The Nature of the Linguistic Propositions of Avicennian Ethics: Obvious or Well-known

Avicenna believed that the reality of the natural world is composed of forms emanated from the active intellect, which are put together in a certain order and have made a single whole. Human being adds some form to this whole by his actions, too. When the added form is the result of his intellectual understanding and in concert with the united system of the world forms, his behavior is ethical; otherwise, it is not ethical. The language of ethics also shows this integrated unitedness, and its truth corresponds with the external world. Therefore, Avicenna’s view required that the language of ethics be a truthful speaker of the external world. However, his words appear so that he doesn’t accept that the language of ethics has such a property. So, in light of the examination of Avicenna’s ethical anthropology, we shall say that his main attention is towards his audiences and show that in his view the truth of the language of ethics depends on its audiences. In this paper, we first analyze the ontology of Avicenna’s ethics, and then we shall examine the audiences of his ethics and the properties of the language of ethics for each one of them.