The Arabic Roots of European Biology

This three-year research and training project will throw new light on Avicenna’s creation of an influential yet neglected model for biological investigation, which centres on the organic body, i.e. the material constituent of living beings. In his biology, Avicenna (d. 1037) combines a medical and a philosophical approach to the body. On the one hand, in a medical fashion, he favours a bottom-up approach to the organic body, which is no longer considered the elusive substrate of the soul in the hylomorphic compound, nor taken in an abstract or general sense, but capable of acquiring its primary determination as a result of chemical interactions. On the other hand, the principles on which Avicenna grounds his investigation of the organic body are still philosophical. This combination brings to light the other crucial novelty of Avicenna’s biology: its cutting-edge methodology, which combines direct observation with theoretical assumptions. To implement his new biology, Avicenna revives botany and zoology by introducing the medical approach to the various forms of organic life into these sciences, thereby using empirical observational methods within a philosophical model governed by theoretical truths that are, in principle, non-negotiable. This new paradigm for life sciences remains operative far beyond the Middle Ages. The centrality of Avicenna’s new biology and its relevance for the subsequent tradition has never been emphasized in scholarship. The proposed project will fill this gap. An accurate examination of primary sources is essential to disentangle the relevant theoretical issues at the core of this project. Thus, the methodology of the proposed research will consist of a jointly philological and philosophical approach. Concretely, this means that the study of the relevant philosophical and scientific issues will be based on first-hand acquaintance with untranslated, unedited or poorly edited, and understudied Greek, Arabic, and Latin texts.