A Study of Avicenna's Views on Personal Identity and its Anthropological Foundations

Nowadays, the issue of personal identity is one of the most important and challenging issues in philosophy and humanities. Among the philosophers who have dealt with this issue, Avicenna is of high importance, because he has studied the existential structure of human beings both clinically and theoretically and intellectually with special attention to self and body. In this research, Avicenna's philosophical anthropological foundations, such as the non-eternity of the soul, the soul and body dualism and the interrelationship of the soul and body, are reread in order to infer some views about personal identity. The findings of this study indicate that the aforementioned anthropological foundations have a very good capacity to explain topics such as conceptualization of personal identity, topics related to self and its difference with personal identity, characteristics of personal identity, constructive components of personal identity, and the process of its formation.