Biography

He was born in 980 CE m Asfahan Village (Bukhara) Russia.

In 990 , at the age of 10 named as Avicenna , to his exceptional intellectual

Powers. He devoted himself for Muslims & studied lslamic Philosophy,
Jurisprudence, Law & science. At age of 17, he shifted towards medicine &
owned a reputation as a physician. Among his scientife works, leading two
books All Kitab Al-shifa ( philosophical encplopedia used on Aristotelian
tradition)
Al-Qanun Al-Tibb( represents final anteqorizatiileof Gree-Arabian thoughts
on medicine.

1019- He gave concept of Psychology and noted close relationship

between emotions & physical conditions.One is of psychological disorder
that he described in Qanun, i.e, Love Sickness disorder first diagnosed
by him In a
Prince of Jujan. He really Love Music & is of the view that had a significant
physical & Psychological effect on Patient.
He died in 1037.

Knowledge theory
Identifies mental faculties in terms of soul.

* Abstraction
* Perception
* Manipulation
Termed as Relation

Also locates estimation (Wahm) - a faculty perceiving non-sensible

"Intentions that exist in individual sensible objects".

Meta Physics
lbne-sina makes distinction b/w Essence & Existence of everything except
God.
1. Essence : (names of things) air, water, Fire, earth.
2. Existence: (Physical & Mental Realizations).
a. casuality
b.necessity
Existence of God:-

The central subject matter of Metaphysics is God and the proof of his
existance. lbn-e-Sina proposes that are essential. Cause & effect will
coexist & cannot be a part of an infinite chain, the nexus of causes must &
its effect must have a first cause, which necesarily exist for itself.

Concept of soul:-
In dealing wilth prophecy, metaphysics and knowledge, Ibn-e-Sina
proposes that must be an incorporated substance because intellectual
thoughts itself are indivisible -The soul is incorporeal implies that it must be
immortal, the decay, and destruction of the body does affect the soul. so it
will makea person unique and unified. "Man can decay, but his soul Never
Decay".

Reward & Punishment:-

Soul retain their identity into immortality. God generates a world that
contain good & its agent Soul, acts in this world and the reward and
punishment it gains in its existence beyond this world.
Theory of knowledge :-

In his theory of knowledge, Ibn Sina identifies is the mental faculter the the
soul in terms of their epistemological function. As the discussion of logic in
has already sunnested, knowledge begins with abstraction Sense
perception, being already mental, is the yem of the object.perceived, sense
perception responds to the particular with ets given form and material
atcidents. As a mental event, being a perception of an object rather hai the
object itself, perception occurs in the particular. To analyze this responsu,
classifying its formal features in abstraction from material accidents, we
must both ret the Images given by sensation and also manipulate them by
disconnecting parts and alighing them according to their formal and other
properties. However, retention ang manipulation are distinct
epistemological functions, and cannot depend on the same psychological
faculty; therefore lum Sina distinguishes faculties of relation and
manipulation as appropriate to those diverse epistemological functions.

Ibn Sina identifies the retentive faculty as 'representation' and charges the
imagination with the task of reproducing and manipulating images. To
conceptualize our expence and to order it according to its qualities, we
must have and be able to reinvoke image of what we experienced but is
now absent. For this we need sensation and representation at least; in
addition, to order and classify the content of representon we must be able
to discriminate, separate out and recombine parts of images, and therefore
must possess imagination and reason. To think about a black flag we must
in able to analyze its color, separating this quality from others, or its part in
the image from other images, and classify it with other black things, thereby
showing that the concept of black applies to all such objects and their
images. Imagination carries rut this. manipulation, allowing us to produce
images of objects we have not seen in fact out of the images of things we
have experienced, and thereby also generating images for intelligible and
prophecies.

Beyond sense perception, retention and imagination, Ibn Sina locates

estimation (wahm), This is a faculty for perceiving non-sensible intentions
that exist in the individual sensible objects. A sheep fiees a wolf because it
estimates that the animal may do it harm; this estimation is more than
representation and imagination, since it includes an intention that is
additional to the perceived and abstracted form and concept of the animal.
Finally, there may be a faculty that retains the content of wahm, the
meanings of images. Ibn Sina also relies on a faculty of common sense,
involving awareness of the work and products of all the other faculties,
which interrelates these features.

