Nicholas Rescher

American philosopher and logician who, in the 1960s and 70s, reconstructed the temporal and modal logic of the Shamsiyya from Sprenger’s English translation.

Life

Nicholas Rescher (1928–2024) taught philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh from 1961 and was the author of well over a hundred books on logic, epistemology and the history of philosophy. In the mid and late 1960s much of his work was devoted to medieval Arabic logic: The Development of Arabic Logic (1964), Studies in Arabic Philosophy (1967) and Galen and the Syllogism (1966).

For the Shamsiyya his main work is Temporal Modalities in Arabic Logic (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1967), followed by a study of modal syllogistic written with vander Nat (1974). For the Shamsiyya he worked from Aloys Sprenger’s English translation of al-Kātibī’s text (Calcutta 1854) and from A.-M. Goichon’s French translation of Ibn Sīnā’s Ishārāt. Tony Street notes that the early studies were hampered by a mistranslation of a difficult passage (§91), which Rescher later corrected with the help of a text in the British Library, and that he offered a semantics for the system in modalised predicate calculus. Khaled El-Rouayheb credits him with reconstructing from the Shamsiyya ‘a sophisticated system of temporal and modal logic’.

Works

• The Development of Arabic Logic1964; still cited by El-Rouayheb, who also criticises its view that later Arabic logic sank into ‘commentary-mongering’.عَمَل
• Temporal Modalities in Arabic Logic — عَلَى al-Risāla al-ShamsiyyaDordrecht: Reidel, 1967 (Street’s bibliography); the TDV article on the Shamsiyya gives 1987. Based on Sprenger’s translation of the Shamsiyya and Goichon’s translation of the Ishārāt.عَمَل
• “The theory of modal syllogistic in medieval Arabic philosophy” (with vander Nat) — عَلَى al-Risāla al-ShamsiyyaIn Studies in Modality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), as cited by Street.عَمَل

Reception

Street dates Rescher’s work on the Shamsiyya to 1967–1975 and treats it as the start of the modern logical study of the book; El-Rouayheb builds on his reconstruction while rejecting his picture of later Arabic logic as sterile ‘commentary-mongering’.