$164.49
Author: Avicenna
Brand: Kazi Publications
Edition: Illustrated
Features:
Number Of Pages: 650
Details: Product Description
Ibn Sina’s famous Canon of Medicine (Qanun fi al-tibb) comes to life in English with this translation. It is a clear and ordered Summa of all the medical knowledge of Ibn Sina’s time augmented from his own observations. It is divided into five books. The first contains generalities concerning the human body, sickness, health and general treatment and therapeutics (the only volume translated here). The second contains the materia medica and the pharmacology of herbs. Three methods agreement, difference and concomitant variations are usually regarded as characteristic of modern science. The third book deals with special pathology, studied by organs, or rather by systems. The fourth book opens with the famous treatise on fevers; then follow the treatise on signs, symptoms, diagnostics and prognostics, minor surgery, tumors, wounds, fractures and bites and that on poisons. The fifth book contains the pharmacopoeia. Because the Canon constituted a monumental unity which maintained its authority until modern times it served as a basis for 700 years of medical teaching and practice and is a proven alternative medicine technique.
Review
The traditional concept of medicine, as presented here, differs profoundly from the view held in the modern world because in the traditional view, the spacesmeridians, channelswithin the body and what flows through them are of more significance in causing illness than the shapes or organs. That is, the emphasis is on that which flows thorugh the channels as the place of the soul. –Laleh Bakhtiar
About the Author
Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina is better known in Europe by the Latinized name Avicenna. He is probably the most significant philosopher in the Islamic tradition and arguably the most influential philosopher of the pre-modern era. Born in Afshana near Bukhara in Central Asia in about 980, he is best known as a polymath, as a physician whose major work the Canon (al-Qanun fi’l-Tibb) continued to be taught as a medical textbook in Europe and in the Islamic world until the early modern period, and as a philosopher whose major summa the Cure (al-Shifa’) had a decisive impact upon European scholasticism and especially upon Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). Primarily a metaphysical philosopher of being who was concerned with understanding the self s existence in this world in relation to its contingency, Ibn Sina s philosophy is an attempt to construct a coherent and comprehensive system that accords with the religious exigencies of Muslim culture. As such, he may be considered to be the first major Islamic philosopher. The philosophical space that he articulates for God as the Necessary Existence lays the foundation for his theories of the soul, intellect and cosmos. Furthermore, he articulated a development in the philosophical enterprise in classical Islam away from the apologetic concerns for establishing the relationship between religion and philosophy towards an attempt to make philosophical sense of key religious doctrines and even analyse and interpret the Qur an. Recent studies have attempted to locate him within the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic traditions. His relationship with the latter is ambivalent: although accepting some keys aspects such as an emanationist cosmology, he rejected Neoplatonic epistemology and the theory of the pre-existent soul. However, his metaphysics owes much to the Amonnian synthesis of the later commentators on Aristotle and discussions in legal theory and kalam on meaning, signification and being. Apart from philosophy, Avicenna s other contributions lie in the fields of medicine, the natural sciences, musical theory, and mathematics. In the Islamic sciences (‘ulum), he wrote a series of short commentaries on selected Qur anic verses and chapters that reveal a trained philosopher s hermeneutical method and attempt to come to terms with revelation. He also wrote some literary allegories about whose philosophical value recent scholarship is vehement
Release Date: 01-09-1999
Package Dimensions: 60x235x1261
