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We are grateful for helpful suggestions from Salimeh Maghsoudlou, Helen Beebee, and Miranda Fricker as well as participants in a seminar on this paper at the University of Toronto. We are thankful to Dag N. Hasse and all other members of the Arabic reading group held at Würzburg and Munich, where we first started exploring the ideas that led to this paper. Finally we gladly acknowledge the DFG for support of our work under the aegis of the project ‘The Heirs of Avicenna: Philosophy in the Islamic East, 12 th –13 th Centuries’.
This article is the second in a special series of commissioned articles on non-Western philosophies. The first article ‘Marxism and Buddhism: Not Such Strange Bedfellows', by Graham Priest, appeared in Volume 4, Issue 1, pp. 2–13.
No argument from the Arabic philosophical tradition has received more scholarly attention than Avicenna's ‘flying man’ thought experiment. It has recently been hailed as a major contribution to the theory of self-awareness (Kaukua 2015: ch.2), and in the past it has been compared to Descartes's cogito argument.1 Though Avicenna alludes to the argument several times in his works (see the list in Hasse 2000: 81–82), the passage on which most scholarship has focused—and on which we will likewise concentrate here—is to be found on the last page of the first chapter of Avicenna's (1959) treatment of soul in his Healing (al-Shifāʾ) – we will subsequently refer to this section of the Healing as On the Soul.2 The Healing is distinguished from Avicenna's other systematic philosophical compendia by its length and also by its self-conscious engagement with the Aristotelian tradition (for a detailed analysis of this aspect of the text in the case of the Metaphysics of the Healing see Bertolacci 2006). Our passage is a case in point. The first chapter offers a nuanced critique of previous attempts to define soul, with special reference to Aristotle's definition that soul is, as Avicenna phrases it, ‘the first perfection of the natural, organic body to which it belongs to perform the actions of life’ (On the Soul 12.7–8; cf. Aristotle, De Anima 2.1.412b4–6).
The thought experiment needs to be understood in this context. It is an attempt to do what Aristotle's definition...