Ibn Khaldūn

North African historian, judge and author of the Muqaddima, whose chapters on the sciences describe the post-Avicennan transformation of logic and treat logic as an auxiliary science.

Life

Ibn Khaldūn was born in Tunis on 1 Ramaḍān 732 (27 May 1332) into an Andalusian family of Yemeni descent that had settled in Seville and later in Ifrīqiya. According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi he studied hadith, Qurʾān readings and law with the scholars of Tunis and learned legal theory, theology, logic, philosophy and mathematics from Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm al-Ābilī. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy adds that in fourteenth-century North Africa he would have been taught the logic of Ibn Rushd together with a digest of al-Khūnajī’s, since his teacher al-Sharīf al-Tilimsānī (d. 1370) wrote a substantial commentary on al-Khūnajī’s Jumal. His public life took him to the courts of Fez, Granada and Bijāya; he spent his last twenty-four years in Cairo, where he served repeatedly as judge and died on 26 Ramaḍān 808 (17 March 1406).

His early work Lubāb al-Muḥaṣṣal (finished Ṣafar 752/April 1351), is an abridgement of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s theological handbook al-Muḥaṣṣal, which the TDV attributes to the influence of al-Ābilī; a treatise on logic that he is said to have presented to the Naṣrid sultan Muḥammad al-Ghanī bi-llāh is mentioned by his contemporary Ibn al-Khaṭīb. His fame rests on the Muqaddima, the introduction to his universal history, whose sixth chapter surveys the sciences of his time.

Three passages of the Muqaddima have become standard evidence for the history of logic. First, he records that the early Muslims and the early theologians ‘greatly disapproved’ of logic and forbade its study, but that since al-Ghazālī and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī scholars had been ‘somewhat more lenient’. Second, he describes the change in logic itself: later scholars, beginning with al-Rāzī and then Afḍal al-Dīn al-Khūnajī, ‘on whom Eastern scholars rely even now’, restricted the subject to the forms of the syllogism and dropped the five ‘material’ books of the Organon (Posterior Analytics, Topics, Rhetoric, Poetics and Sophistical Refutations), so that ‘the books and ways of the ancients have been abandoned, as though they had never been’. Third, he classes logic among the auxiliary sciences, which serve philosophy, theology and legal theory as Arabic philology serves the religious sciences; such sciences, he argues, should be studied only so far as they help the sciences ‘wanted for their own sake’, and recent scholars who multiplied the details of grammar and logic had turned them into an idle pastime that wastes students’ lives.

Works

• al-Muqaddima (introduction to Kitāb al-ʿIbar) المُقَدِّمَةُChapter 6 on the sciences contains his account of logic, its history and its place among the auxiliary sciences.труд
• Lubāb al-Muḥaṣṣal fī uṣūl al-dīn لُبَابُ المُحَصَّلِ فِي أُصُولِ الدِّينِ — к Fakhr al-Dīn al-RāzīAbridgement of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s al-Muḥaṣṣal, finished in Ṣafar 752/April 1351; autograph in the Escorial, ed. and tr. Luciano Rubio (Tetuán 1952) (TDV).труд

Reception

Modern histories of Arabic logic, such as the Stanford Encyclopedia’s survey, take his naming of al-Rāzī and al-Khūnajī as the authors of the ‘new way’ as a starting point for the post-Avicennan tradition.

His view of logic as an instrumental science to be studied only as far as it is useful is quoted in the site’s articles on what logic is and on the genres of logical writing.