And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich online at www

history of philosophy dot net. Today's episode will be an interview about

Avicenna with Dimitri Gutas who is a professor of Arabic and Greco Arabic at Yale University.

Hi Dimitri.

Hi, Major, how are you?

I'm good.

Thanks for coming on the podcast.

I thought I'd start with a few questions about Avicana's life story and how it might have impacted his development as a philosopher.

One thing that I guess immediately leaps to mind here is that whereas a lot of the philosophers we've looked at

lived and worked in Iraq especially Baghdad so Al-Farabi for example and the other

members of the Baghdad school Avicenna was from further east in Central Asia.

So I was wondering whether you thought that that had any significance for understanding

his philosophical thought.

Yes, as always, the historical context is important.

The thing we keep in mind is that around the year after 9.50, with the fall of the central importance of the K-Bef in Baghdad,

there was great decentralization both of

political power along with which there came decentralization of culture and

many of the cultural centers and city centers throughout the Islamic world, from Cordoba all the way to

Buhara in Central Asia, tried to imitate and get some of the culture they had developed in

Baghdad. One of those things that intellectuals were interested in of course was philosophy. There was a great spread of philosophical knowledge through manuscripts and through individuals throughout these areas.

So in Central Asia also, and especially in cities like Bahara, you had people who were knowledgeable

about philosophy, if not philosophers themselves, insofar as the general upper-class culture

...