Abstract

The present study on al-Dīn Suhrawardī's Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq, develops some preliminary explorations on his logic under the background of his remarkable epistemology of pis some witness of d resence. The paper paves the way for responding to the challenges of Tony Street on the compatibility of Suhrawardī's critique of Ibn Sīnā with the development of a temporal and modal syllogism that at first sight seems quite close to that of Ibn Sīnā. In fact, Suhrawardī's modalities are to be understood as the different ways a predicate relates to its subject rather than as propositional operators. Accordingly, necessarily necessary modality relates actual instances (presences) of the Subject-Term with actual (presences) of the Predicate-Term; in contrast, necessarily contingent modality relates these terms conditionally, notably involving states of the Subject-Term within time intervals. Suhrawardī's main innovation, so we claim, is the explicit dialectical role presences or actual instances have in his modal-temporal logic, and particularly so in shaping his notion of contingency that admits both a generic and an individual or de re form of plenitude.