Avicenna is the most influential figure in the intellectual history of the Islamic world. This book is the first comprehensive study of his theory of science, which profoundly shaped his philosophical method and indirectly influenced philosophers and theologians not only in the Islamic world but also throughout Christian Europe and the medieval Jewish tradition. A sophisticated interpreter of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, Avicenna took on the ambitious task of reorganizing Aristotelian philosophy of science into an applicable model of scientific reasoning, striving to identify conditions o.

• Cover
• Avicenna’s Theory of Science
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Citation, Transliteration, and Translation
• Introduction
• PART I. SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY
  • 1. Conception and Assertion
  • 2. Scientific and Nonscientific Assertions
  • 3. The Types and Order of Scientific Inquiry
• PART II. THE ORGANIZATION OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE
  • 4. The Internal Structure of a Science
  • 5. Division and Hierarchy of the Sciences
• PART III. MODALITY
  • 6. Necessity and Scientific Reasoning
  • 7. Scientific Attributes
  • 8. The Logic of Essence
• PART IV. CAUSALITY AND EXPLANATION
  • 9. Causal and Noncausal Demonstration
  • 10. Explanation across Sciences, Subordination, and the Transfer of Demonstration
  • 11. The Four Causes in Demonstration and Definition
• PART V. DEFINITION
  • 12. Definition and Description: Structure and Types
  • 13. The Epistemology of Essence
  • Conclusion
• Appendix A. Conditions of Certainty
• Appendix B. The Logic of Scientific Reasoning
• Appendix C. A Map of Kitāb al-Burhān (Book of Demonstration)
• Appendix D. English-Arabic Glossary
• References
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Lemmata
• Index of Avicenna’s Works with Passages Cited
• Index of Aristotle’s Works with Passages Cited
• Index of Other Authors’ Works with Passages Cited