A Compendium on the Soul
1906
A Compendium on the Soul
1906
Translated by Edward Abbott Van Dyck
What if you woke up suspended in empty space, unable to see or feel your body? Would you still know you exist? This is the famous "flying man" thought experiment that anchors Avicenna's radical inquiry into the soul. Written in the early 11th century as a patronage offering to a prince, this treatise asks what it means to be conscious, to perceive, to think. Avicenna argues that the soul is immaterial yet intimately bound to the body through the machinery of perception. Drawing on Aristotle while surpassing him, he maps the soul's faculties: how external senses gather data, how internal senses synthesize that data into unified experience, and how the intellect abstracts universal forms from particular things. The stakes are enormous: if Avicenna is right, your consciousness survives your body's death. This is not mere medieval speculation. It is the foundation of Islamic psychology and a direct precursor to Descartes' famous cogito, arrived at nearly six centuries earlier. For anyone curious about where consciousness theory truly begins, this is the source text.
Editions
X-Ray
“I despised my arrival on this earth and I despise my departure; it is a tragedy.””
— Avicenna
Link to this book
Add a free, dofollow link to Lex on your blog, forum, syllabus, or reading list.
<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/a-compendium-on-the-soul-7b691c47-45dd-48bd-96fa-896974c37063"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read A Compendium on the Soul by Avicenna free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/a-compendium-on-the-soul-7b691c47-45dd-48bd-96fa-896974c37063)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/a-compendium-on-the-soul-7b691c47-45dd-48bd-96fa-896974c37063][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read A Compendium on the Soul by Avicenna free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/a-compendium-on-the-soul-7b691c47-45dd-48bd-96fa-896974c37063Cite this book
Reading this edition for a paper or guide? Copy a citation.
Avicenna. A Compendium on the Soul. Lex, lex-books.com/book/a-compendium-on-the-soul-7b691c47-45dd-48bd-96fa-896974c37063.Avicenna (1906). A Compendium on the Soul. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-compendium-on-the-soul-7b691c47-45dd-48bd-96fa-896974c37063Avicenna. A Compendium on the Soul. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-compendium-on-the-soul-7b691c47-45dd-48bd-96fa-896974c37063.
