Intuition (Ḥads) and Cogitation (Fikr) in Avicenna’s Logical Writings

Abstract The scholarly attention paid to Avicenna’s psychological theory of intuition (ḥads) has eclipsed consideration of its logical function. This article examines Avicenna’s appeals to intuition in some logical texts in which the scope of intuition is extended beyond its principal role in discovering middle terms. I focus on an overlooked text from the beginning of Healing: Demonstration, where intuition is treated as one of three modes of mental instruction. I show that Avicenna’s account of the relation between intuitive instruction and the other two modes of instruction—cogitative and informative—sheds new light on familiar themes in his psychology of intuition, in particular autodidacticism and the relation between intuition and discursive thinking.