Ibn Taymiyya

Ḥanbalī theologian and jurist who wrote the most thorough critique of Aristotelian logic in Arabic, al-Radd ʿalā al-manṭiqiyyīn.

Life

Ibn Taymiyya was born in Ḥarrān (in today’s south-eastern Turkey) in 661/1263; in 1269 his family fled a Mongol incursion and settled in Damascus, where he became a Ḥanbalī scholar. His views brought him repeated trials and imprisonments in Cairo, Alexandria and Damascus between 1306 and 1326, and he died in prison in Damascus in 728/1328.

His major work on reason and revelation is Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql wa-l-naql (“Averting the Conflict between Reason and Revealed Tradition”). His critique of logic, al-Radd ʿalā al-manṭiqiyyīn (“Refutation of the Logicians”), was begun during his house arrest in Alexandria in 1309–1310 and finished later in Damascus; it is aimed at Aristotelian logic as reformulated by Ibn Sīnā.

Its main arguments, as summarised by Jon Hoover: definitions are a matter of linguistic convention that distinguish one thing from another, not a disclosure of essences, and they do not give knowledge not already known; the syllogism is formally valid, but its many figures and conditions are “prolixity of little use and much weariness”, and certain knowledge is often reached without it, sometimes from a single indicant; analogy and the categorical syllogism are equivalent; and universals exist only in the mind, so universal premises about the outside world cannot be known with the certainty the logicians claim.

Works

• al-Radd ʿalā al-manṭiqiyyīn الرَّدُّ عَلَى المَنْطِقِيِّينَRefutation of the logicians; printed in Lahore (1396/1976) and Beirut (1993). Also known as Naṣīḥat ahl al-īmān fī l-radd ʿalā manṭiq al-Yūnān. Wael B. Hallaq’s English translation, Ibn Taymiyya against the Greek Logicians (Oxford, 1993), translates al-Suyūṭī’s abridgement Jahd al-qarīḥa fī tajrīd al-Naṣīḥa.work
• Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql wa-l-naql دَرْءُ تَعَارُضِ العَقْلِ وَالنَّقْلِHis main work on reason and revelation.work

Reception

According to Hoover, logicians of his own time and later paid the Refutation little attention, partly because it did not engage with the newer developments in logic and was sometimes imprecise about what the logicians claimed.

Al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505), who also opposed logic and treated it as an innovation, abridged and reorganised his critique (Jahd al-qarīḥa); Wael Hallaq regards the abridgement as a more effective critique than the original. Al-Suyūṭī and Ibn Taymiyya are the best-known documented critics of logic.

In the modern period Ibn Taymiyya became a major inspiration for Salafism, and El-Rouayheb notes that opposition to logic has been strengthened by its rise.