On the 7th of Ramadan in 428 Hijri (1037 AD), Muslim physician, philosopher, and father of early modern medicine, Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna) died at Hamadan, Iran. Ibn Sina is known as the most influential philosopher of the pre-modern era.
Ibn Sina's full name was Abu Ali Husayn ibn abd-Allah ibn Sina. He was born in a Persian family in the village of Afshana near the Samanid capital of Bukhara.
His writing subjects include astronomy, alchemy, geography, psychology, Islamic theology and Sufism, logic, mathematics, physics, and poetry.
His encyclopedia of medicine, al-Qanun fi al-Tibb (The Canon of Medicine) remained a medical authority for centuries not just in the Islamic world but also in Medieval Europe. It was used as a standard medical textbook through the 18th century in Europe.
Ibn Sina lived during a time when Islamic civilization was at its height, and he made significant contributions to many areas of knowledge and learning.
His impact on Islamic intellectual culture can be compared to that of Plato and Aristotle in classical antiquity, or Kant in modern European philosophy, in that all subsequent thinkers had to respond to him favorably or unfavorably, explicitly or implicitly, directly or indirectly. He supplanted Aristotle as the figure who, more than any other, represented what ‘philosophy’ ( falsafa) was.
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