In this article, Ibn Sīnā's views on sensation, abstraction, and sensible qualities are interpreted against the backdrop of two contemporary debates. The first of these contexts is the claim in the works of Wallace Matson and Peter King. The second context is the debate about qualia and their status in contemporary philosophy of mind.

The first context is the claim made in the two articles by Matson and King that in antiquity and the Middle Ages, sensation and perception were associated with the body and thinking with the rational soul, whereas Descartes attributed sensation, along with thinking and rational judgement, to the mind rather than the body. According to them, a mind-body problem cannot be mentioned in the pre-Descartes period since it is difficult and almost impossible to translate a sentence such as ‘what is the relation of sensation to the mind (or soul)?’ into Greek and Latin. However, the claim that the processes of sensation and perception are realised by bodily processes completely independent of the mind in antiquity and the Middle Ages becomes a controversial claim, at least in the context of Plato, Plotinus and their followers. The fact that philosophers such as Ibn Sīnā, whose philosophy is dominated by Platonic and Plotinian as well as Aristotelian aspects, address the problem of sensation and perception through the distinctions and relations between the sensory faculties and the intellect, constitute strong and compulsory exceptions to these claims. Ibn Sīnā sets a counter-example to this claim with his views on sensation, abstraction, and sensible qualities. On the one hand, Ibn Sīnā distinguished between sensation and perception, and on the other hand, he discussed the problem of the relationship between the soul's sensory and bodily faculties and its cognitive or mental faculties by making sensation the first stage of the process of abstraction that leads to rational perception. In this sense, although sensation begins at the corporeal and sensory level, due to the dualist character of the Ibn Sīnā’s theory of the soul, it is seen as an experience that does not remain at the corporeal level and is related to the immaterial and incorporeal rational soul by taking the name of perception in the process of abstraction. 

Secondly, in contemporary discussions on the types of mental phenomena, sensations or sensory qualities such as pain, itching, tickling, having successive images, seeing something round and green, smelling something, or nausea are considered as a type of mental phenomena. The term qualia is used for these sensory, qualitative states or the sensory qualities experienced in such states, sometimes called ‘phenomenal’ or ‘qualitative states’ or sometimes ‘raw sensations’. There is an approach to qualia, which almost seems to be the most fundamental problem on which contemporary discussions of consciousness are based, which is referred to as qualia representationalism or externalism. According to this approach, qualia are essentially the representative contents of experiences, and the represented contents are the qualities of external objects that are directly sensed. For example, the qualia of colour in a visual experience is what our experience represents the colour of the object as an entity, and when the representation is true, the qualia is the actual colour of the object. This approach is also known as qualia externalism since it claims that qualia are qualities possessed by external objects if the representation is true or complete. In this way, qualia are placed somewhere in the world in a physicalist manner, making it possible to reject a conception of qualia in the sense of private introspective qualities of inner experiences. In this sense, our sensory experience of objects is transparent in the sense that we directly experience the qualities of the sensed objects.

Ibn Sīnā criticises two positions in the debate about whether sensible qualities have a reality in bodies. The first one, which claims that sensible qualities have no reality in bodies and is the subject of Ibn Sīnā's criticism, is the view that sensible qualities are shapes, which Ibn Sīnā attributes to Democritus and some philosophers. The second is the view that sensible qualities are impressions. Ibn Sīnā's criticisms of these two positions and his view that sensible qualities are some properties that are present in objects and cause sensations specific to each different sense reveals that he adopted an attitude similar to the approach that is expressed today as qualia representationalism or externalism.