Ibn Sina--Al-Biruni Correspondence‪.‬

This fifth installment of the correspondence between Ibn Sina and al-Biruni consists of al-Biruni's objections to the answers he received from Ibn Sina. It seems that al-Biruni was dissatisfied by Ibn Sina's responses to all but two of the first set of ten questions and all but one of the last eight questions he had sent to Ibn Sina. Thus, he wrote back about fifteen responses (leaving out the response of Ibn Sina to his sixth and eighth questions from the first set of ten, and the last question from the second set of eight). This section shows that al-Biruni's dissatisfaction with the answers he had received was ultimately based on his own independent views about the nature of the physical world which were in stark contrast to the views held by the Paripatetics who based their views on Aristotelian physics. These short and categorical responses to Ibn Sina's answers not only open a window to understand al-Biruni's views on the nature of the physical cosmos, they also reflect the vigor and intensity of the Islamic scientific tradition which was at that time appropriating Greek science through a transformative process. Keywords: Ibn Sina-al-Biruni correspondence; Peripatetic natural philosophy; Islamic scientific tradition; history of physics; criticism of Aristotelian physics; natural elements; schools of thought in Islamic scientific tradition.