Genetic Interpretation of Some Medico-Philosophical Theories of Ibn Sina 3-The theory of temperament.

Abstract

Abstract This study is the third in a series of studies aimed at explaining and interpreting some of Ibn Sina's medico-philosophical implications from a genetic perspective. In the first study, we explained the genetic interpretation of the theory of “the soul creation”; while in the second study we discussed the theory of “mixtures and essence”. In the current study, we emphasize the proper linguistic and scientific meaning of the term “temperament”, which is the “genotype” of an organ or some organs, while the temperament of the whole body is the individual genome, which is the “second perfection” of Ibn Sina. This new definition that we propose was derived from two sources. The first is a linguistic source originating from the interpretation of the word “temperament” in all its derivatives in Arabic (Ibn Manzoor’s Dictionary of Lesan al- Arab). The second source is the analysis of the scientific context of Ibn Sina and comparing it to the linguistic analogy term. In his manuscript “Treatise on Cardiac Drugs” Ibn Sina stated, “ each organ has a special structure/qualitative mixture, (temperament in English translation) which is the result of specific mixtures in the essence, but this special structure/qualitative mixture develops because of the number of mixtures and the form of their structure’ in our belief, the terms “specific mixtures” and “special structure” can be adopted as sibling terms, as the difference between them can be explained within the concept of causation (the cause “specific mixtures/genes” and effect “special structure/genotype”) but not in the meaning. Thanks to the Arabic language in which Ibn Sina formulated most of his encyclopedic works, we were able to realize some of the hidden meanings in Ibn Sina’s theories, the most important of which is the meaning of the temperament, as well as the meaning and the origin of the word DNA, which first appeared in the heritage culture of the Arabic language and is called the “two powers” or “al-merrataine” in Arabic pronunciation, which means “A long, fine, well coiled strands” and other synonyms, as will be evident in the folds of the current study.