A Deliberation on Avicenna’s Philosophical Method

Scientific methods are tools for solving the problems of any science. In the new and contemporary era, the independent discussion of some of these popular methods gradually fueled the formulation of science methodology. Although the issue of the method of philosophy was also discussed in the past, today this discussion is followed in an emerging field called meta-philosophy. This article seeks to take an initial step in order to identify the coordinates of Avicenna’s philosophical method. Avicenna does not have an independent and exhaustive discussion of the method of philosophy, and therefore, to identify his philosophical method, one should use his implicit meta-philosophy and by reviewing his works, identify the methods that he actually used. In this article, after an introductory discussion on the method of science and philosophical methodology, I review Avicenna’s discussions on the method of philosophy. In the next step, with a look at the more or less common methods in analytical philosophy, four methods of comparative reasoning, conceptual analysis, logical analysis, and mental test will be selected as models and frameworks for discussion and some examples will be presented for the application of these methods in Avicenna’s philosophy. Recognizing Avicenna’s philosophical method in this framework shows that his philosophy is very similar to contemporary analytical philosophy in terms of method.