Das Transzendentale Bei Ibn Sina

Generations of scholars, attempting to grapple with Aristotelian metaphysics and his notion of first philosophy as the study of being qua being, had to deal with the seeming confusion in the Metaphysics concerning its subject matter and purpose. Was the Metaphysics a work about the abstract notion of being, was it a primary science that determined the subject matter of all the other branches of knowledge, was it another name for theology (or perhaps more specifically what the post-Heideggerian tradition calls onto-theology), or was it somewhat a study of ultimate causes? At the heart of the problem was the very notion of metaphysics and indeed of being itself. This question and problematic animated the young Ibn Sina and as he famously noted in his autobiography, he read and reread the text and failed to grasp its purpose until serendipity intervened and he chanced upon a copy of al-Farabi’s short work explaining the Metaphysics. It is this Avicennan turn, and the wider question of metaphysics as first philosophy, as a transcendental science whose subject matter itself ought to be transcendental that accounts for the research focus of Koutzarova’s published dissertation that deservedly won one of the Iranian Book Agency’s Book of the Year award in 2011. Central to the thesis is the insight that making sense of the metaphysics is a focal step in the critical systematisation of Aristotelian science and the very possibility of science. Metaphysics as science is only possible if it is transcendental and has a transcendental subject.