Avicenna argues that the celestial spheres each have a soul, termed the motive soul, which is emanated by the first celestial intellect––a body of knowledge which knows itself. Despite outlining the powers of the motive soul, Avicenna does not formally investigate the psychology of the spheres nor their volition. Rather, he presents their volition as a mystery and leaves it to posterity to solve. In an attempt to resolve this mystery, I will argue that it is a direct result of Avicenna having purposefully written a repeated gap into his account of emanation such that there is no clear account of the generation of the material which composes the sphere of the heavens; after clarifying the account of emanation by demonstrating that the sphere has a direct connection to the emanating intellect, I will make the plausible argument that estimation has an intellectual volition insofar as it as it possesses a shared similarity with the practical intellect such that its volition is of the same species of volition: intellectual rather than psychological.

The aim of this thesis is to interpretate the stories The Living, son of the Vigilant, The Bird and Salaman and Absal, written by one of the greatest scholars of medieval Islamic East, Ibn Sina (980-1037). Unlike his philosophical and medical writings these stories have a different character and create a coherent narrative cycle. Based on their themes, narrative methods and symbolism they should be in my opinion called initiation stories. The main aim of this dissertation is thus to verify this hypothesis by means of the hermeneutic interpretation. These stories, read as a coherent cycle, show typical features of initiation genre: the hero can't find his way, his existential condition makes him desperate, he is consumed by strong desire for reaching a higher ontological degree, meets an initiator, goes through initiation rites of passage, crosses the border between the uninitiated and initiated space, reaches the final initiation through symbolic death. The interpretation of each of Ibn Sina's three writings reveals an inner coherence of the stories: The Living, son of the Vigilant focuses on the motive of an initiator-guide and the description of the stages on the initiation way leading upwards, The Bird tells in an emotional way about the state preceding the initiation and then concentrates on...

Ibn Jumay''s (d. c. 594/1198) commentary on the Canon of Medicine by Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037) occupies an important place in the history of medicine for it is the first Canon commentary written by a physician and thus stands at the start of a tradition extending over 500 years. In addition, it is a so-far neglected source for our understanding of mediaeval Islamic medicine. The present thesis analyses the commentary with the aims of (1) determining the methods by which the court physician composed his treatise and (2) understanding why Ibn Jumay' undertook to prepare a commentary on one of the most thorough medical compendia of the middle ages. Chapter One presents the biography of Ibn Jumay', reveals that his religion had little impact on his writings and surveys his library which played a pivotal role in the composition of the commentary. Chapter Two investigates Ibn Jumay''s methodology in the entire commentary; it reveals that with his philological and source-critical methods Ibn Jumay' wanted to establish an authoritative reading of the Canon and to demonstrate the high degree of his erudition. Chapter Three focuses on selected passages in the commentary in form of three case studies. Ibn Jumay''s comments on anatomy/dissection, assorted materia medica and headaches demonstrate the court physician’s reverence for ancient authorities and his quest to revive and refine their teachings. Chapter Four contextualises Ibn Jumay''s methods and agenda by comparing them to those of other relevant scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The thesis concludes by arguing that Ibn Jumay''s commentary was part of his revival of the art of medicine and his attempt to gain power in the medical tradition by attaching his name to one of the greatest scholars of his time — the ra'īs Ibn Sīnā.