Avicenna Live: The Immediate Context of Avicenna’s Intellectual Formation

Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 428/1037) is among the most influential philosophers in history and the most important philosopher of the Islamic tradition.

He is described as a Mozart-type Wunderkind, who very early had completed his education and perfected his understanding of reality.

Yet, throughout his life, Avicenna was also an eager student of his teachers or himself a dedicated teacher to his students – leading to the key-question of ALIVE: to what extent have Avicenna’s personal relations with his peers influenced the formation and formulation of his own philosophy?

Did he reform or reformulate his thoughts in light of his personal interactions?Modern scholarship on Avicenna has often evaded these questions, frequently referring to his autobiography, according to which he supposedly never added anything to his views after his eighteenth birthday.

What is more, scholars appear either unaware of the existence of sources that allow the examination of Avicenna’s potential indebtedness to and interaction with his peers or deterred by the challenges involved in exploring them systematically.

As a result, the immediate context of Avicenna’s intellectual formation remained a surprisingly understudied area of research in defiance of its enormous potential for new insights not only into particular parts of his oeuvre but into his philosophy as a whole.ALIVE offers a radically new way of approaching Avicenna by studying four unique source texts that enable us to “circle in” on his intellectual upbringing and development, thereby providing an entirely novel paradigm for all future investigation in the field.

At the same time, ALIVE will make an important contribution to the Digital Humanities by furnishing an online platform that will facilitate the study of diverse and difficult textual corpora for both ALIVE and future projects sharing these challenges.