AVICENNA AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUATION VALORIZING THE INDIVIDUALS

Abstract This study tries to shed further light on Avicenna’s (d. 1037) philosophical and linguistic innovations as suggested in his various accounts of the problem of individuation. To better contextualize his discussions, a background is given from both Porphyry’s (d. 305) Isagoge and Fārābī’s (d. 950) remarks in his Isāġūǧī. I have also enumerated all the candidates for the principle of individuation in Avicenna’s œuvre. It is argued in this paper that the pre-Avicennian Peripatetic tradition hardly engaged, both epistemologically and ontologically, with individual per se as having its own unique identity. Instead, individual was ontologically treated as instantiation of universals and epistemologically it was inquired about to the extent that it could be only told apart. Introducing the notion of individuation as tašaḫḫuṣ, instead of the traditional individuation as tamayyuz, Avicenna offers a new way of looking at intra-species differences for a more complex understanding of the individual per se. According to this view, individual with its unique šaḫṣiyya must be understood on its own through sense perception. This approach appears to propose that the individual should not be deemed as subordinate to Aristotelian universals whose assemblage, in Peripatetic thought, was vainly expected to lead to the knowledge and definition of the individual.