Analytic Philosophy and Avicenna: Knowing the Unknown (By Mohammad Azadpur)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Analytic Philosophy and Avicenna: Knowing the Unknown by Mohammad Azadpur Muhammad U. Faruque (bio) Analytic Philosophy and Avicenna: Knowing the Unknown Mohammad Azadpur New York: Routledge, 2020. Viii + 128 Pages. Recent years have witnessed a revival, and even a defense, of traditional, non-modern epistemologies. One thinks of Robert Pasnau’s After Certainty, which shows what is wrong with contemporary epistemology by arguing that the narrow epistemic ideals to which modern philosophers subscribe are unattainable.1 In a similar vein, in his recent Platonism and Naturalism, Lloyd Gerson defends Platonism against the anti-representationalism (the possibility of attaining truthful representations in the sciences) of Richard Rorty by establishing the explanatory role of the superordinate first principle of all, the Idea of the Good.2 In its own way, Mohammad Azadpur’s groundbreaking book makes a strong case for Avicenna’s (d. 1037) anti-naturalist account of perception vis-à-vis some of the limitations of contemporary Anglo-American discussions in empirical knowledge and sensory intentionality. In particular, the book engages in a constructive dialogue between Avicenna and such major twentieth-century analytic philosophers as Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell. Judged from its philosophical sophistication and philological precision, the book must be regarded as a major study of Avicenna that sheds new light on the contemporary relevance of one of the greatest thinkers of all time. Since the book presents a highly nuanced account of Avicennian epistemology, I shall first provide a sketch of its chapter outlines, before proceeding to engage with some of its key arguments. [End Page 102] The first chapter examines Sellars’s attack on the so-called “the Myth of the Given” concerning the foundation of empirical knowledge. This idea itself goes back to the Cartesian dualism of mind and world, and to the argument that the world somehow gives itself to us in a way that we can understand. For Sellars, the epistemological Given encompasses various empiricist views, according to which knowledge is grounded in non-inferential knowledge of matter-of-fact. According to the Myth, non-inferential knowledge is foundational in that it is not justified by a more basic form of knowledge. Sellars challenges this account by arguing that knowledge requires concepts, and since concepts are linguistic entities, an initiation into the linguistic space of reasons is what enables us to establish non-inferential knowledge. Chapter 2 investigates Sellars’s account of the pseudo-intentionality of sense impressions and its relation to the cognitive order. Appropriating Franz Brentano’s seminal concept of “intentionality” (i.e., object-directedness), Sellars distinguishes between pseudo-intentionality and genuine intentionality in relation to both sense impressions and the cognitive order. Sellars’s psychological nominalism leads him to a naturalistic account of intentionality that conforms to his scientism, according to which progress in science leads to a more accurate representation of the world. Chapter 3 discusses Sellars’s scientism in relation to his distinct version of philosophia perennis. This chapter defends the argument that the “manifest image” (i.e., our commonsense experience of the world) of things is real but constantly refined through scientific progress. Importantly, Azadpur claims that Sellarsian perennialism, in tandem with McDowell’s revision of the Myth of the Given, enables us to resist the debilitating effects of scientism on our knowledge of the world. In Chapter 4, Azadpur argues that Avicenna is in agreement with Sellars regarding the naturalistic fallacy of the Myth of the Given, since he, too, grounds non-inferential factual knowledge in conceptual sensory experience. However, Sellars claims that sensory experience is non-relationally intentional, whereas, Avicenna assigns a relational intentionality to the senses due to the intellect’s involvement in sensory perception. Chapter 5 delves into the deeper dimensions of Avicenna’s philosophy of mind and his complex view of experience. It argues that in contrast to the Sellarsian space of reasons, Avicenna’s account of cognition reaches all the way out to sensory impingements (cf. similar views in McDowell’s Mind and World).3 In Azadpur’s view, this particular reading of Avicenna contributes to McDowell’s refined epistemology, as it develops an account of the categorial unity of the space of reasons through modifying Aristotle’s substance ontology. The...