Tony Street

Historian of Arabic logic at the University of Cambridge, editor and translator of al-Kātibī’s Shamsiyya for the Library of Arabic Literature (2024).

Life

According to his page at the Australian National University, where he is a visiting research fellow of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, Tony Street taught classical Arabic at the ANU and has worked since 1999 in the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge. He describes himself as concentrating on ‘texts which were central to a religious education’ and on Islamic intellectual history in the centuries immediately after Ibn Sīnā.

His studies of Ibn Sīnā’s logic include an article on the ‘eminent later scholar’ in Ibn Sīnā’s Book of the Syllogism (Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 2001), on how Ibn Sīnā set out his differences from al-Fārābī, a chapter on Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s critique of Avicennan logic (2005) and preliminary notes on Ibn Sīnā’s Twenty Questions on logic (2010). With Shahid Rahman and Hassan Tahiri he edited The Unity of Science in the Arabic Tradition (Springer, 2008). His entry ‘Arabic and Islamic Philosophy of Language and Logic’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 2008, revised 2013 with Nadja Germann) is a standard overview; it traces the logic of the Maragha circle and its handbooks into the madrasa.

Much of his work concerns al-Kātibī’s Shamsiyya. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi notes that he based his chapter on logic in the Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (2005) on the Shamsiyya. In a chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy (2016) on al-Kātibī, Quṭb al-Dīn al-Taḥtānī and the Shamsiyya he argued against the prejudice that teaching texts and commentaries written after the fall of Baghdad are derivative, and proposed to speak of a ‘Maragha school in logic’ and even a ‘Maragha revolution’ in the subject. In 2024 he published the first edition of the Shamsiyya with a facing English translation and a full commentary in the Library of Arabic Literature (NYU Press).

Works

• Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī’s al-Risālah al-Shamsiyyah: An Edition and Translation with Commentary — عَلَى al-Risāla al-ShamsiyyaNew York: NYU Press (Library of Arabic Literature), 2024; Arabic text with English translation, commentary on pp. 97–286, notes and a list of technical terms.طَبْعَة
• ‘Kātibī (d. 1277), Taḥtānī (d. 1365), and the Shamsiyya’ — عَلَى al-Risāla al-ShamsiyyaIn The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy (2016); preprint on Zenodo.عَمَل
• ‘Arabic and Islamic Philosophy of Language and Logic’ (with Nadja Germann)Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published 2008, substantive revision 2013.عَمَل
• ‘“The eminent later scholar” in Avicenna’s Book of the Syllogism’ — عَلَى ابْنُ سِيناArabic Sciences and Philosophy 11/2 (2001), 205–218.عَمَل

Reception

The TDV article on the Shamsiyya (2010) names his work among the modern studies of the book, and this site’s articles on logic and on the Shamsiyya draw throughout on his Stanford Encyclopedia entry and his 2016 chapter.