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Epistemology

Avicenna 's most influential theory in epistemology is his theory of knowledge, in which he developed the concept of tabula rasa. He argued that the "human intellect at birth is rather like a tabula rasa, a pure potentiality that is actualized through education and comes to know" and that knowledge is attained through " empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts" which is developed through a " syllogistic method of reasoning; observations lead to prepositional statements, which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts."

In the 12th century, Ibn Tufail further developed the concept of tabula rasa in his Arabic novel, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, in which he depicted the development of the mind of a feral child "from a tabula rasa to that of an adult, in complete isolation from society" on a desert island. The Latin translation of his work, entitled Philosophus Autodidactus, published by Edward Pococke the Younger in 1671, had an influence on John Locke 's formulation of tabula rasa in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.