Avicenna on information processing and abstraction

Avicenna has a great deal to say about the topic of ‘information’ (taṣawwur), that is, the acquisition of cognitive or mental content (ma‘nā). Ma‘nā is a term commonly used among Islamic scholars and could refer the meaning of a word, properties of the external world, and also cognitive or mental content (forms, images, intentions, intelligible forms, or concepts). Within his philosophical works, Avicenna developed sophisticated explanations for the human mind’s ability to process information coming from the external world, as well as the way in which the mind (or ‘intellective soul,’ to use Avicenna’s terminology) apprehends intelligible forms, that is, the highest form of cognitive content. Nevertheless, Avicenna provides two divergent models for human knowledge that scholarly literature has intensely debated between. In this chapter, I expand upon and problematize these two models. While I do not provide a resolution or a novel alternative interpretation to this discussion, I describe the status of the debate and ultimately evaluate if Avicenna’s way of explaining cognition has something to say to contemporary epistemology.