Avicenna’s Theory of Intentionality

Upgrading his original Cambridge PhD dissertation into a fully-fledged debut monograph, Zhenyu Cai’s Avicenna’s Theory of Intentionality is a deceptively deep, rigorous and novel tour-de-force philosophical publication focusing on the complex topic of intentionality – the feature of mental states that enables representation or reference to external objects – through the writings of one of the greatest philosophers to have ever lived. An assistant professor at Peking University, Cai is the latest in a long line of academic scholars examining the outstanding thoughts of the towering and influential Persian Ibn Sīnā (370-428 AH/980-1037 CE), known in the West as Avicenna, often categorised along with the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger as being one of the outstanding thinkers of their respective historical era and for having an indelible impact on human intellectual history. Avicenna’s philosophical takes on perennially hot topics pertaining to metaphysics and psychology continue to mind-boggle readers in the present nearly a millennium after his demise.