La guérison de l’âme : architecture et ambition du Kitāb al-Shifāʾ d’Avicenne

One thousand years after the publication of the Book of Healing (Kitâb al-Shifâ’) by Avicenna (Ibn Sînâ, 980-1037), Falsafa - the Arabic philosophy meetings at the IMA - is dedicating its 2026-2027 season to this monumental work. Logic, physics, mathematics, metaphysics: meeting after meeting, we will explore the various aspects of one of the most ambitious and influential texts in intellectual history, within Islam and beyond.

In 2027 marks the millennium of the Kitāb al-Shifāʾ, the work through which Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) assigned to what is often considered a philosophical encyclopedia the task of setting out philosophical knowledge in its entirety.

Its very title - The Book of Healing - speaks to the ambition of this enterprise: to deliver the soul from ignorance.

By tracing the architecture of the work - logic, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics -, we will show how the order of its parts reflects a unitary and ambitious philosophical design, where the path of knowledge coincides with that of intellectual salvation.

The aim will be to question not only what the Shifāʾ says, but the way its structure embodies the Avicennian ideal of a complete and ordered science which, culminating in metaphysics, is capable of leading the human soul, and thus the individual, to its perfection. With: Olga L.

Lizzini, professor at Aix-Marseille University, where she teaches Islamic studies and the intellectual tradition of Islam.

A specialist in Avicenna, and more generally in Arab-Islamic and medieval philosophy, her research focuses in particular on Arabic-language metaphysics, its Greek sources, and its receptions in the Jewish and Latin worlds.

Among her most recent publications: Traité sur l’unité divine de Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī, introduced, translated from Arabic and commented, Les Belles Lettres, 2025; Avicenne, Vrin, 2026; La philosophie arabe à l’étude. -B. Brenet, Vrin, 2019.

The Falsafa meetings are coordinated and hosted by Jean-Baptiste Brenet, medievalist, professor of Arabic philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, holder of the agrégation in philosophy and PhD from the École Pratique des Hautes Études (section of religious sciences).

These lectures are recorded and published as podcasts, available on streaming platforms and on the IMA website.