Avicenna's Metaphysics in Context.

• Author: McGinnis, Jon
• Position: Book Review

Avicenna's Metaphysics in Context. By ROBERT WISNOVSKY. Ithaca: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2003. Pp. 1x + 305.

Robert Wisnovsky's Avicenna's Metaphysics in Context is arguably one of the most important works to come out on Avicenna to date. Wisnovsky has a superb mastery of the philological, historical, and philosophical tools necessary for tackling some of the most central and deepest issues in Avicenna's philosophy. His study is history of ideas done at its best. The work is must reading for anyone studying Avicenna today and likewise will be of interest to those with broader interests, whether in Arabic philosophy and intellectual history, Hellenistic and Neoplatonic studies, medieval Latin philosophy, or the history of philosophy in general.

To avoid unfulfilled expectations, one should note that Wisnovsky's book is not a synoptic account of Avicenna's metaphysics; rather, it intends to place two related questions germane to Avicenna's metaphysical thought within their historical context, namely, what is the soul and how is it related to the body as its cause, and what is God and how is He related to the world as its cause?

The work is divided into two parts corresponding with these two questions. In part I, "Avicenna and the Ammonian Synthesis," Wisnovsky begins by tracing the history of Aristotle's enigmatic entelekheia (sometimes translated "actuality") in his definitions of both the soul (psukhe) and motion (kinesis), and how the Peripatetic commentators, Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius, attempted to find an overarching meaning for this term in Aristotle's two definitions. Wisnovsky next traces how certain glosses of entelekheia initially suggested by these commentators--namely, teleiotes ('completeness', 'endedness', and 'perfection') as well as to einai ('to be' or 'to exist') and to eu einai ('to be or exist well')--began to take on a life of their own in the procession and reversion schemes of such Neoplatonists as Proclus, Ammonius, Asclepius, and Philoponus, a phenomenon that Wisnovsky terms the "Ammonian synthesis." This synthesis, with its long philosophical history, in turn became embedded in the Arabic translations of Aristotle's texts to which Avicenna was heir. The first part of the book ends with a chapter on Avicenna's answer to the question, "what is the soul and how is it related to the body as its cause?" in light of Wisnovsky's close philological and historical study of the Ammonian synthesis.

Part II, "The...