Abstract

Ibn Sīnā, one of the most influential philosopher-scientists who was known to the West by the Latinised name Avicenna, has introduced a major shift in the philosophy of mathematics. His conception of number is structured into 5 main conceptual developments: the recognition of mathematical objects as intentional entities and the acknowledgment that this amounts to provide an intentional notion of existence; the link between the intentional act of apprehending unity and the generation of numbers by means of a specific act of repetition made possible by memory; the identification of a specific intentional act that explains how the repetition operator can be performed by an epistemic agent; the development of a notion of aggregate that assumes an inductive operation for the generation of its elements and an underlying notion of equivalence relation; the claim that plurality and unity should be understood interdependently.