The Role of Sensation and Experience in Ibn Sina’s Philosophy: An Examination of Ontological, Epistemological, and Psychological Dimensions

Abstract

Ibn Sina (Avicenna), as one of the most eminent philosophers of Islamic civilization, established a coherent philosophical system that synthesized Aristotelian Peripatetic philosophy with Neoplatonic and Islamic teachings, in which the role of sensation and experience holds a central position. This article, focusing on three dimensions—ontology, epistemology, and psychology—analyzes the place of sense perception within Avicennian thought. In his ontology, Ibn Sina presents a hierarchical structure of existence extending from the First Principle to the material world, viewing the Active Intellect as the source of emanation for intelligible forms and the link between intellect and sense. In his epistemology, he defines knowledge as a process based on sensory experience and intellectual abstraction, emphasizing that sense, as the starting point of cognition, provides the primary data necessary for the formation of universal intelligibles. In his psychology, the division of the soul’s faculties into vegetative, animal, and rational, along with his analysis of the gradations of cognition from sensory to intellectual, demonstrates the gradual evolution of knowledge through the interaction between sense and intellect. Ibn Sina rejects innate knowledge and exalts experience as the means of discovering the causes of phenomena and achieving certainty, while considering inner self-awareness as a complement to sensory perception. This study concludes that Ibn Sina’s philosophical system, by stressing the cooperation of sense and reason, not only resolves the apparent conflict between reason and faith but also lays the foundation for the advancement of empirical and philosophical sciences within the Islamic intellectual tradition.