Abstract: This article intervenes in a vigorous debate in the study of medieval Islamic philosophy over whether Avicenna's epistemology is rationalist or empiricist. To settle the debate, scholars have so far focused almost entirely on Avicenna's emanationism or abstractionism. In this study, the author articulates two core theses of rationalism: first, innatism, the view that the mind starts out with certain basic truths or concepts; and second, necessitarianism, the view that we can attain necessary or absolutely certain and substantive knowledge. The former has been insufficiently discussed in the debate while the latter has been entirely overlooked. The author demonstrates that Avicenna is not committed to innatism but does subscribe in his natural philosophy to necessitarianism. Thus, he concludes that Avicenna is a rationalist by virtue of the necessitarianism of his natural philosophy. This finding sheds new light on how we should understand Avicenna's philosophical project.
Ismail Kurun (Sun,) studied this question.