On the Topic of "Improving Human Reason"...

The given prompt was whether Hayy Ibn Yaqzan improves the reason of the reader or is a history of the improvement of human reason, as the name roughly translates to "The Improvement of Human Reason." 

Through a modern lens, it's definite that the story correlates with the latter definition moreso than the former, as it catalogues development of scientific discoveries and methodologies at an extremely accelerated rate through Yaqzan. For people in developed countries in the modern era, the information and methods shown by Yaqzan are all known, barring the philosophical/religious components, which are "affirmed" by Yaqzan using the aforementioned methodologies. 

With that out of the way, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan  was written close to a millennium ago, and the scientific methodologies that are common knowledge now were not so obvious all those years prior. That  being said, and I do believe I mentioned this in a blog post last week, but Yaqzan's scientific methodology is deductive in nature, which has been the basis for science since science was a concept. Would the scientific information given in Hayy Ibn Yaqzan be new to the general populace reading it? Possibly, but the question is whether reason was improved, not knowledge. 

Concerning "reason" as defined by the philosophy of Yaqzan, and I may be misremembering, but Yaqzan's beliefs are similar to Buddhism, not in the presence of a Necessarily Existent, but in the humility and dissociation from worldly desires that was the basis of Yaqzan's path to corporeality. It's certainly not avant-garde, and, like most philosophy, it is not exactly packaged in an easily digestible manner. To be blunt, you'd think that philosophy texts are written explicitly not to inform people of their contents, and I say that because most philosophy texts, at least that I've read, are musings that are loosely tied together, the original shower thoughts given textual form. I'm not downplaying philosophy, but it is probably the least clear literary genre overall. All that is to say that I don't believe that Hayy Ibn Yaqzan improved the reason of the reader even in the time period it was written.