Of all the philosophers in the West, perhaps the best known by name and less familiar for the actual content of his ideas is the medieval Muslim philosopher, physician, princely minister and naturalist Abu Ali Ibn Sina, known since the days of the scholastics as Avicenna. In this lucidly written and witty book, L. E. Goodman a philosopher long known for his studies of Arabic thought presents a factual, pithy, and engaging account of Avicenna's philosophy.
Setting the thinker in the context of his often turbulent times and tracing the roots and influences of Avicenna's ideas, Goodman offers a factual and credible philosophical portrait of one of the world's greatest metaphysicians. The book details Avicenna's account of being as a synthesis between the seemingly irreconcilable extremes of Aristotelian eternalism and the creationism of monotheistic scripture. It examines Avicenna's distinctive theory of knowledge, his ideas on immortality and individuality, including the famous Floating Man argument, his contributions to logic, and his probing thoughts on rhetoric and poetics.
Drawing from the very latest scholarship, "Avicenna" is more than a philosophical appreciation. L. E. Goodman considers the abiding value of Avicenna's contributions, assaying his thought against the responses of his contemporaries and successors but also against our current philosophical understanding. It will have wide appeal among all Arabists and Islamicists, and among students and scholars of philosophy.

What is fair? How and when can punishment be legitimate? Is there recompense for human suffering? How can we understand ideas about immortality or an afterlife in the context of critical thinking on the human condition? In this book L. E. Goodman presents the first general theory of justice in this century to make systematic use of the Jewish sources and to bring them into a philosophical dialogue with the leading ethical and political texts of the Western tradition. Goodman takes an ontological approach to questions of natural and human justice, developing a theory of community and of nonvindictive yet retributive punishment that is grounded in careful analysis of various Jewish sources-biblical, rabbinic, and philosophical, His exegesis of these sources allow Plato, Kant, and Rawls to join in a discourse with Spinoza and medieval rationalists, such as Saasidah and Maimonides, who speak in a very different idiom but address many of the same themes. Drawing on sources old and new, Jewish and non-Jewish, Goodman offers fresh perspectives on important moral and theological issues that will be of interest to both Jewish and secular philosophers.

Questions asked by Greek philosophy and science - how do we come to be? How do we grow? When are we recognizably human? - are addressed with new intensity today. Modern embryology has changed the methods of enquiry and given new knowledge. Public interest and concern are high because medical applications of new knowledge offer benefits and yet awaken ancestral fears. The law and politics are called upon to secure the benefits without realizing the fears. Philosophers and theologians are involved once again. In this volume some of the world's authorities on the subject trace the tradition of enquiry over two and a half thousand years. The answers given in related cultures - Greek, Latin, Jewish, Arabian, Islamic, Christian - reflected the purposes to be served at different times, in medical practice, penitential discipline, canon law, common law, human feeling. But the terms in which the questions were discussed were those set down by the Greeks and transmitted through the Arabic authors to medieval Europe.

In God of Abraham, Lenn Goodman expands on his critically acclaimed Monotheism (1981), rejecting and dichotomy between the God of Abraham and the God of the philosophers. He argues that in fact the two are one, and shows how human values can illuminate our idea of God and how the monotheistic idea of God in turn illuminates our moral, social, cultural, aesthetic, and even ritual understanding. Goodman traces the symbiosis of ideas about God and human values to its conceptual roots in the Biblical account of the binding of Isaac, and Abraham's momentous decision to spare Isaac's life and reject the pagan linkage of violence with the holy. Goodman argues that when Abraham separates horror from the holy he purges evil from the idea of the divine and forges the synthesis that will make possible the revelation of the Torah. Thus it becomes possible to integrate human values and human life in emulation of God's unity and goodness. Throughout this study Goodman draws on traditional, philosophical, historical, and anthropological materials, and particularly on a wealth of Jewish sources. He demonstrates how an adequate understanding of the interplay of values with monotheism dissolves many of the longstanding problems of natural theology and ethics and guides us toward a genuinely humanistic moral and social philosophy.