Ibn Ṭufayl (full Arabic name: أبو بكر محمد بن عبد الملك بن محمد بن طفيل القيسي الأندلسي ʾAbū Bakr Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Malik bin Muḥammad bin Ṭufayl al-Qaysiyy al-ʾAndalusiyy; Latinized form: Abubacer Aben Tofail; Anglicized form: Abubekar or Abu Jaafar Ebn Tophail; c. 1105 – 1185) was an Arab Andalusian Muslim polymath: a writer, Islamic philosopher, Islamic theologian, physician, astronomer, and vizier.
[6] He also served as a secretary for the ruler of Granada, and later as vizier and physician for Abu Yaqub Yusuf, the Almohad caliph,[4] to whom he recommended Ibn Rushd (Averroës) as his own future successor in 1169.
These people include Nur al-Din al-Bitruji, Abu ‘Abdallah Muhammad b. al-Abbar, Abd al-Wahid al-Marrakushi, Ahmed Mohammed al-Maqqari, and Ibn al-Khatib.
Eventually, Ibn Tufayl moved to the service of Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf, who was a prince at the time and later became the second Almohad caliph.
'Alive, son of Awake'), also known as Philosophus Autodidactus in Latin, a philosophical romance and allegorical novel inspired by Avicennism and Sufism, and which tells the story of an autodidactic feral child, raised by a gazelle and living alone on a desert island, who, without contact with other human beings, discovers ultimate truth through a systematic process of reasoned inquiry.
[24] "Locke's Essay went on to become one of the principal sources of empiricism in modern Western philosophy, and influenced many enlightenment philosophers, such as David Hume and George Berkeley.
[26][27] Other European writers influenced by Philosophus Autodidactus included Gottfried Leibniz,[15] Melchisédech Thévenot, John Wallis, Christiaan Huygens,[28] George Keith, Robert Barclay, the Quakers,[29] Samuel Hartlib,[30] and Voltaire.
[32] "If you want a comparison that will make you clearly grasp the difference between the perception, such as it is understood by that sect [the Sufis] and the perception as others understand it, imagine a person born blind, endowed however with a happy natural temperament, with a lively and firm intelligence, a sure memory, a straight sprite, who grew up from the time he was an infant in a city where he never stopped learning, by means of the senses he did dispose of, to know the inhabitants individually, the numerous species of beings, living as well as non-living, there, the streets and sidestreets, the houses, the steps, in such a manner as to be able to cross the city without a guide, and to recognize immediately those he met; the colors alone would not be known to him except by the names they bore, and by certain definitions that designated them.
Suppose that he had arrived at this point and suddenly, his eyes were opened, he recovered his view, and he crosses the entire city, making a tour of it.