Book Description

The reception history of the 11th-century philosopher Ibn Sina, known in the West by his Latinized name Avicenna, has received little scholarly attention and remains to this day largely virgin territory. Presenting a detailed analysis of the medieval Arabo-Islamic bio-bibliographical tradition, this volume investigates the lives and critically inventories the works of the principal philosophers who created the Avicennan philosophical tradition in the Islamic world between the 11th and 14th centuries. The author's critical prosopographical studies elucidate the literary tropes of the genres of secular and religious biography in Arabic literature, demonstrating how philosophical authority was constructed and deconstructed within the "rational" and "traditional" sciences in Islam; and how the genealogies and methods of these often opposing intellectual trends shaped the scholastic identities and vocations of these philosophers-cum-Islamic theologians and jurists. A work of intellectual archaeology, this volume clearly documents the vitality of the post-classical philosophical tradition as reflected in literary biography, the genres of commentary and gloss, and within the madrasa tradition of medieval Islamic civilization.