Approximately thirty years after Al-Farabi's death, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) was born in 980 AD / 370 H., near Bukhara, a region of ancient Persia, now Uzbekistan. Avicenna achieved the profile of a universal philosopher, versed in all knowledge, taking not only falsafa to its apogee, but also the history of thought to one of its zeniths. His name, thus surpassing the limits of the falsafa itself, was placed alongside the greatest names in history. Three aspects led to this picture: the first was that Avicenna collected a large part of the sciences and philosophy of his time; the second, because he systematized and re-elaborated this body of work, resulting in his innovative approach; and the third concerns his remarkable presence in the destinies of philosophy and later sciences, both in the East and the West.

              A precocious genius who combined a limitless effort to learn everything that fell into his hands, Avicenna was self-taught for most of his life and embraced the main knowledge of his time. At the same time, he became one of the most notable physicians ever known and held administrative positions with the sovereigns of his time while simultaneously writing many pages a day.

            His work is quite extensive, reaching 276 titles. Of all of them, The Book of Healing, written in Arabic, is Avicenna's most complete work, a landmark in the history of science and philosophy in which there is a certain funneling, a gathering, in which everything that was produced in this area tends to rest, as a synthesis within its limits and, on the other hand, much of what came to be done later also starts from this synthesis, then accomplished.

          In medical art, Avicenna was among the greatest physicians in the history of medicine, belonging to the tradition inherited from the Greeks by the Arabs, through which many theories of Hippocrates and Galen were disseminated. Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, a synthesis of the medical knowledge of his time and his own experiences, was adopted in European universities until the 16th century AD – and therefore for more than five hundred years after his death – as the basic text for medical teaching.

            In philosophy, his main sources were the works of Aristotle and the theses of Al-Farabi. From the latter, he inherited mainly the cosmological doctrine with the vast metaphysical and systematic description of the world, the hierarchy of intelligences and the procession of the spheres of the Existentially Necessary to the sublunary world, linking Plotinus' thought of procession to the Aristotelian doctrine of the intellect. The Book of the Soul and Avicenna's Metaphysics are two striking examples of the great impact of his ideas in the elaboration of a complete and harmonious philosophical system in its parts.

          The simultaneous excellence in both areas of knowledge, that is, medicine and philosophy, is an important guide when you wants to understand the relationships that Avicenna established between medical and philosophical theories, relationships that culminated in his psychology of a psychosomatic dimension.

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