Eighth to the Sixteenth Century - Rashid Islamic Center

102 • The Making of Islamic Scienceowner needs money and so it is cheap. I will sell it to you forthree dirhams”. So, I bought it and, lo and behold, it was AbuNasr al-Farabi’s book on the objects of Metaphysics. I returnedhome and was quick to read it, and in no time the objects ofthat book became clear to me because I had got to the point ofhaving memorized it by heart. I rejoiced at this and the nextday gave much in alms to the poor in gratitude to God, theExalted. (Ibn Sina tr. 1974, 25–35)Ibn Sina was to remain committed to the Aristotelian frameworkfor the rest of his life, and leave behind a legacy of philosophical textsthat would influence the course of Islamic philosophical thought formany centuries. Later, he and Ibn Rushd, a great philosopher fromSpain committed to a similar understanding of the cosmos, wouldbecome the two most important Muslims to influence philosophy inthe Latin West.Ibn Sina outlined his cosmological doctrines in his majorphilosophical works, which include al-Shifa (The Book of Healing), al-Najat (The Book of Salvation), al-Mabda’ wa’l Ma‘ad (The Beginning andthe End), and the Isharat (The Book of Directives and Remarks); his greatwork on medicine, al-Qanun fi’l tibb (Canon of Medicine), also containsa great deal of cosmological thought.Ibn Sina envisioned the cosmos in an Aristotelian manner, usedhis terminology (form, matter, accidents), and defined change as thepassage from potency to act. He lists six causes instead of Aristotle’sfour, but his two additional causes (the matter and form of thecomposed) are reducible to the given of the accident and the form ofthe matter, respectively.Ibn Sina’s cosmology, however, differs from Aristotle’s in twoimportant respects. For Aristotle, the distinction between essence andexistence was only a logical distinction. Ibn Sina made this distinctionontological. That is to say, Ibn Sina considered this distinctionpresent in every being except the Divine Being. This allowed himto preserve a uniquely Islamic view of existence of things, becauseevery existent in which this distinction is to be found must come intoexistence through an agent in whom these two are united, and thisleads to the division of beings into contingent and necessary. Thesecond major difference between the cosmologies of Aristotle and