Analyze and explain Avicenna’s account of perceptual experience.
1. Explain (in your own words and using your own examples) Avicenna’s distinction between ‘assent’ [tas.d ??q] and ‘conceptualization’ [tas.awwur ]. What does Avicenna mean when he says that there can be conceptualization without
assent but no assent without conceptualization?
2. Analyze and explain Avicenna’s account of perceptual experience. What psychological systems does Avicenna posit in order to explain perceptual experience? What aspects of perceptual experience are these various psychological systems supposed to account for? How, on Avicenna’s theory, do our perceptual experiences differ from those of non-rational animals?
3. According to Avicenna: under what conditions will a human being’s faculty of ‘intellect’ [caql] constitute a ‘material’ intellect, a ‘habitual’ intellect, and an ‘actual’ intellect. What, on Avicenna’s theory, are the respective roles that
the ‘Agent Intellect’ and the ‘cognitive’/‘cogitative’ faculty [al-fikr ] play with respect to the development of the human intellect?
4. Analyze and explain Avicenna’s floating person thought experiment. What kinds of awareness does Avicenna claim the floating person would and wouldn’t have? What aspect of our perceptual and intellectual experiences is the alleged
self-awareness of the floating person supposed to explain?
Answer preview to analyze and explain Avicenna’s account of perceptual experience.
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