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The Thought Experimental Method: Avicenna's Flying Man Argument

Part of: Non-Western Philosophies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2018

PETER ADAMSON  and
FEDOR BENEVICH
PETER ADAMSON
Affiliation:
LMU MUNICHpeter.adamson@lrz.uni-muenchen.debenevich@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
FEDOR BENEVICH
Affiliation:
LMU MUNICHpeter.adamson@lrz.uni-muenchen.debenevich@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
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Abstract

No argument from the Arabic philosophical tradition has received more scholarly attention than Avicenna's ‘flying man’ thought experiment, in which a human is created out of thin air and is able to grasp his existence without grasping that he has a body. This paper offers a new interpretation of the version of this thought experiment found at the end of the first chapter of Avicenna's treatment of soul in the Healing. We argue that it needs to be understood in light of an epistemological theory set out elsewhere by Avicenna, which allows that all the constitutive properties of an essence will be clear to someone who understands and considers that essence. On our reading, this theory is put to work in the ‘flying man’: because the flying man would grasp that his own essence has existence without grasping that he has a body, connection to body cannot be constitutive of the essence.

Keywords

Avicennaself-awarenessdualismessentialismIslamic philosophy
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , Summer 2018 , pp. 147 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2018 

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Footnotes

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, 12th–13th 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.

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