Creative imagination in Avicenna's philosophy

Discussing on imagination is an important and vital issue in Islamic philosophy and mysticism. It has numerous ontological and epistemological dimensions. Avicenna was the first philosopher who cosmologically has distinguished imaginary world from material and intellectual ones. Epistemologically, he has made a distinction between imagination and imaginative taking two approaches to imagination which tends to the sense and tends to intellectual world. The material characters are devoted to the imagination tending towards sense but the imagination which tending towards the transcendental world is creative and immaterial which is able to change the things in the natural world. We, at this paper, by analytical and descriptive research method, have attempted to survey Avicenna’s approach to the imagination who has affected the next mystics and philosophers.