Arabic logicians in the thirteenth century discussed a set of arguments raised by the theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210) that in some respects closely resembles Carroll’s paradox. Roughly, the paradox states that we can never reach a conclusion from a set of premises without incurring an infinite regress. The present article presents and discusses Rāzī’s formulation of the problem with syllogistic deduction, his own solutions to the problem, and the contributions of Afḍal al-Dīn al-Khūnajī (d. 1248) and Najm al-Dīn (...) al-Kātibī (d. 1276). It is argued that the proposed solutions developed by these authors are best understood as tending in the direction of Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between knowing-that and knowing-how. (shrink)

Nazariyat, Journal for the History of Islamic Philosophy and Sciences, issued twice a year in English and Turkish (Nazariyat İslam Felsefe ve Bilim Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi), is a refereed international journal. It publishes original studies, critical editions of classical texts and book reviews on Islamic philosophy, kalām, theoretical aspects of Sufism and the history of sciences. The goal of Nazariyat is to contribute to the discovery, examination and reinterpretation of the theoretical traditions in the history of Islamic thought, by giving (...) special attention to the post-classical period of it. **ISSN: 2148-8088 E-ISBN: 2547-9415**. (shrink)

In Being Another Way, Dustin Klinger recounts the history of how medieval Arabic philosophers in the Islamic East grappled with the logical role of the copula 'to be,' an ambiguity that has bedeviled Western philosophy from Parmenides to the analytic philosophers of today. Working from within a language that has no copula, a group of increasingly independent Arabic philosophers began to critically investigate the semantic role that Aristotle, for many centuries their philosophical authority, invested in the copula as the basis (...) of his logic. Drawing on extensive manuscript research, Klinger breaks through the thicket of unstudied philosophical works to demonstrate the creativity of postclassical Islamic scholarship as it explored the consequences of its intellectual break with the past. Against the still widespread view that intellectual ferment all but disappeared during the period, Klinger shows how these intellectuals over the centuries developed and refined a sophisticated philosophy of language that speaks to core concerns of contemporary linguistics and philosophy. (shrink)

RésuméPar la nouvelle lecture de Métaphysique Ε2-3 – un morceau de texte toujours manquant une interprétation satisfaisante – qui est proposée ici, l'argument d'Aristote ressort comme une défense de l'indéterminisme se fondant sur une notion solide de l'accident. Les êtres accidentels comme causes noncausées ont leur place légitime dans l'ontologie d'Aristote. L'indéterminisme assez radical qui en résulte est utilisé comme une mise à l’épreuve de la démarche exégétique d'Averroès : Il sera montré que la fidélité proverbiale du Grand Commentateur au (...) texte du Stagirite parfois laisse place à des interprétations idiosyncratiques. Ses explications de Métaphysique Ε2-3 sont plutôt clairsemées et non moins obscures que le texte d'Aristote, mais si on les lit à la lumière de ses commentaires à la Physique, à laquelle il se réfère explicitement deux fois dans son Grand commentaire à Métaphysique Ε2-3, une image surprenante se fait jour. Averroès recycle la notion de l'accident, cette fois conceptualisée en termes cosmologiques, en l'employant contrairement à Aristote dans une théorie originale et idiosyncratique du mouvement qui fait intégrer les domaines supra- et sublunaires dans un seul cadre déterministe des chaines causales ininterrompues, entièrement pénétrable par la providence Divine. (shrink)