“The eminent later scholar” in avicenna's book of the syllogism

Arabic Sciences and Philosophy

Volumn 11, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 205-218

  Street, Tony ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 62449290559     PISSN: 09574239     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0957423901001096     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. Particularly the doctrines regarding the absolute proposition, Essays, p. 114 et seq.; cf. Nicholas Rescher, “Averroes’ Quaesitum on assertoric (absolute) propositions”, in Studies in the history of Arabic logic (Pittsburgh, 1963), pp. 91-105.
2. On a similar usage of the reduplicative proposition, see the analysis in Allan Bäck, On Reduplication (Leiden, 1996), pp. 103-4 (on Syllogism, p. 97 et seq., where, however, the proponent of the use of the reduplicative proposition is not named by Avicenna).
3. Madkour, L'Organon d'Aristote, p. 37.
4. L'Organon d'Aristote., pp. 186-7. Madkour does not go on to cite the place in Alexander where we can find the proof, presumably because Jan |ukasiewicz's Aristotle's Syllogistic, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1957) had recently been published, and it could be assumed people would be familiar with it. |ukasiewicz, of course, called the proof “the neatest example of an argument by substitution derived from an ancient source” (L'Organon d'Aristote., p. 10). See now J. Barnes, S. Bobzien, K. Flannery and K. Ierodiakonou, Alexander of Aphrodisias On Aristotle's Prior Analytics 1.1-7 (New York, 1991), p. 90.
5. The Propositional Logic of Avicenna, p. 7. This work, the first extended translation of a section of the Syllogism, was on the hypothetical syllogistic.
6. Preferring one of the variants in the apparatus to the edition's “no Js are Ds”.
7. Since I do not know Greek, I have here to rely on recent studies, especially Barnes et al., Alexander of Aphrodisias On Aristotle's Prior Analytics.
8. One attempt to characterize Alexander's position on the subject-term is that he took the syllogistic to be two distinct systems, the first system comprising contingent propositions, the second comprising all the other propositions-in the first system, the subject-term does ampliate to the possible. See Paul Thom, The Logic of Essentialism (Dordrecht, 1996), p. 4.
9. Averroes, Commentarium medium in Aristotelis Priorum Analiticorum libros recensum textis Arabicis initiavit M. Kassem, complevit, revidit et adnotationibus illustravit C.E. Butterworth adjuvante A. Hariri (Cairo, 1983).
10. In his review of Shehaby's The Propositional Logic of Avicenna in Der Islam, at p. 307.
11. I modify Shehaby's translation (The Propositional Logic of Avicenna, p. 159) very slightly, among other things by incorporating a correction proposed by Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian tradition, p. 106, fn. 11.
12. It may be convenient to recapitulate the references to the eminent later scholar in Syllogism considered in this study: the proof for e-conversion, p. 81.1 et seq.; the ampliation of the subject-term, p. 85.5 et seq.; the proof for a-conversion, p. 90.9 et seq.; the two Barbaras, p. 148.9 et seq.; the conversion of the two-sided possible, p. 209.7 et seq.; the hypothetical syllogistic, p. 356.7 et seq. I have ignored the first reference to the eminent later scholar at p. 11.9-10, concerning whether logic is a part or mere instrument of philosophy, and the second reference at p. 14.7-10, concerning the topic-neutrality of logic. There may well be more references; I have been reading Syllogism selectively.