Mysticism and Science in Avicenna’s Philosophy

Abstract

Even though this paper opens out from a problem that recognizes as contemporary, it seeks to show the close linkage that intrinsically merges the fields of law (both religious and secular) with those of speculative knowledge (science or ʿilm) and those of mysticism, the latter mainly identified as ethics. In this case, the nature of this triple relationship will be surveyed within the thought of de Ibn Sīnā («Avicenna» in his Latinized form), a Persian philosopher whose intellectual legacy has aroused not few divergences -both in his and in our times- in respect to the continuity and compatibility between demonstrative and mystical knowledge.