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  • “SUBJECT GENERALITY” AND DISTRIBUTION IN MEDIEVAL ARABIC SYLLOGISTIC

  • Khaled El-Rouayheb
  • Journal:
    Arabic Sciences and Philosophy / Volume 33 / Issue 2 / September 2023
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    09 August 2023, pp. 141-161
    Print publication:
    September 2023
    • Article
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  • A relatively well-known medieval Latin innovation is the doctrine of distributive supposition. This notion came to be used in syllogistic theory in the late medieval and early modern periods, as Latin logicians sought to establish general rules for syllogistic productivity across the various figures. It is much less well-known that some logicians in the medieval Arabic tradition also attempted to establish general rules for the syllogism, appealing to what they called “subject generality.” In the present article, I introduce this use of “subject generality” in some influential Arabic works on logic from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth, specifically Al-ǧumal by Afḍal al-Dīn al-Ḫūnaǧī (d. 1248) and Tahḏīb al-manṭiq by Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 1390) and some of their commentators. I also compare this concept of “subject generality” to the Latin concept of “distribution.”

  • 3 - Arabic Logic after Avicenna

  • from PART I - PERIODS AND TRADITIONS
  • Edited by Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands, Stephen Read, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic
    Published online:
    05 September 2016
    Print publication:
    12 September 2016, pp 67-93

  • Summary

    When the North African historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406) reflected on the development of logic, he distinguished – along with a number of other fourteenth-century observers – between “the early” and “the later” logicians (Rosenthal 1958, III, 143). The former included those who took their point of departure from the classical Organon, such as the philosophers al-Fārābī (d. 950), Avicenna (d. 1037) and Averroes (d. 1198). The first of “the later logicians”, according to Ibn Khaldūn, were the Persians Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210) and Afḍal al-Dīn al-Khūnajī (d. 1248). These disregarded the Categories entirely and gave short shrift to the “matter” of the syllogism: demonstration, dialectic, sophistical fallacies, rhetoric, and poetics. Instead, they focused almost exclusively on the five predicables, definition and description, propositions and their immediate implications (such as conversion, contraposition) and the formal syllogism. By Ibn Khaldūn's time, “the later logicians” had carried the day. “Logic” (manṭiq) had ceased to be a discipline in which one comments upon or paraphrases or summarizes the books of the Organon; it had become rather a field dealing with the acquisition of concepts (taṣawwurāt) through definition or description and the acquisition of assents (taṣdīqāt) through syllogism. Ibn Khaldūn himself lamented this development, but the resulting narrower view of the scope of manṭiq made it much closer to the contemporary understanding of “logic” than the earlier Peripatetic conception of it as a discipline that covers all the books of the Organon.

    The roots of the new view of the scope of “logic” can be said to go back to Avicenna himself, especially to his condensed presentation of logic in al-Ishārāt. But Ibn Khaldūn was not guilty simply of oversight. Avicenna had followed the books of the Organon in his magnum opus al-Shifā’: Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, Sophistical Refutations, Rhetoric, and Poetics. His student Bahmanyār (d. 1065) similarly divided the logic part of his philosophical summa al-Taḥṣīl into chapters covering Eisagoge, Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, and Posterior Analytics. The powerful influence of Avicenna's Ishārāt was due in large part to its widely discussed commentary by Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī.

Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century
  • Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb
  • Khaled El-Rouayheb
  • Published online:
    05 August 2015
    Print publication:
    08 July 2015
  • For much of the twentieth century, the intellectual life of the Ottoman and Arabic-Islamic world in the seventeenth century was ignored or mischaracterized by historians. Ottomanists typically saw the seventeenth century as marking the end of Ottoman cultural florescence, while modern Arab nationalist historians tended to see it as yet another century of intellectual darkness under Ottoman rule. This book is the first sustained effort at investigating some of the intellectual currents among Ottoman and North African scholars of the early modern period. Examining the intellectual production of the ranks of learned ulema (scholars) through close readings of various treatises, commentaries, and marginalia, Khaled El-Rouayheb argues for a more textured - and text-centered - understanding of the vibrant exchange of ideas and transmission of knowledge across a vast expanse of Ottoman-controlled territory.

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