Metaphysics

Book of Directives and Remarks

♡+

Avicenna

c. 1020

The Book of Directives and Remarks — Kitab al-Isharat wa-l-Tanbihat — is considered Avicenna's most mature and personal philosophical work, written in the last decade of his life. Unlike the encyclopaedic Book of Healing, it is compressed and aphoristic in style, offering a progressive curriculum in logic and philosophy that culminates in the mystical dimensions of Avicenna's thought. The final sections — on stages of the mystic path — represent Avicenna's synthesis of Peripatetic philosophy and Sufi spiritual psychology: the gnostic ('arif) who ascends through love and purification to direct intuitive knowledge of the divine. The work was extensively commented on by later Islamic philosophers, most notably Fakhr al-Din al-Razi and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, and shaped the entire subsequent tradition of Islamic philosophy.