Language and Logic in the Graeco-Arabic Tradition: A History of Propositional Analysis from the Hellenic Commentators on Aristotle to Theories of the Proposition in Arabic Philosophy, 900-1350

Abstract

The present dissertation is a diachronic study of the philosophical problem of predication in the Graeco-Arabic tradition. It traces discussions on the role of the copula in predication from Aristotle and the Greek commentators to Arabic philosophers active in the 8th/14th century. The dissertation makes accessible, often for the first time, contributions to the age-old problem of predication by classical and post-classical Arabic philosophers. Thereby it contributes, on the one hand, to recent scholarship in Islamic intellectual history by documenting how Arabic logic developed into an area of lively research well after the Mongol sacking of Baghdād, an event still widely considered as marking the beginning of cultural and scientific decline. On the other hand, it contributes to a more global history of philosophy, by complementing historical scholarship on Western contributions to the problem of predication. There are three parts. Part I engages with modern scholarship on the problem of predication. By revisiting the contributions of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and Davidson, as well as studying Aristotle’s De interpretatione and its Greek commentators, several aspects of Geachean views on the history of logic are being submitted to scrutiny. Part II discusses the contributions of the classical Arabic philosophers Fārābī, Avicenna, Avempace and Averroes against the historical backdrop of the translation movement. Part III presents and discusses, partly based on manuscript research, the contributions of nine sometimes little-known figures in Arabic philosophy: Fakhr al-Din al-Rāzī, Afḍal al-Dīn al-Khūnajī; Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī, Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī, Sirāj al-Dīn al-Urmawī; Shams al-Dīn al-Samarqandī, al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī, and Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī al-Taḥtānī.