Avicenna
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| Turning towards Mecca |
“”Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.
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| —Avicenna, being heartily sick of sophist idiots.[1] |
Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā (c. 980–1037), commonly known in the Middle East as Ibn Sīnā and in the West by his Latinized name Avicenna, was a Persian (not Arab) polymath and scholar of damn near everything and had a brain the size of a planet. He is renowned in the Middle East the way the greatest of the ancient Greeks are in the West.
He was mostly a physician. Amongst his 150 surviving treatises on various topics, at least 40 are on medicine. He compiled The Canon of Medicine, his 14-volume medical encyclopedia, which remained a medical authority for several hundred years and was used as a set text in European medical schools until the 18th century. This was at the cutting edge of medical knowledge, such as it was, in his time, but is now used mostly as excuses and an appeal to long history by alternative medicine practitioners, which is far less reputation than he deserves.
He was considered one of the "virtuous pagans" by Florentine writer Dante Alighieri, appearing in Limbo in The Divine Comedy, alongside figures including Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Ovid, and Saladin.[2]
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