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This chapter presents Avicenna's discussion of melancholy. Avicenna is the Latinized form of the Arabic Ibn Sina, an abbreviation of Abu Ali al Husain ibn Abd, Allah ib Sina. Avicenna lived between 980 and 1037. He was born near Bukhara and was of Persian origin. Avicenna's masterpiece, written in Arabic, was the four-volume Canon of Medicine. The writing on melancholy in the Canon illustrates the way humoral theory and the symptom descriptions of melancholia traveled between ancient and medieval (western European) medicine by way of Arabic medicine. Arabic medical authorities such as Avicenna and his immediate influences Ishaq ibn Imran and Haly Abbas knew Greek medical lore, and, although there were also more direct sources through the Latin translations of the Greek works, were to a significant extent responsible for its return to western Europe to influence medieval medicine.

This introductory chapter covers the historical, cultural, and intellectual background up to and during the time of Avicenna. It begins by presenting the Greek course curriculum taught at the Academies in Athens and Alexandria, with its emphasis on Aristotle in logic and the natural sciences, and then its increasing reliance on Plato, particularly as read through his Neoplatonic interpreters, for metaphysics, ethics, and politics. This course curriculum was in turn inherited by philosophers working in the medieval Islamic world, and provided the basis of Avicenna’s own education. The chapter then considers the factors and institutions indigenous to the Arabic-Islamic milieu in which Avicenna worked, such as Islamic theology and law, as well the immediate historical and political situation in which Avicenna found himself. It concludes with a detailed presentation of the life and works of Avicenna.

This chapter presents the two most important views about cosmology held by Muslims in the era of al-Ghazali. The first is the cosmology of the Ash’arite school of Muslim theology, which developed earlier ideas of the Mu’tazilites into what has become knows as occasionalism. Its main components are the atomism of the earlier Mu’tazilites plus the idea that time is a leaped sequence of moments. The latter idea is sometimes called an “atomism of time.” In every moment, God rearranges all the atoms of this world and creates their accidents anew—thus creating a new world every moment that is not causally connected to the one in the moment before. The Muslim philosophers subscribed to a different cosmology where God is regarded as the first cause of all events in this work. Here, God does not act directly on all its creatures but only through the mediation of so-called secondary causes. Every cause is caused by another cause etc. until this chain ends in God, the first cause. The chapter shows how the usual view that these two cosmologies are diametrically opposed to one another cannot be maintained and that al-Juwayni, for instance, al-Ghazali’s teacher, already applies a cosmology where he applies elements of both systems.

This chapter examines Islamization in Classical Arabic Central Asia. The Arab Empire founded by the prophet Muhammad expanded rapidly, defeating the Byzantine Empire and capturing Syria (637) and Egypt (640). At the same time, the Arabs defeated the Sasanid Persian Empire (637) and raced across Persia into Central Asia. Within a very short time, early Arab Islamic culture came into direct, intimate contact with several major civilized areas, including the Graeco-Roman-influenced cultures of the Levant and North Africa, Persian culture, and the Buddhist cultures of Central Asia. From them the Muslims adopted various cultural elements. This chapter considers when, where, and how the Muslims acquired the recursive argument method and the Islamic college or madrasa. It shows that the recursive argument method is used in Arabic works by the Central Asian scientist and philosopher Avicenna.

This chapter examines how the recursive argument method was transmitted to medieval Western Europe. The appearance of the recursive argument method in Latin texts was preceded by more than a century in which Classical Arabic learning was increasingly translated and introduced to the Medieval Latin world. A trickle of translations of Arabic scholarly books into Latin had already begun to appear in Italy and Spain by the mid-eleventh century, but none of the works known to have been translated at that time seem to use the Arabic version of the recursive argument method. The recursive argument method first appears in Western Europe in Avicenna's De anima “On the Soul” or “Psychology.” The chapter considers other examples of the recursive argument method in Latin, including works by Robert of Curzon, Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great), and Thomas Aquinas.

This chapter surveys the reception of Aristotle's Categories in the late ancient and Arabic traditions. There is a puzzle when it comes to philosophical encyclopedias and compendia in the later Islamic tradition: Aristotle's categories gradually recede in importance before disappearing from sight altogether. This chapter shows that Avicenna initiates a move of the categories within the philosophical curriculum from logic to metaphysics, where he claims they rightfully belong. Avicenna nonetheless fails to follow through on his promise to carry out a full metaphysical investigation of the categories. This chapter shows that Avicenna is responding to certain problems regarding the Aristotelian categories which had their origins in late antiquity and the late ancient Platonists' appropriation of Aristotelian logic in their school teaching. While Avicenna managed to resolve many of these problems successfully, the categories ended up a casualty of this reordering of the way Aristotelian logic and ontology relate to one another.

This chapter examines Meister Eckhart's commentary on Exodus in the Bible. Exodus, about the flight out of Egypt, is filled with dramatic stories, from God calling to Moses out of the burning bush and telling him his name “I am who I am,” to the Israelites leaving Egypt and crossing the Red Sea with dry feet, and God supplying the Ten Commandments with thunder and lightning. However, none of these events are of much interest to Eckhart. His method of reading is rather “scholastic”: he is looking for universal theoretical issues. God tells Moses his name, and it raises the question of the relation between names and things. This chapter discusses Eckhart's interpretation of God's name based on his statement “I am who I am” using two sources: Avicenna and the Pseudo-Hermetic Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers. It also considers Eckhart's explanation of the sentence from Exodus “Moses approached the darkness in which God was,” with particular emphasis on his argument that God's light blinds our intellect.

