The Phenomenological Quest between Avicenna and Heidegger

The Phenomenological Quest between Avicenna and Heidegger [1] [2] is a 2000 book by Nader El-Bizri that examines Avicenna’s phenomenological considerations of the question of being through Heideggerian analytics. It was published in its first edition by Global Publications, State University of New York at Binghamton, then again in 2014 via SUNY Press.[3]

The Phenomenological Quest between Avicenna and Heidegger investigates Avicenna’s (Ibn Sina’s; 980–1037 CE) ontological, epistemological, mystic, and linguistic accounts of being while at the same time accounting for Martin Heidegger’s critique of the history of metaphysics. This investigation constituted one of the first elaborate examinations of Avicenna’s phenomenological considerations of the question of being. The consideration of Avicenna’s philosophical works has been mainly conducted through primary Arabic medieval texts that have not yet been at the time translated into English, French, or German, nor sufficiently addressed by Western scholarship in philosophy.

Martin Heidegger claims that the history of metaphysics is the history of the oblivion of being while holding that his “fundamental ontology” presents a “genuine phenomenological account that attempts to overcome metaphysics.” However, Avicenna’s philosophical works do testify to the emergence of a phenomenological philosophical tradition that took the question of being to be the most central question of philosophical investigations. This Avicennian philosophical heritage grounded subsequent developments that attested to the rise of a new strain in ontology that overcomes substance and subject based ontology while being characterized by salient phenomenological dimensions. To sum up, Avicenna’s philosophical accounts of being present phenomenological dimensions in ontology that offer alternative phenomenological methods of investigation in ontology that would contribute to the renewal of philosophy in general, and ontology and metaphysics in particular.

This book offers contributions to discussions in metaphysics, hermeneutics, philosophy of mind, and history of philosophy. It is also one of the first pioneering attempts to critically account for Heidegger’s critique of the history of metaphysics by way of examining the legacy of Avicenna. It also offered a new line of interpretation in Avicennian studies that is not confined to the conventions of studies in medieval philosophy and their reliance simply on historiography and philology, rather developing analytics that are informed by hermeneutics and fundamental ontology. This opened up a contested field in methodology that was interdisciplinary and that refracted continental thought and phenomenological inquiry with intellectual history and the legacy of Falsafa in particular in novel ways of interpretation. This line of inquiry also belongs to a new emergent sub-field of academic research on the reception of Heidegger in the Islamicate intellectual milieu, and established a novel current in philosophical investigations in the form of El-Bizri's take on the fundamentals of a "Neo-Avicennism" strand in thinking. Nader El-Bizri delivered an interpretation of Avicennism that is informed by hermeneutic sensitivity to Heideggerian notions (not restricted to the early Heidegger but his later oeuvres as well). This showed how Avicenna’s grasp of the question of being already signaled a critique of classical metaphysics (ousiology) that remains relevant to contemporary debates in ontology.