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Philosophy Then

Do You Need Any Body?

Peter Adamson on Avicenna’s soul survivors.

Aristotle, for all his undoubted merits, was a rather strange choice to be the great authority among medieval philosophers. They loved his pioneering work on logic and his contributions in natural philosophy, which did not create too many difficulties for the members of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faiths who lauded him. But his teachings were more awkward on the points they cared about most: he denied that the universe had a beginning in time, and he made God not a person, but only an unmoving cause of eternal celestial motion. To all appearances, he also denied the immortality of the soul. His famous definition of the soul, after all, makes it the ‘form of the body’.

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