This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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He may be virtually unknown in the west but the Persian thinker Avicenna who was born in

around 980 in what is now Uzbekistan is one of the most important philosophers in history. That at least is the view of

Aficenna expert Peter Adamson. A polymath Avicenna wrote about everything from

music and physics to theology and astronomy to logic and medicine. He also came up with what he

regarded as an incontrovertible proof for the existence of God.

Peter Adamson, welcome to Philosophy Bice.

Hello there?

We're going to focus on a particular philosopher from the Arabic world, Avicenna.

Could you just say a little bit about who he was?

He lived in the 10th and 11th centuries AD and he lived and traveled around in the Middle East modern day Iran and he was of Persian extraction but wrote most of his works in Arabic.

He's the greatest figure in the history of Islamic philosophy because he's very innovative

and because he's an innovator in many different fields.

For example, he's also an important figure in the history of medicine.

I know you think his ideas are worth studying not just as a historical relic, but actually because they have powerful arguments within them.

Could you perhaps outline his most famous argument for the existence of God?

To do that, I need to first explain his conception of how modality works.

So what I mean by modality is the concepts of necessity,

possibility, and impossibility.

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