- Lived:
- c. 980–1037 · born near Bukhara (in today's Uzbekistan), died in Hamadan (Iran)
- Tradition:
- Islamic Golden Age; the summit of falsafa, Greek-inspired philosophy in Arabic — physician, logician, and system-builder
- The Big Idea:
- Ask of anything what it is, and nothing in the answer tells you that it is. Existence is something everything in the world receives — except one Necessary Existent, whose very essence is to exist.
- In their words:
- "Horseness, in itself, is nothing but horseness; in itself it is neither one nor many, neither existent nor non-existent."
- If you remember one thing:
- For six hundred years, across three religions and two continents, doing philosophy meant answering Avicenna — the self-taught prodigy who split what things are from the fact that they are, and rebuilt the universe around the crack.