Of these faculties, imagination has a principal role in intellection. Its

comparison and tonstruction of images with given meanings gives it access
to universals in that it is able to think of the universal by manipulating
images (see UNIVERSALS). However, Ibn Sina explains this process of
grasping the universal, this emergence of the universal in the human mind,
as the result of an action on the mind by the Active Intellect. This intellect
can be both destiny and punishment because the world and it's order are
precise between human choices, good and evil.
His views about human beings:-
Human beings consist of both open and hidden elements.
* Hidden elements such as cells and tissues.
* Open elements such as physical traits.
To Aviccena, human is the real body on the outside, revealed within by
mean of structure.

Concept of Mental Powers :-

According to Aviccena, body constributes of 3 hidden parts which enables
humans to carry out various acivities involving motivation & to behave as
humans.
These hidden parts consist of mental powers/facilities;
1. faculties that are shared by both humans & plants as :
* Vegetative faculty: Growth, feeding and reproduction.
2.The faculty that are shared by animals and humans.
* Faculty of Motion
( Instinctive and Rational motion )
*Faculty of comprehension (Involves five senses).

3.The faculty that distinguishes human beings from

*Active faculty :-
directs humans to practical conditions.

*Cognitive faculty:-
directs intellectual conduct

4.Nature of human beings ; cant live in isolation.

5.Nature of society
In the last of ten cosmic intellects that stand below God. In other words, the
manipulation of images does not not by itself procure a grasp to think the
universals when they the mind of universals so much as train are given to
the mind by the Active Intellect Once achieved, the processes undergone in
training inform the mind so that the latter can attend directly to the Active
Intellect when required. Such direct access is crucial since the soul lacks
any faculty for retaining universals and therefore repeatedly needs fresh
access to the Active Intellect when required. Such directs access is crucial
since the soul lacks any faculty for retaining universals and therefore
repeatedly needs fresh access to the Active Intellect.

As the highest point above the Active Intellect, God, the pure intellect, is
also the highest object of human knowledge. All sense experience, logic
and the faculties of the human soul are therefore directed at grasping the
fundamental structure of reality as it emanates from that source and,
through various levels of being down to the Active Intellect, becomes
available to human thought through reason or, in the case of prophets,
intuition. By this conception, then, there is a close relation between logic,
thought, experience, the grasp of the ultimate structure of reality and an
understanding of God. As the highest and purest intellect, God is the
source of all the existent things in the world. The latter emanate from that
pure high intellect, and they are ordered according to a necessity that we
can grasp by the use of rational conceptual t. sught These interconnections
become clearer in Ibn Sina's metaphysics.

1. Metaphysics

Metaphysics examines existence as such, 'absolute existence' (al-wujud al-

matlaq) or existence so far as it exists. Ibn Sina relies on the one hand on
the distinction in Aristotle's Prior Analytics between the principles basic to a
scientific or mathematical grasp of the world, including the four causes and
on the other hand the subject of metaphysics, the prime or ultimate cause
of all things God. In relation to the first issue, Ibn Sina recognizes that
observation of regularities in nature fails to establish their necessity. Af best
it evinces the existence of a relation of concomitance between events. To
establish the necessity implicated in causality, we must recognize that
merely accidental regularities would be unlikely to occur always, or even at
all, and certainly not with the regularity that events can exhibit (see
CAUSALITY AND NECESSITY IN ISLAMIC THOUGHT). Thus, we may
expect that such regularities must be the necessary result of the essential
properties of the objects in question.

In developing this distinction between the principles and subject of

metaphysics, Ibn Sina makes another distinction between essence and
existence, one that applies to everything except God. Essence and
existence are distinct in that we cannot infer from the essence of something
that it must exist (sec EXISTENCE).. Essence considers only the nature of
things, and while this may be realized in particular real circumstances or as
an item in the mind with its attendant" conditions, nevertheless essence
can be considered for itself apart from that mental and physical realization.
HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY

European Christendom through Spain and Sicily, where, within Muslim

culture, Jew and Muslim lived together in peace.

Both Jews and Muslims also made important philosophical contributions of

their own, and their influence often rivals Aristotle's. Maimonides, the
greatest Judaic philosopher, was treated with the utmost respect by
Thomas Aquinas. Islamic thinkers also contributed to mathematics and
science as well as philosophy. The two most important Muslims for our
purposes were ibn-Sina, whose psycho- logical system we will examine
later, and ibn-Rushd, whose purified Aristotelianism provoked an
intellectual crisis that marked the end of the High Middle Ages.

