Concept

Hayy ibn Yaqdhan

Overview

Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān or Yaqdhan (Arabic: حي بن يقظان, lit. 'Alive son of Awake'; also transliterated as Hai eb'n Yockdan) is an Arabic philosophical novel and an allegorical tale written by Ibn Tufail (c. 1105 – 1185) in the early 12th century in al-Andalus. Names by which the book is also known include the Latin: Philosophus Autodidactus ('The Self-Taught Philosopher'); and English: The Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan. Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān was named after an earlier Arabic philosophical romance of the same name, written by Avicenna during his imprisonment in the early 11th century, even though both tales had different stories.

It is viewed as one of the most creative products of Islam's classical intellectual legacy. The novel greatly inspired Islamic philosophy as well as major Enlightenment thinkers. It is the third most translated text from Arabic, after the Quran and the One Thousand and One Nights.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

1. I do not wonder if in reality the Thomists and the Jesuits, and even the Molinists and the Jansenists, agree together on this matter more than is supposed. A Thomist and even a wise Jansenist will content himself with certain determination, without going on to necessity: and if someone goes so far, the error mayhap will lie only in the word. A wise Molinist will be content with an indifference opposed to necessity…

   Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil

   States what Hayy ibn Yaqdhan is; the author is tied to Hayy ibn Yaqdhan in the knowledge graph.

   Read the chapter · Open in the reader

2. A great difference inclines us to produce a distance. The ideas of distance and difference are, therefore, connected together. Connected ideas are readily taken for each other; and this is in general the source of the metaphor, as we shall have occasion to observe afterwards. SECT.

   David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

   States what Hayy ibn Yaqdhan is; the author is tied to Hayy ibn Yaqdhan in the knowledge graph.

   Read the chapter · Open in the reader

3. 116. There is not a greater number of philosophical reasonings, displayed upon any subject, than those, which prove the existence of a Deity, and refute the fallacies of _Atheists_; and yet the most religious philosophers still dispute whether any man can be so blinded as to be a speculative atheist. How shall we reconcile these contradictions? The knights-errant, who wandered about to clear the world of dragons and…

   David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

   The author is tied to Hayy ibn Yaqdhan in the knowledge graph.

   Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Philosophers who discussed Hayy ibn Yaqdhan

• Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
• John Locke
• Averroes
• Moses of Narbonne

Related ideas

• Empiricism
• The Guide for the Perplexed
• Ibn Tufayl
• Avicenna
• George Berkeley
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Western philosophy
• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
• Isaac Newton
• Immanuel Kant
• Al-Ghazali
• John Locke
• Islamic philosophy
• Karl Marx
• Early Islamic philosophy
• Al-Farabi
• Materialism
• Maimonides
• Astrology
• Neoplatonism
• Sense
• Perception
• Revelation
• Sufism

Place in the tradition

Part of Empiricism.

Explore Hayy ibn Yaqdhan in the interactive graph →