Risāla fī kammiyyat kutub Arisṭūṭālīs

Al-Kindī's epistle On the Quantity of Aristotle's Books is a guide to the Aristotelian corpus that sets out what a student must read, and in what order, to acquire philosophy. It opens with the logical books, so that it amounts to the first Arabic overview of the whole Organon, from the Categories to the Poetics. Modern readers note that al-Kindī had evidently not read some of the books he describes, and the epistle also includes his comment on Qurʾān 36:79–82 on creation. Most of al-Kindī's own writings on logic are lost, so this survey is the main witness to how the first faylasūf presented logic as the gateway to philosophy.

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