  Nonetheless, Ibn Kammuna parted ways with Avicenna, and with the mainstream philosophical tradition, on the key issue of the soul’s pre-existence. Avicenna denied that the soul existed before the human was born, but Ibn Kammuna held that the soul’s pre-existence is intimately connected with its immateriality, and a doctrine that must be accepted in order to prove the soul’s survival after the death of the body. And, indeed, as Lukas Muehlethaler has shown in a series of publications, Ibn Kammuna labored to shore up the demonstrations of psychological doctrines throughout. In his commentary to Avicenna’s Ishārāt (“Pointers”), where the “Flying Man” thought experiment is displayed, Ibn Kammuna puts Avicenna’s verbal argument into syllogistic form. (Whether the syllogism is productive, and, in general, just how well Ibn Kammuna has succeeded in answering the modern critics of Avicenna, remain open questions; see Muhlethaler 2009 for full discussion). Ibn Kammuna boldly claims to have formulated the first demonstrative proof for the soul’s eternity a parte ante. Indeed, for Ibn Kammuna the soul is really an intellect (‘aql) that is called “soul” when it is associated with a particular body (Muehlethaler 2012).