The word Īsāghūjī

1A Greek word for ‘introduction’

The Greek noun eisagōgē comes from the verb eisagein, ‘to introduce’, built from eis, ‘into’, and agein, ‘to lead’. An eisagōgē is literally a ‘leading in’. English still has the learned word isagoge, ‘a scholarly introduction to a branch of study’, borrowed through Latin from the same Greek word.

In ordinary Greek the word could mean the importing of goods or the formal ‘introduction’ of a person, for example of an adopted heir. It was also used for ‘introduction to a subject, elementary teaching’, and already before Porphyry an elementary treatise could carry Eisagōgē as its title; the standard Greek dictionary (Liddell–Scott–Jones) cites one by the Stoic Chrysippus.

When Porphyry wrote his short guide to five terms needed for reading Aristotle’s Categories, he called it Eisagōgē, ‘Introduction’. In Latin it kept the Greek word as Isagoge. It is this book, much more than the general meaning of the word, that explains the later history of the name.

2Into Arabic: Īsāghūjī and al-Madkhal

Arabic writers used two names for Porphyry’s book. One simply writes the Greek word in Arabic letters: إِيسَاغُوجِي (Īsāghūjī), also spelled ايساغوجي without the hamza. The other translates it: المَدْخَل (al-madkhal), ‘the entrance’, ‘the way in’, that is, the introduction.

The two names often stand side by side. Al-Fārābī’s work on the subject is titled Kitāb Īsāghūjī ay al-Madkhal, ‘the book Īsāghūjī, that is, the Introduction’. Ibn Sīnā calls the first book of the logic of his great encyclopaedia al-Shifāʾ simply al-Madkhal. Ibn Rushd’s epitome, lost in Arabic, is recorded as Talkhīṣ Madkhal Furfūriyūs, ‘Epitome of Porphyry’s Introduction’ (Furfūriyūs, فُرْفُورِيُوس, is Porphyry’s name in Arabic).

The Turkish encyclopaedia of Islam (TDV) adds that Īsāghūjī became in the Islamic world the shared name of works written for the same purpose as Porphyry’s: short introductions to logic. That is how the title could pass from one author to another.

3Three meanings of one word

First, Īsāghūjī names Porphyry’s book. This is the original sense, and it is the one used in the translation literature and by the early Arabic philosophers.

Second, it names the subject of that book: the five universals, الكُلِّيَّاتُ الخَمْسُ (al-kulliyyāt al-khams). The Ottoman bibliographer Ḥājjī Khalīfa (Kâtip Çelebi, d. 1067/1657) opens his entry with the statement that Īsāghūjī ‘is a Greek word meaning the five universals, that is, genus, species, differentia, proprium and common accident’, and calls it one of the nine sections (abwāb) of logic. He quotes a Persian couplet that lists the five and says that together they were given the name Īsāghūjī. The later lexicographer al-Tahānawī says the same from the other side: the five universals ‘are also called Īsāghūjī’.

Third, it names al-Abharī’s short treatise on the whole of logic, the book that The Mantiqi is built around. Ḥājjī Khalīfa says that the Īsāghūjī ‘well known and in circulation in our time’ is the epitome ascribed to Athīr al-Dīn al-Mufaḍḍal b. ʿUmar al-Abharī.

4How al-Abharī’s treatise got the name

Al-Abharī’s book covers much more than the five universals: it goes on to definition, propositions, the syllogism and the five arts. Why, then, is the whole book called Īsāghūjī? The answer is visible in the text itself. After his short preface, al-Abharī begins the first part, on utterances and universals, with the single word Īsāghūjī as a heading, and only then starts: ‘a signifying utterance signifies what it was coined for by correspondence…’.

Ḥājjī Khalīfa gives two explanations for the name, both based on that heading. Either the book was called Īsāghūjī figuratively, ‘by applying the name of the part to the whole’, or a book was simply named after its opening section. In either case the word that headed the chapter on the five universals became the title of the treatise.

Al-Abharī’s work is also known as al-Risāla al-Athīriyya fī l-manṭiq, after his honorific Athīr al-Dīn (TDV). But the name Īsāghūjī prevailed, and in later centuries ‘the Īsāghūjī’ usually means his book.

5Traditional explanations of the name

Because the Greek origin of the word was no longer obvious to readers of Arabic, later reference works record several explanations. Al-Tahānawī reports that the five universals were called Īsāghūjī ‘because it is the name of a sage who drew them out or wrote them down’. He adds another view: that someone taught them to a person named Īsāghūjī and addressed him by name in each question, saying ‘O Īsāghūjī, such and such’.

The Dastūr al-ʿulamāʾ of Aḥmadnagarī (18th century, India) goes further and divides the word into three Greek words, īs, āghū and ājī, meaning ‘you’, ‘I’ and ‘there’, which were then joined, with one alif dropped, into a name for the five universals. It also records a Persian equivalent written كل بنج بركه, most naturally read gul-i panj-barga, ‘a five-petalled flower’ (the reading is our interpretation of the undotted spelling).

These stories are part of the history of how the book was read, and they show how firmly the word had become attached to the five universals. They do not match the Greek, however. The word is Porphyry’s title eisagōgē, ‘introduction’, as both modern dictionaries and the Arabic equivalent al-madkhal show.

6Reading the word in context

When a text mentions Īsāghūjī, the context usually shows which sense is meant. In the early philosophers (al-Kindī, al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā) it refers to Porphyry’s book or to the section of logic that corresponds to it. In the madrasa literature, from the fourteenth-century commentaries onward, it usually refers to al-Abharī’s treatise and its commentaries. In lexicons and in the commentaries themselves, it may also stand for the five universals as a topic.

The articles that follow trace the first two stages of this story: Porphyry’s own Introduction, and how it travelled through Greek, Syriac and Arabic until al-Abharī’s short handbook took over its name.