Ibn Sina on the Nature of Pain

Abstract

From the past, philosophers through philosophical approaches have tried to uncover the hidden aspects of the phenomenon that we call ‘pain’. One of the basic questions in this regard is the nature of pain to which Ibn Sina has addressed. Avicenna believes that the concept of pain is not self-evident, sonot only onecan define it, but should do so. In his book Al-Isharatva Al-Tanbihāt, he has provided a precise definition of pain,according to whichpain is the perception of what is perceived as a pest and evil qua pest and evil. Nasir al-Din Tusi, in his commentary on the book, has given a detailed analysis of this definition. In spite of its precision, it seems that Ibn Sina's definition suffers from someambiguities, for exampleit is not clear whether the pain is merely a subjective matter or has objective features. Moreover, the lack of clarity in the distinction between acquirable (mediated) knowledge and direct (unmediated) knowledge in Sheikh’s philosophy, has made it difficult to express the being directness feature of pain as a kind of perception, in this definition.

Keywords

• definition of pain
• perception
• direct knowledge
• Avicenna