space

The Project

The aim of SPACE is to explore in detail the neglected issue of the system of the sciences as instantiated in the earliest examples of philosophical encyclopaedias, those penned by the Arabophone Persian polymath Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 1037). The research will be focused on Avicenna’s main and foremost summa, the Book of the Cure/Healing [Kitāb al-Šifāʾ], a wide-ranging and comprehensive work on Aristotelian philosophy that covers materials spanning from logic to metaphysics, with long intermediate sections devoted to natural philosophy and mathematics, pure and applied. The vastity of Avicenna’s magnum opus, together with the quality and the theoretical sophistication of his elaboration of Aristotle’s material, have until now discouraged a systematic study of the structure of the K. al-Šifāʾ. For medieval encyclopaedias of philosophy, the generally interesting problem of the ordering and organization of the sciences becomes however even more challenging, since the ordo sciendi is there thought to be a somewhat faithful mirror of a universal ordo essendi. Such a programmatic correspondence between the epistemological and the ontological levels invites to recognise in the structure of the summae the watermark of an analogous order of the world itself, in a fruitful exchange between the text and the reality it describes. 

The methodology of SPACE is that of a veritable mapping of the nodal points of juncture of Avicenna’s summa of philosophy: by charting systematically all the cross-references between different parts of the K. al-Šifāʾ, and by comparing them with those appearing in shorter philosophical summae also penned by Avicenna, SPACE will be able to show the geography of the philosophical landscape envisaged by the greatest thinker of the Islamic Middle Ages, allowing new insights into its theoretical landmarks. Before and beyond the ever increasing sectoring of today sciences, such a map can offer the fascinating historical alternative of a holistic model of knowledge.