Avicenna
“”Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.
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| —Avicenna, being heartily sick of sophist idiots.[1] |
Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā (c. 980 - 1037), commonly known in the Arabic world as ibn Sīnā and in the West by his Latinized name Avicenna, was a Persian polymath and scholar of damn near everything and had a brain the size of a planet. He is renowned in the Arabic world the way the greatest of the ancient Greeks are in the West.
He was mostly a doctor. Amongst his 150 surviving treatises on various topics, at least 40 are on medicine. He compiled The Canon of Medicine, his 14-volume medical encyclopedia, which remained a medical authority for several hundred years. This was at the cutting edge of medical knowledge, such as it was, in his time, but is now used mostly as excuses and an appeal to long history by alternative medicine practitioners, which is far less reputation than he deserves.
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Avicenna, Metaphysics, I; commenting on Aristotle, Topics I.11.105a4–5.