Re-presentation in Avicenna’s Doctrine of Knowledge

Abstract

Avicenna’s doctrine of knowledge is known for its complexity, and modern scholars have offered different if not contradictory interpretations of its features. Avicenna’s doctrine of imagination is particularly difficult to apprehend. Is the work of imagination, as some texts suggest, a necessary step in the process that leads to intellection, or is imagination, as other texts suggest, a power that frees man from adequacy with reality?.