al-Kindī

The first philosopher of Islam, at the centre of a circle of translators in ninth-century Baghdad, who wrote the first original Arabic works on logic, among them an overview of the Organon and an abridgement of Porphyry’s Isagoge.

Life

Al-Kindī came from a noble Arab family of the tribe of Kinda; his father, Isḥāq b. al-Ṣabbāḥ, was governor of Kufa under several Abbasid caliphs. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi notes that neither his birth nor his death is dated in the classical sources: a modern estimate places his birth around 185/801, and modern works give his death variously as 860, 869, 870 or 873; Muṣṭafā ʿAbd al-Rāziq, followed by the TDV, argued for about 252/866. He grew up in Kufa and Basra and spent the rest of his life in Baghdad, where he won the favour of the caliph al-Maʾmūn, worked among the scholars and translators of the Bayt al-Ḥikma and was tutor to Aḥmad, son of the caliph al-Muʿtaṣim, for whom he wrote many of his treatises. Under al-Mutawakkil he fell from favour.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes him as the centre of a circle of translators that had formed by the 830s. Members of the circle produced an epitome of and commentary on the Categories, an epitome of On Interpretation, a version of the Sophistical Refutations and probably an early translation of the Rhetoric, while al-Kindī himself wrote ‘a short overview of the whole of the Organon’. In his classification of the sciences, logic and mathematics are the instrumental sciences that prepare for philosophy, and logic consists of the eight books of the Aristotelian Organon, from the Categories to the Poetics.

The TDV article on logic calls him the first Muslim thinker to write original works on logic. The titles recorded include two introductions to logic (al-Madkhal al-manṭiqī, one complete and one abridged), an abridgement of Porphyry’s Isagoge, a treatise on the five predicables (al-aṣwāt al-khams), treatises on the Categories, an abridgement of On Interpretation, a commentary on the Prior Analytics, a short treatise on demonstration, a treatise on guarding against the tricks of the sophists and an abridgement of the Poetics. None of his logical works survives, so their quality cannot be judged; the Andalusian Ṣāʿid al-Andalusī complained that they were too brief to be useful. His surviving philosophical treatises show him using logical arguments, especially the reductio, alongside mathematics, which he made a precondition of philosophy.

Works

• Short overview of the whole OrganonTranslated by Nicholas Rescher (1963), as cited in the Stanford Encyclopedia; the Arabic title is not given in the sources consulted.karya
• Ikhtiṣār Kitāb Īsāghūjī li-Furfūriyūs اخْتِصَارُ كِتَابِ إِيسَاغُوجِي لِفُرْفُورِيُوس — atas PorfiriusAn abridgement of Porphyry’s Isagoge (TDV, ‘Mantık’); lost.karya
• Risāla fī al-aṣwāt al-khams رِسَالَةٌ فِي الأَصْوَاتِ الخَمْسِOn the five predicables, the subject of the Isagoge; lost.karya
• Risāla fī madkhal al-manṭiqTwo introductions to logic, one full (al-mustawfī) and one abridged (TDV); lost.karya
• Risāla fī al-iḥtirās min khudaʿ al-sūfisṭāʾiyyīnOn guarding against the tricks of the sophists (TDV); lost.karya

Reception

In the early philosophers, al-Kindī among them, the word Īsāghūjī refers to Porphyry’s book or to the part of logic corresponding to it, not yet to al-Abharī’s treatise (see ‘The word Īsāghūjī’).

The Stanford Encyclopedia and the TDV treat him as the starting point of Arabic logic and of the Peripatetic school in Islam, whose logical work was continued by al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā.