{"podcast":{"title":"sleepyphilosophyradio","slug":"sleepyphilosophyradio-7603911","podcast_index_feed_id":7603911,"rss_url":"https://anchor.fm/s/10aead048/podcast/rss","website_url":"https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/","image_url":"https://d3t3ozftmdmh3i.cloudfront.net/staging/podcast_uploaded_nologo/44681282/44681282-1777026987033-e668d2591b5ee.jpg","author":"slphilosophy","episode_count":54,"summary":"Long-form philosophy content for late-night listening and deep focus. We cover the big thinkers - from the Stoics and Aristotle to Camus, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky - explained in a calm, steady voice that keeps things interesting without being overstimulating. If you want something substantial to think about during quiet hours, or just appreciate philosophy delivered at a relaxed pace, this is for you.","last_synced_at":"2026-07-19T20:17:58.150479+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/sleepyphilosophyradio-7603911"},"episode":{"title":"Avicenna | The Most Prolific Polymath of the Islamic Golden Age","slug":"avicenna-the-most-prolific-polymath-of-the-islamic-golden-age","published_at":"2026-05-07T16:08:39+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/sleepyphilosophyradio-7603911/avicenna-the-most-prolific-polymath-of-the-islamic-golden-age","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/sleepyphilosophyradio-7603911","url":"https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sleepyphilo/episodes/Avicenna--The-Most-Prolific-Polymath-of-the-Islamic-Golden-Age-e3i3tn1","audio_url":"https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO4863155372.mp3","summary":"Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/vote How did a physician writing by lamplight in a mountain fortress come to shape five centuries of world philosophy? The philosopher who called himself Avicenna was born in nine hundred and eighty near Bukhara, memorized the Quran at ten, read Aristotle's Metaphysics forty times, and then built a philosophical system so comprehensive that it became, in two separate civilizations, the foundation on which later thought was constructed. This episode traces his life from the Samanid libraries of his childhood through the courts and prisons of his middle years to the final synthesis he achieved in Isfahan. We work through his great philosophical encyclopedia, his proof that a necessary being must exist, his famous thought experiment about a soul floating in empty space with no sensory contact of any kind, his account of the inner faculties of the mind, his theory of how prophetic knowledge works, and the three allegorical works that say what the philosophy cannot quite say in argument. We follow his ideas into the Latin West, where Thomas Aquinas read and transformed them, and through the Islamic tradition, where Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra built new philosophies on his foundations. One of the great minds of any civilization, examined at full length. Please listen only in safe, restful contexts. (0:00:00) The Life of a Wandering Mind (0:15:52) The Inheritance (0:25:13) The Book of Healing (0:33:10) The New Logic (0:40:44) Nature and Causation (0:48:07) Essence and Existence (0:55:20) The Necessary Existent (1:02:26) The Floating Man (1:09:17) The Faculties of the Soul (1:16:59) Intellect and Illumination (1:23:47) The Book of Salvation (1:29:31) The Canon of Medicine (1:36:44) Medicine as Philosophy (1:43:26) C…","meta_description":"Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/vote How did a physician writing by lamplight in a mountain fortress come to shape five cen…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":10517,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/sleepyphilosophyradio-7603911/episodes/avicenna-the-most-prolific-polymath-of-the-islamic-golden-age/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/sleepyphilosophyradio-7603911/avicenna-the-most-prolific-polymath-of-the-islamic-golden-age.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}