Kitāb al-Muʿtabar (logic)

The Book of What Has Been Established by Personal Reflection follows the plan of Ibn Sīnā's Shifāʾ in three books, logic, natural philosophy and metaphysics, but tests each received doctrine against the author's own reasoning. In logic Abū al-Barakāt holds that the study of words belongs to grammar, so that the subject of logic is concepts rather than expressions; he adds analogy (tamthīl) as a third kind of definition beside ḥadd and rasm; and he disputes the view that Aristotle wrote a separate work on conditional propositions. Medieval biographers praised the book highly, al-Suhrawardī criticised its author, and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and Ibn Taymiyya drew on its criticisms of the Peripatetics. It is an early sign of the independent, critical turn in post-Avicennan logic.

Draft · awaiting review by a qualified teacher