The Historical and Philosophical Significance of Avicenna's Dānešnāmeh-ye ʿAlāyī and its position in the Contemporary Avicenna Scholarship

I examine the philosophical and historical merits of Avicenna’s Dānešnāmeh-ye ʿAlāyī. With this aim, I briefly discuss the structural characteristics of the Dānešnāmeh and situate it within Avicenna’s oeuvre in respect to his other summae. I argue that in the Dānešnāmeh Avicenna takes serious steps towards the ideal order and pedagogical sequence of the philosophical sciences, the foundation of which he has laid in the Kitāb al-Šifāʾ. For supporting this claim, I concentrate on Dānešnāmeh’s expositions of the two doctrines of the categories and body and show how the development of Avicenna’s views on them reaches its climax in the Dānešnāmeh. Arguing for the significance of Dānešnāmeh as a comprehensive summa and its constructive role in the post-Avicennan tradition, I will draw attention to its neglect and marginalization by contemporary scholarship, and suggest reasons for this regrettable underestimation. I provide an overview of the editorial genealogy of the Dānešnāmeh, and then relying on the previous discussions, reason that Mawlā’s earnest edition of it is informed by a major structural error which has entirely ruined one of its most significant philosophical innovations, and is consequently unusable for research purposes. I conclude my piece by suggesting that the Dānešnāmeh still stands in need of a new critical edition based on sounder editing techniques, and informed by consideration of a wider range of manuscripts. If we are to gain a more comprehensive picture of the development of Avicenna’s philosophy, I urge the scholarly community to pay this work the careful attention that it deserves.