| abstract
| - Avicennism (Persian: فلسفه سینایی) is a school of early Persian Islamic philosophy which began during the middle of the Islamic Golden Age. The school was founded by Avicenna (Ibn Sina), an 11th-century Persian philosopher who attempted to redefine the course of early Islamic philosophy and channel it into new directions. His metaphysical system is built on ingredients and conceptual building blocks which are largely Aristotelian and Neoplatonic, but the final structure is something other than the sum of its parts. For example, while he accepted Neoplatonic emanationist cosmology and the "Amonnian" synthesis of later Aristotelian commentators, he rejected Neoplatonic epistemology and the theory of the pre-existent soul. His metaphysics also owes much to Islamic legal theory and Kalam on meaning, signification and being. This philosophy has recognized the compatibility of the metaphysics of contingency, by which Islamic theologians have tried to rationalize the Islamic idea of creation, and the metaphysics of necessity, in which Aristotelians have defended the idea that the goal of philosophy and science is as to understanding why and how things must be as they are. The key to this philosophy is conceptualization of the world as contingent in itself but necessary with references to its causes, leading back to ultimately to the First Cause. The main innovations in this philosophy are the definite distinction of essence from existence and its relation to the cosmological proof he devised, the ontological argument for the existence of God from the metaphysics of contingency and necessity, his idea about knowledge and "individuality of the disembodied soul" and his "Floating Man" thought experiment. Due to his successful reconciliation between Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism along with Islamic theology, Avicennism eventually became the leading school of Islamic philosophy by the 12th century and had become a central authority on philosophy by then. In the 13th century, Avicennism was revived by the efforts of Nasīr al-Dīn al-Tūsī, though the interpretation of this Avicennism was based on the ideas of Suhrawardi (founder of Illuminationist philosophy) and Ibn Arabi, and differed from the rationalist Avicennism known in Europe. In the 16th century, Mulla Sadra innovated a new philosophical system, known as Transcendent theosophy, which combined the vision of Sufi metaphysics and the rationalistic Peripatetic approach of Avicenna. Although the Avicennian school of thought was criticized by theologians such as al-Ghazali, philosophers such as Averroes, and by Sufis such as Rumi and Attar, Avicenna's writings spread like fire and continued until today to form the basis of philosophical education in the Islamic world. For to the extent that the post-Averroistic tradition remained philosophical, especially in the eastern Islamic lands, it moved in the directions charted for it by Avicenna in the investigation of both theoretical and practical sciences. Most of the later Muslim philosophers, theologians and mystics who tried to harmonize philosophy and theology, like Nasir al-Din Tusi, or philosophy and mysticism, like Suhrawardi, and later on, philosophy and theology and mysticism, like Mulla Sadra, also made use of Avicennan methodology and arguments.
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