This chapter shows another side of the intellectual vitality stimulated by the 1575–8 crisis. An unprecedented denial of ‘true plague’ suddenly swept medical circles. Best known are the arguments voiced by the Paduan academic Girolamo Mercuriale, invited to Venice to diagnose the disease and which resulted in rescinding health board policies such as quarantine. Similar arguments raced through the peninsula, from Trent to Palermo, but everywhere were met head‐on with impassioned rebuttals from those within and outside the medical profession. Questioning long‐held models of medieval and renaissance medicine with admixtures of Galen, Avicenna, and God, they focused instead on what was observable to understand the causes of plague and recommend new remedies lodged in public policy.

Chapter 3 is a brief summary of the main sources, Greek and Arabic, that Averroes used in the three commentaries. The sometimes very long notes of this chapter provide lists of the references to these sources in the three commentaries. In the case of the long commentary the lists may not be complete, but still cover the major part of the references.

This chapter deals firstly with works which supplied a dense backcloth for ‘demographic’ thought, providing very detailed and plausible data about reproduction, and then secondly with one ‘demographic’ theme, life-span. It focuses on the treatises by Aristotle which were known in the middle ages as On animals, and in particular among these the History of Animals and the Generation of animals; Aristotle's tract Length and Shortness of Life; and a work attributed to Aristotle, the Problems. In addition there are Avicenna's On Animals, which contains much from Aristotle, and Averroes's epitome of Length and Shortness of Life. Set alongside these is just one representative and important example of medical texts, Avicenna's Canon of Medicine.

This chapter introduces the central problem of the book: how exactly does one divine person produce another (e.g. how does the Father “beget” a Son)? It would seem that a divine person would have to be produced with materials (which seems implausible, since God is supposed to be entirely immaterial), or without materials (which cannot be either, for that would amount to creation from nothing, which the earliest Christian Creeds deny). This chapter also discusses the philosophical and theological background to the problem. On the philosophical side, Aristotle and Avicenna are particularly important because they articulate some key philosophical intuitions about production. On the theological side, the Creed of Nicea and the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 are significant, for they set the theological boundaries of the playing field.

Henry of Ghent offered a provocative answer to the question: how is a divine person produced? Henry insists (against Peter Lombard) that the Father must produce the Son or Spirit from materials––or at least something that plays the role of materials––because otherwise the Son or Spirit would be produced from nothing, and that is something the Nicene Creed denies. But how can a divine person be produced “with materials”? According to Henry, the divine essence plays the role of the materials, and the personal properties play the role of the forms, for the divine essence is not produced in the Son or Spirit, whereas the Son’s and Spirit’s personal properties are, analogous to the way that sculptors do not produce the clay in their statues, but they do produce the forms of their statues.

Scotus believes the divine essence must play the role of the formal terminus of production––that is, it must be the shared form of the persons, not a shared lump of matter. For Scotus, there simply are no materials in the Godhead. But this does not mean that the Son is created from nothing. As Scotus sees it, something is not created if it is produced with at least one pre-existing ingredient, and that need not be a material entity (it could be a form, as the divine essence is in the production of a divine person). According to Scotus, the divine essence and the personal properties are both like “forms,” as it were, that combine by perfect identity (a very tight bond between formally distinct entities) to constitute the divine persons.

This chapter opens with a brief overview of the impact of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed on the medieval Latin scholastic tradition, and then focuses on its influence on Thomas Aquinas. It is well known that Thomas knew the teachings of “Rabbi Moses” as he developed his own philosophical positions on human understanding of God. However, almost all previous scholarship on the Maimonides-Aquinas connection has limited itself to the Summa theologiae and to Aquinas’ direct criticisms of Rabbi Moses. This chapter turns instead to Aquinas’s engagement with Maimonides in his earlier Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (1252-1256) where we see him working out arguments whose conclusions are later articulated in the Summa. The chapter shows how Aquinas read Maimonides, not in isolation, but in the context of the Arabic philosophers, and especially Avicenna. Furthermore, by closely analyzing their detailed philosophical accounts of divine attributes and human knowledge of the nature of God, the author shows how Aquinas “Maimonidizes” Avicenna, rendering him a Maimonidean agnostic who denies that humans can have knowledge of God. This serves as the counterpoint to Aquinas’s defense of his own positive view of the possibility of human knowledge of God

This chapter explores the remarkable phenomenon of twelfth-century rigorous Andalusian Aristotelianism. In the early twelfth century, the philosophical map of al-Andalus was dramatically redrawn. Along with what can only be described as the blossoming of Islamic philosophy after its constrained state in the previous century, one notices a significant shift to an orthodox version of Aristotelian philosophy. The thought of the Eastern Aristotelians was sprinkled with un-Aristotelian elements. Largely in response to Platonizing authors, especially Avicenna, Andalusian falāsifa explicitly identified with the Peripatetic tradition, and strove to strengthen the authority of Aristotle and his commentators. This stricter version of Aristotelianism, which makes its debut with Ibn Bājja under the Almoravids, was further crystalized under the Almohads by philosophers such as Averroes and Maimonides. The chapter also considers “the Andalusian revolt against Ptolemaic astronomy.” The term “Andalusian Revolt” was first coined in 1984 by Abdelhamid Sabra in his discussion of astronomical theories that attempted to dethrone Ptolemy's astronomy from its almost unquestioned authority.