Seminar: "What’s Truth Got to Do With It? Logic as (Mere) Instrument in Philosophy of the Islamic World" by Peter Adamson

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Peter Adamson, Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy, LMU in Munich

Co-sponsor: Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

Abstract

A commonplace of ancient Aristotelianism that passed into the Arabic tradition was that logic is only an instrument (organon) of philosophy. 

Against Stoic claims to the contrary, logic is not a “part” of philosophy and cannot by itself establish any truths. But it is of great importance nonetheless: as another widely disseminated claim had it, logic is the instrument by which we distinguish true from false, and good from bad. In this paper I will look at the fortunes of this idea in the Islamic world, starting with the defense of logic’s necessity by members of the Baghdad school, who basically adhered to the ancient line on the function of logic but developed new ways of explaining why it is, in the words of Khaled el-Rouayheb, “content neutral.” I spend some time exploring the solution of Ibn ʿAdī, nefore moving on to a suggestion made by al-Fārābī, namely that logic deals with content-neutral aspects of intelligibles. This idea was then taken up by Ibn Sīnā, with the further stipulations that the intelligibles in question are second-order (e.g. not “horse,” but “species”), and that logic deals with them strictly with a view to the role of second-order intelligibles in increasing knowledge. In conclusion I suggest that, thanks to this idea, logic increasingly drifts away from substantive philosophy in post-Avicennan philosophy, because it is seen only as a set of rules for mental operations.