Avicenna, Meaning, and Causation

Avicenna’s view on “abstraction,” particularly on the initial acquisition of the intelligible forms corresponding to natural kinds, has been hotly debated in the recent scholarship. In this paper, after introducing the problem and quickly reviewing the literature, I will propose a new interpretation, called “Avicennan Abstraction,” according to which Avicenna’s epistemology of abstraction is explainable in light of his semantics of different types of “meaning” and metaphysics of causation, i.e., essential and accidental causes.