Avicenna on Emotions: Their Nature and Significance for Knowledge and Morality

Abstract

This dissertation examines the view of emotions found in the writings of the philosopher and medical doctor Avicenna (Ibn Sīna, d. 1098 CE). Avicenna is known to have influenced the course of cognitive psychology in the Muslim East and the Latin West, yet little has been written on his affective psychology. Over the course of five chapters, I examine his accounts of animal and human emotions, their physiology, and their relation to voluntary action and moral dispositions. Avicenna is notable for the degree to which he highlights uniquely human emotions, while simultaneously giving attention to the complexity of emotions able to be felt by animals. He also stands out for the way that he integrates his knowledge of physiology into his analysis of philosophical questions. Emotions, according to Avicenna, are acts of the animal motive faculty, caused by cognitions of varying complexity. For example, uniquely human emotions are caused by cognitions of which only humans are capable, but they are fundamentally actualizations of the same motive faculty shared by animals and humans alike. Emotions are also to be understood as inclinations (Ar: inbiʿāthāt/nizāʿāt), meaning that they incline us towards various objects and courses of action, but do not on their own initiate any type of movement. This dissertation includes a full translation of Avicenna’s section on emotion in his Healing: Rhetoric.