“We say: the soul is the first perfection of a natural body possessed of organs, which has life potentially.”

What does it mean?

The mainstream reading is an Aristotelian definition placed at the start of his psychology. The soul is not a ghost added to a corpse. It is the first perfection, the actuality, of a natural body that has organs and is capable of life. A competing reading hears a religious soul that survives without any body, which this sentence does not assert. The floating man, later in the same book and already in this library, is the passage used for a stronger claim about self-awareness without sensation. This sentence is the definition the later argument has to fit. It stands in Book I, chapter 1, of the Psychology. Perfection translates a technical term, which is why translations vary and the badge says translation. Organs matter. He is not defining the soul of a stone. He is defining what it is for an organic body to be alive.

Did Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) really say this?

The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. The definition of the soul at the start of the Psychology of the Healing, modelled on Aristotle's De Anima II.1. English translations of the Arabic differ in the word 'perfection' (Aristotle's entelechy). This wording follows that tradition. It is not the floating-man passage, which comes later in the same work.

Where it comes from

The Book of Healing, Psychology (Kitāb al-Nafs), Book I, chapter 1, the definition following Aristotle

Approximate date: c. 1020s.

How to use it

A conversation that treats the soul as a second object hiding in the body has left this definition. He identifies the soul with the body's being alive in a certain way. Whether he also thinks a part of the soul can exist apart is a further argument. Quoting the definition as if it were already the floating man skips the chapter where he says what the word means.

A mindset reading

Technical definitions are easy to replace with the picture you arrived with. The habit is to keep 'first perfection of an organic body' in the sentence. If that phrase goes, the definition has gone, and a different doctrine has taken its place.

Understand the philosophy

This is the opening definition in the Psychology of the Book of Healing, following Aristotle's account of the soul as the first actuality of an organic body. The key term is perfection, his word for that actuality. The floating man is a later thought experiment in the same work and is a separate card. The Canon is medicine. The necessary existent is metaphysics. The four cards are four different claims.

Related

• “One of us must imagine himself so as to be created all at once and perfect, but with his sight veiled so that he cannot see anything external, and floating in the air, so that he feels nothing. Would he affirm the existence of his self? He would not doubt the affirmation of his self.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “Medicine is the science by which we learn the various states of the human body, in health and when not in health, and the means by which health is likely to be lost and, when lost, is likely to be restored.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes.”

  Paraphrase or translation

Related bias. Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, remember, and accept what supports a view you already like, and to skim past what would hurt it. It is not a claim that every belief is stubborn. It is a pattern in how attention is spent.

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