The purpose of the article is to present further information about Avicenna's work on Eastern philosophy, supplementing what was written in the author's Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (Leiden, 1988), pp. 115-30. In view of the prevalent but unfounded notions among some students of Avicenna that the Eastern philosophy is mystical or illuminationist, an initial section traces the history of the development of these tendentious ideas first to Ibn T[dotu]ufayl and then to the followers of his interpretation in the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Further sections discuss the title of the book, list its contents insofar as they can be reconstructed from Avicenna's statements and the extant portions, and provide additional information about its manuscripts and transmission. The style of the work is then analyzed and compared with that of the šifā' in order to verify Avicenna's claim in the Preface to the latter work that the difference between the two was merely stylistic. A final section gives a table of concordance between the contents of the extant part on physics and the corresponding sections in the šifā', establishing the direct relationship and verbal congruity between the two works.

Did classical kalām debates about how thing (šay') and existent (maw[gcaron]ūd) relate to each other pave the way for Avicenna's distinction between essence (māhiyya) and existence (wu[gcaron]ūd)? There are some indications that the concept of thingness (šay'iyya) may have played a bridging role between the mutakallimūn's discussions and those of Avicenna. Nevertheless, Avicenna's appeals to thingness occur most densely in passages devoted to analyzing the relationship between efficient and final causes, an entirely Aristotelian topic. A philological question arises: should these passages be emended to read causality (sababiyya) in place of thingness (šay'iyya)? I argue that the balance of evidence compels us to retain thingness. For Avicenna, thingness is the respect in which the final cause is prior to the efficient cause (as well as to the formal and material causes); existence, by contrast, is the respect in which the efficient cause is prior to the final cause. In fact, over the course of Avicenna's career a progression from the kalām problematic of šay' v. maw[gcaron]ūd to his own problematic of māhiyya v. wu[gcaron]ūd can be detected in his discussions of efficient and final causation.

Our aim here is to show that an enigmatic text of Avicenna's Glosses, devoted to the problem of evil, takes on its full meaning in the light of the last chapter of the šifā' on De generatione et corruptione. We will see how Avicenna, deepening and developing a cosmological argument already present in the commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias on the De generatione, ends up building most of his theodicy on the relative incommensurability of the different celestial periods. All the problem of divine Justice is thus reinterpreted in terms of opposition between discrete and continuous. Finally we will show the importance that this development of Avicenna had in Western Christendom in the 14th century, and the complex relationship which Leibniz has with it in his recently edited reflections on the Great Year.

As for Avicenna the human soul is a complete substance which does not inhere in the body nor is imprinted in it, asserting its survival after the death of the body seems easy. Yet, he needs the body to explain its individuation. The paper analyzes Avicenna's arguments in the De anima sections, V, 3 & 4, of the Shifā' in order to explore the exact causal relation there is between the human soul and its body and confronts these arguments with relevant passages in the Metaphysics. It argues that the causal relation between body and soul remains obscure and that, though Avicenna claims that there is a personal immortality and that the disembodied soul remains individuated, he does not provide a satisfactory ontological account for it.

Al-šahrastānī, who confronts Avicenna in several of his works, devoted an entire work to criticizing him, the title of which was The Struggle against the Philosophers. Although unfinished, it nevertheless includes five “questions” out of the seven which its author had foreseen. These concern themes fundamental for philosophy and theology: being, God, the world and its creation. The method according to which al-šahrastānī deals with them is both radical - he is well aware of the central and sensitive points of Avicenna's philosophy, in particular the status of the first emanated Intelligence - and analytical, as it submits Avicenna's technical terms to a rigorous semantic examination, and takes apart those which have the form of syntagmas (such as “The Being necessary by itself”). The foundation of this merciless refutation is adherence to prophecy, as opposed to the attitude of the philosophers.