Ḥikmat al-ishrāq (logic)

The Philosophy of Illumination, completed in 1186, opens with a part on the 'rules of thought' (§§7–106), which sets out al-Suhrawardī's reform of logic before the ontology of light in the second part. He criticises the Peripatetic essential definition, arguing that a thing's essence cannot be known through genus and differentia, and grounds definition in direct, presential knowledge. He simplifies formal logic by reducing all propositions to necessary affirmatives, reducing the modalities to one form and reducing the second and third figures to the first. His earlier Peripatetic works (al-Talwīḥāt, al-Lamaḥāt, al-Mashāriʿ wa-l-muṭāraḥāt) treat logic more conventionally, and the commentaries of Shams al-Dīn al-Shahrazūrī and Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī carried his critique into later Persian philosophy.

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