Eternity and Incipience of the Soul according to Ibn Kammuna and Ibn Sina, and a Critique of Ibn Kammuna’s Account

The problem of soul (or its equivalents in other languages, such as “nafs” in Arabic and “jān” in Persian) is an important issue considered by people since very old times. Philosophers and intellectuals have tried to account for it in their ontologies, and have offered different theories. For Muslim intellectuals, the problem of soul has had a special place, and a variety of remarkable theories were proposed by prominent Muslim philosophers with an eye to Quranic doctrines. This paper considers two great philosophers of the Islamic world—Ibn Sīnā (or Avicenna) and Ibn Kammūna—in order to deal with an issue concerning the soul: its “eternity or incipience.” These two philosophers had different views of the matter. In this paper, we challenge these two views: Peripatetic and Illuminationist Peripatetic. We finally criticize Ibn Kammūna’s theory of the soul’s incipience and survival.