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The Fourth Figure Syllogism Resurgent: Ibn Kammuna’s Commentary on Suhrawardi’s Logic of the Talwihat
Abstract
As a logician the philosopher Suhrawardi is best known for the almost sneering simplification of logic in the first part of his masterwork The Philosophy of Illumination. However, in his so-called “Peripatetic” works, he writes much more extensively about logic and in a conventional Aristotelian/Avicennan style and terminology—about 1000 pages in the recent printed editions of the three major Peripatetic texts. These works have been largely neglected, with only the metaphysics of each edited in the older Corbin edition. Almost nothing has been written about Suhrawardi’s logic beyond The Philosophy of Illumination, apart from a monograph by Hussein Ziai dealing mainly with epistemology. The most extensive treatment of Suhrawardi’s logic occurs in the commentary on Suhrawardi’s Talwihat, the middle of the three Peripatetic works, by the 13th century Jewish philosopher Ibn Kammuna, apparently the earliest of the followers of Suhrawardi’s Illuminationist tradition. He analyzes Suhrawardi’s text paragraph by paragraph. He is a sympathetic commentator, generally treating omissions and lapses as simplifications appropriate to the level of the text and then filling in the gaps. Like other logicians of the period, Ibn Kammuna elaborates the divisions of propositions and considers the effects these new kinds of propositions have on various forms of inference. In the syllogistic Ibn Kammuna derives the many moods of the syllogism from the first figure, going back by preference to Barbara, the simplest mood. In a departure from Suhrawardi’s text, he adds the vexed fourth figure, which had been controversial since Galen added it a thousand years earlier. Recent scholarship has begun to show that Suhrawardi’s philosophy cannot be understood in isolation from his Peripatetic works. Likewise, recent scholarship on Islamic logic in this period, notably the works of El Roueyheb and Street, have shown that the 13th and 14th centuries were periods of major innovation in Islamic logic, parallel to while different from the European logic of the same period, though the details are only gradually becoming clear. Both differ in basic ways from modern formal logic. This paper contributes towards understanding the changes going on in Islamic logic in this period, a time when modern scholars have only serious examined less than half a dozen Islamic logicians.
Discipline
Philosophy
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
None