Avicenna, Arabic Ibn Sīnā, (born 980, near Bukhara, Iran [now in Uzbekistan]—died 1037, Hamadan, Iran), Muslim physician, the…

TEXT II

        Avicenna, Arabic Ibn Sīnā, (born 980, near Bukhara, Iran [now in Uzbekistan]—died 1037, Hamadan, Iran), Muslim physician, the most famous and influential of the philosopher-scientists of the medieval Islamic world. He was particularly noted for his contributions in the fields of Aristotelian philosophy and medicine. He composed the Book of the Cure, a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopaedia, and The Canon of Medicine, which is among the most famous books in the history of medicine.

        Avicenna did not burst upon an empty Islamic intellectual stage. It is believed that Muslim writer Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, or possibly his son, had introduced Aristotelian logic to the Islamic world more than two centuries before Avicenna. Al-Kindī, the first Islamic Peripatetic (Aristotelian) philosopher, and Turkish polymath al-Fārābī, from whose book Avicenna would learn Aristotle’s metaphysics, preceded him. Of these luminaries, however, Avicenna remains by far the greatest. 

Adapted from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Avicenna

Here is one of his sayings:

The pronoun in preceded him (2nd paragraph) refers to