No argument from the Arabic philosophical tradition has received more scholarly attention than Avicenna's ‘flying man’ thought experiment, in which a human is created out of thin air and is able to grasp his existence without grasping that he has a body. This paper offers a new interpretation of the version of this thought experiment found at the end of the first chapter of Avicenna's treatment of soul in theHealing. We argue that it needs to be understood in light of an epistemological theory set out elsewhere by Avicenna, which allows that all the constitutive properties of an essence will be clear to someone who understands and considers that essence. On our reading, this theory is put to work in the ‘flying man’: because the flying man would grasp that his own essence has existence without grasping that he has a body, connection to body cannot be constitutive of the essence.

Al-Kindī was influenced by two Greek traditions in his attempts to explain vision, light and color. Most obviously, his works on optics are indebted to Euclid and, perhaps indirectly, to Ptolemy. But he also knew some works from the Aristotelian tradition that touch on the nature of color and vision. Al-Kindī explicitly rejects the Aristotelian account of vision in his De Aspectibus, and adopts a theory according to which we see by means of a visual ray emitted from the eye. But in the same work, al-Kindī draws on Philoponus’ commentary on Aristotle's De Anima. His borrowing from this commentary, via an Arabic paraphrase of the De Anima, was crucial in the development of al-Kindī's new ‘ ‘ punctiform analysis of light.” Conversely, two broadly Aristotelian works by al-Kindī, which explain the reason things are colored, engage with problems about color dealt with in the Aristotelian tradition ( e.g. by Alexander of Aphrodisias ). But here the Aristotelian theory, and in particular the Aristotelian notion of the transparent, is abandoned in order to accommodate the visual ray theory expounded in De Aspectibus.

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