We should also note that both Judaic and Islamic philosophy failed to
escape the fate so narrowly avoided in Latin Christendom. The
conservatives among Jewish and Islamic leaders found the free inquiry of
philosophy too dangerous to revealed "truth" to be tolerated. Philosophy
and its works were prohibited, so that after the time of ibn-Rushd (died
1198) there was no independent, nontheological philosophy among Jews or
Muslims. As we shall see in a later section of this chapter, a similar
persecution just failed of its object in fourteenth century Europe. In unified,
absolutist Islam, thought control could succeed; in politically diverse Europe
it could not.

*Medieval Psychology* :-
"He who knows his soul, knows his creator".
Proverb of the Muslim Brethren of Purity

*The Early Middle Ages* :-

This proverb could stand as the motto of early and high medieval
psychology. Augustine, as we have seen, wanted to know God and the
soul. He believed that by turning inward and inspecting the soul one could
come to know God, who is present in every soul. Augustine saw a unity of
Creator and Creation so that the three mental powers-memory,
understanding, and will, mirror the three beings of the Holy Trinity as any
three related things were thought to.

Introspective psychology characterized the earliest years of Christian

philosophy: A philosoplier looked inward to his own soul in order to know.
God-not to understand himself as a unique human being but only as a
vehicle for divine illumination, It was not until the High Middle Ages that true
individualism appeared, and then largely in popular culture rather than
philosophy.
However, outside of European Christendom an ultimately more fruitful and
naturalistic faculty psychology based on Aristotle was developing. This
psychology was originally worked out in a Neoplatonic framework within
which Aristotle was interpreted, and combined an elaboration of Aristotle's
psychology with late Roman and Islamic medicine. Over the next two
centuries, as Aristotle became better known in Europe, this naturalistic
faculty psychology completely replaced the older, Augustinian Neoplatonic
psychology. In the Neoplatonic scheme of things, humans stand midway
between God and matter.
(from Spirituality and individualism: The middle Ages and the
Renaissance.)
As a rational animal, a human being resembles God, while as a physical
being a human resembles animals and other purely physical creatures. In
this view, when allied with Aristotelian faculty psychology, a human's mind
itself reflects this ambiguous position: the five corporeal senses are tied to
the animal body, while the active intellect-pure reason-is close to God. A
person is a microcosm reflecting the greater Neoplatonic macrocosm.

Various writers elaborated on Aristotle's psychology inserting various

inward wits, or internal senses, between the rational soul and the corporeal
senses. These became the exact transition point between body and soul in
the chain of being. Such a scheme appears in Islamic, Judaic, and
Christian, thought in the Early Middle Ages. Muslims made the special
contribution of placing the discussion in a physio- logical context. Islamic
medicine carried on the classical medical tradition, and Muslim doctors
looked for brain structures that hosted the various aspects of mind
discussed by philosophers. The most complete statement of the Aristotelian
medical view was made by Abū Ali al-Husain ibn-Sina (980-1037), known in
Europe as Avicenna, who was both a doctor and a philosopher and whose
works were influential in constructing high medieval philosophy and
psychology.

Different lists of mental faculties had been drawn up before ibn Sina. The
five corporeal senses and intellect were not considered mental faculties, a
status reserved for the interior senses. Aristotle had proposed three
faculties-common sense, imagination, and memory-although the lines
between them were not sharply drawn. Later writers proposed three to five
faculties, but ibn-Sina produced a list of seven faculties that became the
norm. This list presented a Neoplatonic hierarchy from the faculty closest to
the senses (and the body) to the faculty closest to divine intellect.
Beginning with the parts of the mind closest to the body, ibn Sina discusses
the vegetative soul, common to plants, humans, and animals (which he
treats as did Aristotle), saying that it is responsible for the reproduction,
growth, and nourish- ment of all living things.
Next comes the sensitive soul, common to men and animals. At its lowest
level it comprises the five external or corporeal senses (which again follows
Aristotle). The second level of the sensitive soul comprises the internal
senses, or mental faculties, which are at the border between man's animal
and angelic natures. They, too, are hierarchically arranged. First comes
common sense which, as in Aristotle, receives, unites, and makes
conscious the various qualities of external objects perceived by the senses.
These perceived qualities are retained in the mind by the second internal
sense, retentive imagination, for further consideration or later recall. The
third and fourth internal senses are the compositive animal imagination and
the compositive human imagination, which are responsible for active,
creative use of mental images, for they relate together (compose) the
images retained by the retentive imagination into such imaginary objects as
unicorns. It animals this process is simply associative, while in man it may
be creative, hence the distinction of two faculties. The fifth internal sense
was estimation, a kind of natural instinct for making judgments about the
"intentions" of external objects. The dog avoids the stick because it has
learned the stick's punishing "intentions".
Ibn-Sina's faculty psychology. (Figure)
( from AGENT INTELLECT
A DIVINE LIGHT CREATING HUMAN KNOWLEDGE)

