Rustom/Sourcebook, 7. Avicenna: The Healing

This entry contains a complete translation of Avicenna’s Healing I.5, in which he aims is to provide an explication of some of the main conceptual principles of the science of metaphysics. These principles are the notions of existence and thing or quiddity, as well as the modalities of necessity, possibility, and impossibility. In clarifying these notions, Avicenna argues, among other things, that all of them are semantically primitive and epistemically primary.