600 Years Before Descartes: Ibn Sina’s Flying Man | Peter Adamson

Peter Adamson is Professor of Philosophy at LMU Munich and the host of the widely respected podcast History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. He is one of the leading scholars working on the history of philosophy across the Islamic world, late antiquity, medieval philosophy, Greek philosophy, Arabic philosophy, and the broader global history of ideas. In this episode, we discuss Ibn Sina’s Flying Man thought experiment, the mind-body problem, the soul, the self, and whether the mind can exist without the body. We also explore Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna, Ibn Rushd, also known as Averroes, Al-Ghazali, Aristotle, Plato, falsafa, kalam, Islamic philosophy, philosophy in the Islamic world, Arabic philosophy, the Greek-Arabic translation movement, the Latin translation movement, Maimonides, Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Descartes, the Islamic Golden Age, the Abbasid world, Byzantium, Syriac translators, madrasas, commentary traditions, the Mongol invasions, the myth that Al-Ghazali killed philosophy, and why philosophy in the Islamic world was far more original, diverse, and influential than many standard histories suggest.