Sharḥ al-ʿIbāra

This is the only one of al-Fārābī's long commentaries on the Organon to survive complete: a section-by-section exposition of De interpretatione in Isḥāq b. Ḥunayn's translation. It discusses the parts of speech in Arabic, the copula and the tenses, comparing Arabic with Greek and Persian, and argues that logic concerns the form of propositions, which is not the same as their grammatical form. Its treatment of future contingents (the sea battle) holds that the disjunction is necessary while neither side is yet true, and that God's knowledge does not remove contingency or human choice. It shows the full scale of the Baghdad commentary tradition behind the later, shorter manuals.

Draft · awaiting review by a qualified teacher