The Knowledge of Body in Avicenna's Psychology
Abstract
Human existence from the view of philosophy is a connection between self and body, and both of them build human identity. The place of the self is upper than the place of the body. So the majority of Muslim sages like Avicenna tried to introduce the self as the basis of human being in their anthropological topics and attempted to explain it in their ontological system. The main question of this article is: How much it deserves to pay attention to the knowledge of body and its effects in order to know the self from the view of Avicenna? The brief answer is that the knowledge of self is impossible without knowing body and its specifications in Avicenna's medical and philosophical views. The claim of this article is that many topics are related to the knowledge of body and its’ characteristics such as the introduction of self, proving the existence of self, self-immateriality, its substantive being, the difference between self and body, self cognition and proving vaporous spirit.