volume 20, no. 10 april 2020 Avicenna’s Emanated Abstraction Stephen R. Ogden The Catholic University of America © 2020 Stephen R. Ogden This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. <www.philosophersimprint.org/020010/> O ne of the largest ongoing debates in contemporary schol- arship on Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, the 10th−11th-century Per- sian philosopher) concerns his epistemology of the acqui- sition of intelligible forms (or concepts) between the more traditional “emanationists” and the more recent “abstractionists”. It is encourag- ing to see a topic in Avicenna (and Islamic philosophy more broadly) receive the kind of detailed scholarly attention regularly aforded to many other fgures in the history of philosophy. And for good reason. This is a paramount issue in Avicenna’s philosophy (which went on to infuence both the Islamic and Western traditions in unrivaled fash- ion), and the two accounts need to be reconciled in a much more sat- isfactory way. Emanationists — such as Rahman, Davidson, and Black, follow- ing major historical sources such as Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Aqui- nas — argue that Avicenna envisions the universal intelligibles as emanated directly into human minds from the separate and eternal Active Intellect (hereafter AI). Abstractionists — such as Hasse and Gutas — argue that the intelligibles are rather the result of the hu- man intellectual activity of abstraction from sensory images. The debate boils down to this: From where do the intelligibles initially come — from above, i.e., the AI (in a more “Neo-Platonic” fashion), or from below, i.e., from sense experience and images (in a more “Aristo- telian” fashion)? Both sides can point to numerous seemingly proba- tive texts in Avicenna’s corpus. 1 1. One of the most important texts in favor of emanationism is the last chapter of the psychological part of al-Najāt (The Salvation), 192−193 (Rahman transl., Avicenna’s Psychology, 68−69), which states that the Active Intellect “gives the soul and imprints on it the intelligible forms from its substance” (192.21−22). One of the most important texts in favor of abstractionism is Avicenna’s dis- cussion of the process in al-Shifāʾ (The Cure), al-Nafs (Psychology), II.2, 58−61, and Najāt, 168−171 (Rahman 38−40). Highly contested on both sides is Shifāʾ, Psychology V.5. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own, though I have consulted some existing translations where available. I thank audi- ences at the University of Notre Dame and Syracuse University for feedback on earlier versions of this project. In particular, I wish to thank Peter Adam- son, Deborah Black, Therese Cory, Kendall Fisher, Kara Richardson, Richard Taylor, anonymous referees, and especially Jon McGinnis for many valuable comments and suggestions. I am also very grateful for the Andrew Mellon