The Floating Man and the Methodological Grounds for Avicenna’s Immaterial Soul

While Avicenna is traditionally perceived as advocating for the human soul’s immaterial nature, his “floating man” thought experiment has been seen to offer an apparently circular argument. This paper investigates Avicenna’s methodology in order to contextualize this thought experiment and determine its meaning within Avicenna’s philosophical system. The paper examines how Avicenna’s conception of thought experiments and the nature of the soul were influenced by his reception of Aristotle through the lens of Neoplatonist commentators. The paper then proposes that this Neoplatonist reception of Aristotle led Avicenna to conceive of the material and immaterial as logically identical and sharing the attribute of existence. This paper finds that Avicenna did not conceive of his “floating man” argument as circular. Rather, Avicenna intended to show that an empirical test of the immateriality of the soul was possible, providing evidence for his view that the soul could come into contact with another such immaterial existent: God.