Avicenna’s Self-Knowledge and Epistemic Agency: A Comparative Study of Self-Knowledge in Avicenna’s Philosophy and Contemporary Agentialist Theories

**Abstract**



This study aims to reexamine the relationship between Avicenna’s theory of self-awareness (al-shiʿūr bi-al-dhāt) and the contemporary analytic philosophical theory of “epistemic agency,” exploring the possibility of reconciling the two approaches. Agentialist accounts (represented by Burge, Moran, Bilgrami, Boyle, McGeer, and Coliva) explain self-knowledge not through introspection or inference, but through the exercise of agency, epistemic responsibility, and practical commitment toward one’s mental states. In contrast, in his major works (al-Shifāʾ, al-Ishārāt, al-Taʿlīqāt, and al-Mubāḥathāt), Avicenna considers self-awareness as an immediate, presentational consciousness of the soul to itself, realized prior to any attention to the external world. The main question is whether agential self-consciousness can explain the foundational layer of Avicennian self-awareness. Using a descriptive-analytical method with a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach, the article compares the two paradigms through six ontological and epistemological criteria: foundational presence, immediacy, durational presence, identity of subject and object, independence from embodiment, and the existential connection between self-awareness and the soul. The findings show that agential theory emphasizes epistemic responsibility and practical commitment, explaining self-knowledge as the result of agency through rational norms (Burge, Moran) or self-fulfilling predictions (McGeer). Avicenna, however, insists that self-awareness is realized pre-reflectively and immediately, even prior to any commitment or agential responsibility. The “Flying Man” thought experiment demonstrates that when all possibilities of agency and practical commitment are removed, self-awareness remains—something agential theory fails to explain. The article’s value lies in its three-layered model of “presence, agency, interpretation.” Avicennian presentational self-consciousness is the condition for the possibility of agential self-awareness (in both its Kantian and empirical versions), not vice versa. This model shows the two theories are not rivals but complements, each explaining a different level of self-consciousness.