Avicenna
Avicenna was born in Afshana, a village near Bukhara (in present-day Uzbekistan), the capital of the Samanids, a Persian dynasty in Central Asia and Greater Khorasan. His mother, named Sitāra, was from Bukhara; his father, Abdullāh, was a respected Ismaili scholar from Balkh, an important town of the Samanid Empire, in what is today Balkh Province, Afghanistan. His father worked in the government of Samanid in the village Kharmasain, a Sunni regional power. After five years, his younger brother, Mahmoud, was born. Avicenna first began to learn the Quran and literature in such a way that when he was ten years old he had essentially learned all of them.
Principle of individuation
The late Roman philosopher Boethius (480–524) touches upon the subject in his Isagoge, where he says that things which are individuals and are discrete only in number, differ only by accidental properties. The Persian philosopher Avicenna (980-1037) first introduced a term which was later translated into Latin as "signatum", meaning 'determinate individual'. Avicenna argues that a nature is not of itself individual, the relation between it and individuality is an accidental one, and we must look for its source not in its essence, but among accidental attributes such as quantity, quality, space and time. However, he did not work out any definite or detailed theory of individuation. His successor Averroes (1126–1198) argued that matter is numerically one, since it is undetermined in itself and has no definite boundaries. However, since it is divisible, this must be caused by quantity, and matter must therefore have the potential for determination in three dimensions (in the same way a rough and unhewn lump of marble has the potential to be sculpted into a statue).