Talk to Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
Persian physician whose medical canon shaped centuries
c.980–1037Persia and Central Asia (born near Bukhara, died in Hamadan)
Persian physician and philosopher, known in Latin Europe as Avicenna, born near Bukhara in the Samanid realm and active in Khwarazm, Rayy, Hamadan and Isfahan. His Canon of Medicine became the standard medical text in the Islamic world and in European universities for centuries, and his philosophical Book of Healing (Kitab al-Shifa) shaped both Islamic and Latin scholastic thought.
Talk to Ibn Sina out loud in the Yuga app.
Questions to ask
- How did you learn so much so young?
- What is the 'floating man' and what is it meant to prove?
- How did you treat patients, and what did you get wrong?
- What was your life like as a vizier and as a fugitive?
- Can reason and faith be reconciled?
Which Ibn Sina picks up
- 1020Hamadan. Aged about 40, physician and vizier to the Buyid ruler Shams al-Dawla, he spends his days at court and his evenings dictating pages of the Book of Healing to his students.
- 997Bukhara. Aged about 17, a prodigy who has just cured the Samanid ruler Nuh II, he is rewarded with access to the royal library, which he reads through with hunger.
- 1024Isfahan. Aged about 44, after escaping prison and a hard period of flight, he settles at the court of Ala al-Dawla, where he will write several of his major works.
- 1037Hamadan. Aged about 57, on campaign with his patron and exhausted, he falls ill with colic and, by the account of his student al-Juzjani, dies in June after treating himself too hard.
Questions about Ibn Sina
- Who was Ibn Sina (Avicenna)?
- Persian physician and philosopher, known in Latin Europe as Avicenna, born near Bukhara in the Samanid realm and active in Khwarazm, Rayy, Hamadan and Isfahan. His Canon of Medicine became the standard medical text in the Islamic world and in European universities for centuries, and his philosophical Book of Healing (Kitab al-Shifa) shaped both Islamic and Latin scholastic thought.
- Can you talk to Ibn Sina with AI?
- Yes, in the Yuga app for iPhone and Android. You talk out loud with an AI recreation of Ibn Sina, set in Hamadan, 1020. It draws on their own writing and well-sourced accounts of their life, and it can still get things wrong, so check anything important against the sources.
- Is that really Ibn Sina's voice?
- No. No recording of their voice survives. Yuga's voice is designed from how people at the time described it, and every call is labelled an AI recreation.
- What did Ibn Sina say about How he studied?
- In his autobiography he says he memorised the Qur'an by ten, mastered Euclid and logic with teachers, and read Aristotle's Metaphysics forty times without understanding it until he found al-Farabi's commentary in a Bukhara bookshop. Source: Autobiography as continued by al-Juzjani, c.1030s; Sirat al-shaykh al-ra'is.
- What did Ibn Sina say about the floating man?
- A person created in mid-air, blindfolded and with no sensation, would still be aware of his own existence, which shows that the self is not the body. Source: Kitab al-Shifa (Book of Healing), On the Soul, c.1020s.
- What did Ibn Sina say about Medicine?
- Medicine is the science by which one learns the states of the human body in health and in the absence of health, in order to preserve health and restore it; he systematised ideas on contagion, diet, drugs and diseases of the mind. Source: Al-Qanun fi'l-tibb (Canon of Medicine), c.1025.
How Ibn Sina talks
Orderly, analytical and confident, with the structure of a teacher who divides a problem into parts. He defines terms first and then reasons, like a physician giving a diagnosis. He uses Arabic technical vocabulary, but speaks to others in plain Persian, and adds a dry humour about ignorant doctors and quarrelsome scholars.