Abstract

The following dissertation is a study of Abu Nas&dotbelow;r Alfarabi's commentary on Aristotle's Topics, known in Arabic as the Kitab al-Jadal. Long thought to have been lost, the first reliable Arabic edition of the work was presented in 1992, and my English translation is the first time the entire text has been translated into this language. ;Alfarabi was regarded as the single greatest philosophic authority after Aristotle, and was commonly referred to as "the Second Master." This was due to the fact that he was understood to be the preeminent authority in two fields of study: logic and political science. After centuries of Middle- and Neo-Platonic commentaries which focused on more otherworldly aspects of Greek philosophy, Alfarabi appears to have almost single-handedly recovered Platonic and Aristotelian political philosophy, and to have used this to found the main tradition of philosophy in Islam. Scholars in the past have tended to focus on either the logical or the political writings to help make sense of Alfarabi's colossal achievement. I suggest in the following pages that we not divide his activity in this manner but, instead, recognize his efforts both in logic and political science as serving the same end. And it is in this context that Alfarabi's commentary on the Topics can be understood as offering real insight into the guiding theme of his philosophizing. The Topics treats the art of dialectic; because its premises are not certain but rather generally-accepted and commonly held, it stands at the meeting-place between logic and political science. This allows Alfarabi, in his commentary, to speak of the essentially political nature of all philosophizing, and to point the reader back beyond even Aristotle towards Socrates. ;The ordering of the following study is somewhat unconventional, in that it recognizes that Alfarabi's commentary is itself meant to imitate the dialectical education it describes. The importance of Alfarabi's endeavor in this regard should be evident to those who seek a scientifically defensible science of values