguished physicians . . . reading the science of medicine under his supervision’ (Sirat al-shaykh al-ra’is (The Life of Ibn Sina): 27). His medical expertise brought him to the attention of the Sultan of Bukhara, Nuh ibn Mansur, whom he treated successfully; as a result he was given permission to use the sultan’s library and its rare manuscripts, allowing him to continue his research into modes of knowledge.
What I like most of Ibn Sina’s philosophy is his concept of reality and reasoning which I believe was central to his philosophy. For him, reason, can allow progress through various levels of understanding and can finally lead to God, the ultimate truth. He stresses the importance of gaining knowledge, and develops a theory of knowledge far before Manheim. His theory is based on four faculties: sense perception, retention, imagination and estimation. Imagination, however, has the principal role in intellection, as it can compare and construct images which give it access to universals. Again the ultimate object of knowledge is God, the pure intellect.
In terms of metaphysics, Ibn Sina makes a distinction between two concepts: essence and existence; essence considers only the nature of things, and should be considered apart from their mental and physical realization. This distinction applies to all things except God, whom Ibn Sina identifies as the first cause and therefore both essence and existence. He also argued that the soul is incorporeal and cannot be destroyed. The soul, in his view, is an agent with choice in this world between good and evil, which in turn leads to reward or punishment.
As one of the most important practitioners of philosophy, Ibn Sina exercised a strong influence over both other Islamic philosophers and medieval Europe. His work was one of the main targets of al-Ghazali’s attack on Hellenistic influences in Islam. Al-Ghazali, in fact attacked all philosophers of the time in his book, Tahafut al-Falasifah (Incoherence of Philosophers) Ibn Sina’s influenced many Christian philosophers, most notably Thomas Aquinas.
I believe that if the Islamic world in that time followed his approach to reality and that of Ibn Rushd, the Muslim and Arab world would be very much different from its situation in modern times. I mean his thoughts borrowed from Aristotle, which singles out a capacity for a mental act in which the knower spontaneously hits upon the middle term of a syllogism. Since rational arguments proceed syllogistically, the ability to hit upon the middle term is the ability to move an argument forward by seeing how given premises yield appropriate conclusions. It allows the person possessing this ability to develop arguments, to recognize the inferential relations between syllogisms. Moreover, since reality is structured syllogistically, the ability to hit upon the middle term and to develop arguments is crucial to moving knowledge of reality forward. (598 words) www.hasanyahya.com
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