Imagination in Avicenna's Philosophical System

A lot of academic and philosophical issues can be delineated, justified and settled through recourse to imagination. The use of imagination in different philosophical issues including ontological, epistemological and eschatological ones has been of interest to Muslim philosophers. Among them, Avicenna is one of the greatest philosophers who has set out a great number of viewpoints with recourse to the moderate view of imagination. The present article, through demonstrating the pivotal position of imagination in Avicenna’s philosophical system, intends to first explain the position of imagination among the internal senses and its rationale and reality so that its function in relation to issues such as revelation, miracle, creation of things and its role in the epistemology of perception and ultimately the eschatological position of imagination in relation to the theory of evolution on which the demonstration and denial of the world of ideas is based could be explicated.