DESIDERIO DI SAPERE, PIACERE DELL’INTELLETTO ED ELITARISMO: INTORNO ALL’ESCATOLOGIA DI AVICENNA

For Avicenna, happiness in the afterlife is twofold: on the one hand, it consists, as it does in this life, of the perception of bodily pleasure (this is also how revealed Law explains it); on the other, it is intellectual and involves the soul, in so far as the latter is separate from the body. In this respect, the pleasure of the soul – whose destiny is to become an intellectual world – is absolute. The bases of this doctrine are Avicenna’s intellectual psychology and his theory of knowledge, which in turn explains his philosophical elitism.