1.RATIONAL SOUL:-
*Contemplative Intellect-knows universals.
*Practical Intellect-manages everyday affairs

2.Sensitive Soul:-
a. Appetite:

Approach pleasure (concupiscable appetite)

Avoid pain (irascible appetite)

b. Interior Senses:
~Recollection-recalls intuitions from memory
~Memory-stores intuitions from estimation
~Estimation-intuitions about benefit and harm
~Compositive human imagination-creative imagination
~Compositive animal imagination-combines images
~Retentive imagination-image-copies of object's
~Common sense-combines the five exterior senses

c. Exterior Senses:
Vision, Hearing, Reproduction,Touch, Taste, Smell

3.VEGETATIVE SOUL
Reproduction ,Growth and Nourishment.
_______________________________
The wolf seeks the sheep for it knows the sheep is edible. This power,
similar to the simple conditioning of modern psychologists, "estimates" the
value or harm of objects in the animal's world.

The highest internal senses are memory and recollection. Memory stores
the intuitions of estimation. These intuitions are not sensible attributes of
the object, but rather simple ideas of the object's essence. Recollection is
the ability to recall these intuitions at a later time. The material stored by
memory and recalled by recollection are thus not copies of objects, for this
function is performed by the retentive and compositive imaginations.
Instead, the material is a set of simple but abstract ideas, or general
conclusions, derived from experience. They are not, how- ever, true
universals, for only, the human mind has the power to form universals.

Ibn-Sina was a physician, and he tried to combine his explication of

Aristotle's philosophical psychology with the traditional, though erroneotis,
Rontan medical tradition stemming from Galen. By speculation, without
resort to forbidden dissec- tions, ibn-Sina located the internal senses in
different parts of the brain. His proposals became standard medical
teaching until in the sixteenth century Vesalius again practiced dissection
and proved ibn-Sina's ideas wrong.

Here shows a simple figure of a head from a medical texthook of about

1420, whicli shows the location of four internal senses. Although the figure
com- bines some of ibn-Sina's senses (as he himself often did), it follows
his teaching. Four "cells" of the brain are shown. The first one contains
common sense, which here includes retentive imagination.
The second cell contains human and animal compositive imagination. The
third cell holds estimation. The fourth and rearmost cell contains menory,
including recollection.
Head of a man from a medical textbook of about 1420 showing the
locations of four internal senses. From front to back the cells contain
common sense, imagination, estimation, and memory. (From Clarke &
Dewhurst, 1972.)

(explanation of figure):-

The final aspect of the sensitive soul treated by ibn Sina is motivation. As
Aristotle had pointed out, what sets animals apart from plants is that they
move themselves. Ibn Sina, following Aristotle, calls this motive power
appetite, and it has two forms. Animals sense pain or danger, and flee; this
may be called avoidance. On the other hand, animals sense or anticipate
pleasure, and move toward it; this is approach.

The mental powers and senses so far considered by ibn Sina are tied to
the body and brain and are held in common by man and animal. However,
man surpasses the animals in the ability to form universal concepts. This is
the unique power of the human soul that alone transcends the material
body and brain. Ibn- Sina distinguished two faculties within the human soul:
practical intellect and the contemplative intellect. The lower practical
intellect concerns itself with everyday affairs. It regulates the body,
maintains good behavior, and protects the contempla-
tive intellect so it may fulfill itself.

The fulfillment of the contemplative intellect is knowledge of universals

abstracted from particular sense experiences. In this ibn Sina follows
Aristotle, as he does in further distinguishing active and passive intellect.
The contemplative intellect of the human soul is entirely passive (Aristotle's
passive mind) and has the potential for knowledge, which is actualized by
the active intellect, or agent intellect.