TEHRAN (MNA) – Iran marks the national day of Avicenna, the prominent Persian philosopher and physician on August 23.
Ibn Sīnā known as Avicenna (980-1037) was a Persian physician and is considered the most famous and influential philosopher and scientist of the medieval Islamic world.
Iranians also mark National Doctors’ Day on August 22 to pay tribute to all the efforts made by Avicenna in his time. He was particularly renowned for his contributions to the fields of philosophy and medicine.
He wrote the Kitāb al-shifāʾ(Book of the Cure), a comprehensive philosophical and scientific encyclopedia, and Al-Qānūn fī al-ṭibb (The Canon of Medicine), which is among the most famous books in the history of medicine.
He was taught the whole Qur’an and much Arabic literature when he was 10 years old. He mastered logic, natural sciences, and mathematics when he was 18. He then turned to theology and studied Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
Ibn Sina’s philosophical system has left the deepest and the most persistent effect on Islamic philosophical thought as well as European Medieval philosophy. He has innovations within the Peripatetic philosophy, demystifying points in Aristotle’s thoughts, and sometimes adding to them.
He sought to establish a new philosophical system drawing on Platonic and neo-Platonic thoughts, but adventures in his life, and his premature death, left his enterprise unfinished.