al-Muqaddima: the chapter on logic

In the sixth chapter of his Muqaddima, on the sciences, Ibn Khaldūn gives a short account of logic and its history. He describes how the later scholars, beginning with Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and followed by al-Khūnajī, treated logic as a discipline in its own right rather than as an instrument, so that the books of the ancients were abandoned 'as if they had never been'; he names al-Khūnajī's Kashf al-asrār, Mūjaz and Jumal as the works of his day. Elsewhere he argues that auxiliary sciences such as logic should not be studied at length. It is the best contemporary witness to how fourteenth-century scholars saw the change in their logic.

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