The Improvement of Human Reason

Ibn Tufail (c. 1105-1185) (full name Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Abd al-Malik ibn Muhammad ibn Tufail al-Qaisi al-Andalusi; Latinized form: Abubacer Aben Tofail; Anglicized form: Abubekar or Abu Jaafar Ebn Tophail) was an Andalusian-Arab Muslim polymath: an Arabic writer, novelist, Islamic philosopher, Islamic theologian, physician, vizier, and court official. As a philosopher and novelist, he is most famous for writing the first philosophical novel, Hai Ebn Yokdhan, also known as Philosophus Autodidactus in the Western world. As a physician, he was an early supporter of dissection and autopsy. Hai Ebn Yokdhan is 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.