Sovereignty of Theory over Avicenna’s Conception of Practical Philosophy

Avicenna’s practical philosophy, unlike his theoretical philosophy, did not gain intellectual power in Islamic philosophical tradition. An investigation into the absence of the human action problem at the center of Avicennan thought could explain both the origin of the theory/practice separation in Avicenna and the subsequent philosophical tradition in the Islamic world, which is based on Avicennan thought. While researchers have considered this problem from non-philosophical perspectives, the present paper concentrates on its philosophical origins in the Avicennan thought and explores his conception of practical philosophy in his discussion about the division of sciences. The finding is that the theoretical and practical philosophies are common in theorization and differ in their practical ends. Thus both the theoretical and practical philosophies are theories, but the theoretical one is a pure theory, and the practical one is a second-order theory. Because of the sovereignty of the theoretical over the practical, practical philosophy also aims to theorize the action. But changeable, individual, and manifold qualities of practice are not understood by the unchangeable, universal, and uniform attributes of theory. As an adherent to the priority and dominance of the theoretical, Avicenna tried to theorize action as much as possible (by the action theory in psychology) and entrusted the rest of it, which was not recognizable by theoretical reason, to another authority, that is religion. Thus in Avicennan encounter with humanitarian action, eventually, the practice would not be an original philosophical problem to necessitate a practical philosophy.