Avicenna claims to have a coherent, general program for his philosophical enterprise. He says that he has concealed it. By his own admission, he has not finished the project in what he has left to us: for example, details of the hypothetical syllogistic remain to be worked out; the moral and political parts appear to have been largely undone (Avicenna, al-Qiyās (ed: Zāyid S). al-Hayʾa al-ʿāmma li-šuʾūn al-maṭābiʿ al-amīriyya, Cairo, p 403, 3, 1964). Avicenna cross-references his discussions in different areas of philosophy at times, but leaves it unclear how to connect them up. He says that he has done so deliberately, so that only the worthy few will proceed so as to make the connections. Avicenna follows in the tradition of the Second Teacher, al-Fārābī, who sees the course of a universal philosophy moving from culture to culture. Yet more than following Fārābī, Avicenna follows the First Teacher, Aristotle, not in a Neo-Platonist way, but in the more orthodox Aristotelian way of those like Alexander of Aphrodisias and John Philoponus. To focus this general discussion of Avicenna’s philosophical system, I shall concentrate on his views about determinism and contingency. He insists upon the distinction between necessary and contingent being, but also upon everything following necessarily from the activity of the divine Necessary Being. It puzzles many how Avicenna can then leave any room for contingency. I shall show that, if we follow out his metaphysical hints and pointers to his logical theory, we can see the outlines of his general philosophical program.