Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T10:40:47.442Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Flying and the Masked Man, One More Time: Comments on Peter Adamson and Fedor Benevich, ‘The Thought Experimental Method: Avicenna's Flying Man Argument’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2020

JARI KAUKUA Open the ORCID record for JARI KAUKUA [Opens in a new window]
JARI KAUKUA*
Affiliation:
UNIVERSITY OF JYVÄSKYLÄjari.kaukua@jyu.fi
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This is a critical comment on Adamson and Benevich (2018), published in issue 4/2 of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association. I raise two closely related objections. The first concerns the objective of the flying man: instead of the question of what the soul is, I argue that the argument is designed to answer the question of whether the soul exists independently of the body. The second objection concerns the expected result of the argument: instead of knowledge about the quiddity of soul, I claim the argument yields knowledge about the soul's existence independently of the body. After the objections, I turn to the masked man fallacy, claiming that although the Adamson-Benevich interpretation does save the argument from the fallacy, this comes at the cost of plausibility. I then give a more modest interpretation that both avoids the fallacy and is plausible. The paper concludes with a remark about the metaphysical possibility of the flying man.

Keywords

Avicennaflying manthought experiments
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , Fall 2020 , pp. 285 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I am grateful for the collegial discussion with Peter Adamson and Fedor Benevich during the writing of this paper, as well as for the comments from the anonymous referees and my colleagues in Jyväskylä (Davlat Dadikhuda, Yusuf Daşdemir, Hadel Jarada, Kutlu Okan, and Nathan Spannaus). The research was made possible by the generous funding of the European Research Council (grant agreement no. 682779).

References

Adamson, Peter, and Benevich, Fedor. (2018) ‘The Thought Experimental Method: Avicenna's Flying Man Argument’. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 4, 147–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ʿAffīfī, Abū l-ʿAlā, ed. (1956) Ibn Sīnā. Al- Shifāʾ. Al-Manṭiq 5: al-Burhān. Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation.Google Scholar
Alpina, Tommaso. (2018) ‘The Soul of, the Soul in Itself, and the Flying Man Experiment’. Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 28, 187–224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Black, Deborah L. (2008) ‘Avicenna on Self-Awareness and Knowing that One Knows’. In Rahman, Shahid, Street, Tony, and Tahiri, Hassan (eds.), The Unity of Science in the Arabic Tradition (Dordrecht: Springer), 63–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hasse, Dag Nikolaus. (2000) Avicenna's De anima in the Latin West: The Formation of a Peripatetic Philosophy of the Soul, 1160–1300. London and Turin: The Warburg Institute and Nino Aragno Editore.Google Scholar
Kaukua, Jari. (2015) Self-Awareness in Islamic Philosophy: Avicenna and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kukkonen, Taneli. (2014) ‘Ibn Sīnā and the Early History of Thought Experiments’. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 52, 433–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marmura, Michael E. (1986) ‘Avicenna's ‘Flying Man’ in Context’. Monist, 69, 383–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGinnis, Jon. (2006) ‘A Penetrating Question in the History of Ideas: Space, Dimensionality and Interpenetration in the Thought of Avicenna’. Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 16, 47–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michot, Jean R. (1997) ‘La Réponse d'Avicenne à Bahmanyâr et al-Kirmânî: Presentation, traduction critique et lexique arabe-française de la Mubâḥatha III’. Le Muséon, 110, 143–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rahman, F., ed. (1959) Avicenna's De anima (Arabic Text): Being the Psychological Part of Kitāb al-Shifāʾ. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sebti, Meryem. (2000) Avicenne: L’âme humaine. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vasalou, Sophia. (2007) ‘Subject and Body in Baṣran Muʿtazilism, or Muʿtazilite kalām and the Fear of Triviality’. Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 17, 267–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed