A Critical Evaluation of Ibn Sina's Arguments on the Presential Perception of Essence

According to Islamic philosophers, the soul’s self-perception is of the type of presential knowledge. In other words, the soul’s awareness of its own essence, unlike what Descartes states in his concept of Cogito, does not occur through external objects, body organs, or soulish acts. Rather, the soul perceives its self free from its acts and states and with no reliance on the activities of material body. The prominent Islamic philosopher, Ibn Sina, has posed different arguments in order to demonstrate this claim, the most important of which is the argument of “floating man” or “suspended man”. However, an evaluation of such arguments seems to reveal that they are not capable of demonstrating their claim and, under the best circumstances, they can merely prove the difference between the soul’s self-knowledge and its knowledge of other objects. Therefore, it seems that either more solid arguments are necessary to demonstrate the soul’s independence in self-perception or the soul should not be considered independent of the body and, particularly, the brain in this regard.