Relational Syllogisms and the History of Arabic Logic, 900-1900

by Khaled El-Rouayheb

Relational inferences are a well-known problem for Aristotelian logic. This book charts the development of thinking about this anomaly, from the beginnings of the Arabic logical tradition in the tenth century to the end of the nineteenth. Based in large part on hitherto unstudied manuscripts and rare books, the study shows that the problem of relational inferences was vigorously debated in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ottoman logicians (writing in Arabic) came to recognize relational inferences as a distinct kind of 'unfamiliar syllogism' and began to investigate their logic. These findings show that the development of Arabic logic did not - as is often supposed - come to an end in the fourteenth century. On the contrary, Arabic logic was still being developed by critical and fecund reflections as late as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Genres: Philosophy, Islam, History, Logic

295 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Khaled El-Rouayheb is James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic and of Islamic Intellectual History at Harvard University.

Khaled El-Rouayheb’s research interests include: the intellectual and cultural history of the Arabic-Islamic world in the Mamluk and early-Ottoman periods (1200-1800); the history of Arabic logic; Islamic theology and philosophy. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), a MA in Middle Eastern History from the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), and a PhD (2003) from the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge (United Kingdom).

His publications include three monographs: Before Homosexuality in the Arabic-Islamic World, 1500-1800 (University of Chicago Press, 2005), Relational Syllogisms & the History of Arabic Logic, 900-1900 (Brill, 2010), and Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He has also prepared an edition of Kashf al-asrar ‘an ghawamid al-afkar, a summa of logic by Afdal al-Din al-Khunaji (d.1248) (Iranian Institute for Philosophy, 2010). He is the co-editor (along with Sabine Schmidtke of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton) of The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy (2016).