Deborah L. Black

Intentionality in Medieval Arabic Philosophy

It has long been a truism of the history of philosophy that intentionality is an invention of the medieval period, and within this standard narrative, the central place of Arabic philosophy has always been acknowledged. Yet there are many misconceptions surrounding the theories of intentionality advanced by the two main Arabic thinkers whose works were available to the West, Avicenna and Averroes. In the first part of this paper I offer an overview of the general accounts of intentionality and intentional being found in the linguistic, psychological, and metaphysical writings of Avicenna and Averroes, and I trace the terminology of “intentions” to a neglected passage from Avicenna’s logic. In the second part of the paper I examine the way that Avicenna and Averroes apply their general theories of intentionality to the realm of sense perception. I offer an explanation of why Avicenna might have chosen to denominate the objects of the internal sense faculty of estimation as “intentions”, and I explore the i...

Avicenna on Self-Awareness and Knowing that One Knows

One of the most well-known elements of Avicenna’s philosophy is the famous thought experiment known as the “Flying Man.” The Flying Man argument attempts to show that the soul possesses innate awareness of itself, and it has often been viewed as forerunner to the Cartesian cogito. But Avicenna’s reflections on the nature of self-awareness and self-consciousness are by no means confined to the various versions of the Flying Man. Two of Avicenna’s latest works, the Investigations and the Notes, contain numerous discussions of the soul’s awareness of itself. From an examination of these works I show that Avicenna recognizes two distinct levels of self-knowledge: (1) primitive self-awareness, which is illustrated by the Flying Man; and (2) reflexive self-awareness, which comes from our awareness of cognizing some object other than ourselves. While Avicenna assigns primitive self-awareness a central role in ensuring the unity of the soul’s operations, he encounters a number of difficulties in his efforts to explicate the relation of primitive self-awareness to the reflexive varieties of self-knowledge that he inherits from the Aristotelian tradition.