Philosophy of Medicine in the Islamic World

This chapter reflects on the epistemological status of medicine in the Islamic world. It focuses in particular on the figure of Avicenna (d. 1037), who was the first to build a proper philosophy of medicine in the Islamic tradition aiming at providing medicine with a coherent and unitary theoretical framework. To this end, he authored the Book of Animals, his only writing on zoology, as the culmination of natural philosophy and a bridge between philosophy and medicine. Avicenna’s Book of Animals centers on the study of the animal organic body, with the purpose of granting upon the physician the knowledge of the proximate principles of their art—that is, of the organic body, its parts, its constituents, and its functions. This chapter offers the first reconstruction of the two theoretical moves through which Avicenna builds his philosophy of medicine in the zoological section of his natural philosophy.