Ibn Sina and the Canon of Medicine

Ibn Sina, known to the Latin West as Avicenna, was born near Bukhara and all his life combined medicine, service at courts, and philosophy. His Canon of Medicine draws Greek, Persian and Arabic medicine into one, and remains the textbook of the European universities into the seventeenth century. In philosophy he joins Aristotle to Islamic doctrine, distinguishing necessary from possible being; his arguments are taken up by Jewish and Christian thinkers alike. Half a century later al-Ghazali will answer with the Incoherence of the Philosophers, and the dispute over the limits of reason will run on for a long time.