The Picture of the Life After Death in Avicenna's Philosophy

The aim of this article is to examine Avicenna’s theory of the immortality of human soul. Avicenna believes in immortality of the soul and resurrection of the body but he engages in a philosophical investigation about the former not the latter. According to his view, religion has talked of resurrection of the body in detail. The picture he presented of the immortality of the soul, viz spiritual immortality, was very impressive on Muslim philosophers. In illustrating the situation of the soul after death, first he mentions five principles about the pleasures and pains of the faculties of the soul and then makes use of these principles to explain the pain and pleasure of the intellect. Given that vegetative and animal faculties have embodied realizations and are evolved from the soul’s attachment to the body, they can’t survive the bodily death, so any kind of immortality belongs to intellect. He divides human beings according to the intellectual aspect of their souls and their habits and also according to their being adversary or culpable, and explains their position in the afterlife. He also explains the position of whom that couldn’t reach to intellect (bulh) in their earthy life. According to Avicenna, the punishment of intellectual aspect of the soul is everlasting but the punishment of the behavioral bad habits of the soul is temporary.