Abstract
This essay presents an overview of what Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 1037) has to say across his corpus about vegetative faculties and plant life. It begins with a look at more general concerns, including Avicenna’s efforts to enumerate various vegetative faculties according to sound principles, and to not only distinguish them from animal and human faculties, but also explain their integration with those higher faculties. The second half of the essay examines Avicenna’s contributions to more specific issues related to the vegetative life, including zoophytes, reproduction and embryology in his Book of Animals, and the distinction between the concepts of “life” and “soul” in his Book of Plants.
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Notes
- 1.
On Aristotle’s vegetative soul, see Corcilius’s contribution in this volume.
- 2.
On Plato and Galen, see respectively Carpenter’s and Vinkesteijn’s contribution to this volume.
- 3.
All translations of the Arabic are my own. For Healing: Psychology, I have at times consulted a draft translation by Michael Marmura and Deborah Black.
- 4.
Avicenna was possibly influenced in this by Alexander of Aphrodisias: “For this reason, even though there are many soul powers in [living] things in which the rational power is present, the soul constituted from them all is one, because no subsequent power can occur without the power that comes before it. Rather, they all belong to it as parts, where successive [powers] are joined to the preceding ones and the preceding ones are because of this expanded and developed (Avicenna 2012, section 30).”
- 5.
Most of what follows in this section is a summary of the information relevant to vegetative faculties gleaned from Basim Musallam (1989), as little other work has been done in this area.
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Fatigati, M. (2021). Avicenna on Vegetative Faculties and the Life of Plants. In: Baldassarri, F., Blank, A. (eds) Vegetative Powers. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 234. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69709-9_5
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