Ibn Tufayl

Their big question

How much could you work out with no one to teach you?

Ibn Tufayl did something that philosophers almost never do: instead of arguing that reason alone can find out how things work, he wrote a story in which someone does it.

A child, Hayy, is alone on an island. He is raised by a deer. He has no language, no books, no teacher, no religion. Over seven-year stretches he notices fire, observes animals, dissects, compares, generalises; he works out that the world has a structure, that he has a self, and eventually that there must be something on which all of this depends. He gets there by looking and thinking, with nobody telling him anything.

Written as a philosophy book, that claim sounds like a boast. Written as a story, it is a test you can apply: at each stage, ask whether a person really could have got from the previous step to this one with nothing but observation and reasoning. Sometimes the answer is convincingly yes and sometimes the story is doing work the argument should be doing — which is itself instructive about how much of what we know depends on other people.

The point that survives is a question about education. Everything you believe came either from your own looking or from being told. Ibn Tufayl suggests that the gap between those two is far larger than we admit, and that most of what feels like knowledge is really testimony — reliable, useful, and not the same thing.

“A child alone on an island, with no teacher, might come to understand the world by looking at it.”

The premise of his book Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, a thought experiment written as a story rather than as an argument.

Three things worth knowing

• His book tells of Hayy, raised by a deer on a deserted island, who grows up observing, testing and reasoning his way to an understanding of nature.
• It was translated into Latin, then English, and read in Europe as an argument that reason alone could reach deep truths.
• He served as a court official and a physician, and is said to have introduced the works of Ibn Rushd to the ruler he served.

Try it — think like Ibn

Pick something you know because an adult told you. Now imagine you had never been told. How much of it could you get by watching? Write down the steps you would need.

We have no portrait of Ibn that is both authentic and free to use, so this page uses a drawn mark rather than an invented face. About the pictures.