Avicenna on Self-Awareness and Knowing that One Knows

It is a commonplace in the history of philosophy that issues surrounding selfawareness, consciousness, and self-knowledge do not become prominent until the early modern period. For medieval philosophers, particularly those in the Aristotelian tradition, the nature of self-knowledge plays only an ancillary role in psychology and epistemology. This is a natural consequence of Aristotle’s characterization of the intellect as a pure capacity that has no nature of its own: “Thus that in the soul which is called mind ... is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.” Until the intellect has been actualized by some object, there is nothing for it to reflect upon; hence self-knowledge for Aristotle—at least in the case of human knowers—is derivative upon knowledge of other things: “Thought is itself thinkable in exactly the same way as its objects are.” Like all historical generalizations, of course, this truism admits of striking individual exceptions. The most obvious and well-known exception in the medieval Islamic tradition is Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, 980-1037), whose famous thought experiment known as the “Flying Man” centres on the human soul’s awareness of itself. But Avicenna’s reflections on the problems of awareness and consciousness are by no means confined to the various versions of the Flying Man. In particular, two of Avicenna’s latest works, the Investigations and the Notes—both of which are in the form of remarks compiled by Avicenna’s students—contain a wealth of tantalizing and often problematic reflections on the soul’s awareness of itself (shu‘ūr bi-al-dhāt). The purpose of the present study is