IBN SINA’S WORK ON LOGIC- GREEKS TO ARABS, Reviewed Ateeb Gul- The Dawn
IBN SINA’S WORK ON LOGIC- GREEKS TO ARABS, Reviewed Ateeb Gul
Books & Authors- DAWN, Dec 11, 2011
REVIEWED BY ATEEB GUL
The Aristotelian logical tradition was to find its second home in none other than the lslamic world, with likes of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina carrying the tradition forward with remarkable ingenuity and scholarships.
Aristotle’s Organon, which includes his famous logical treatise, Prior Analytics, was extremely influential for Arbo-Islamic philosophers who were introduced to formal logic through that work. Ibn Sina was one of those philosophers.
I am typing this review on a computer – a binary system of zeros and ones creative almost infinite number of innovative possibilities, and all based on the binary logic zeros of ones. This is how far logic has come, and it all started with the ancient Greek philosophical featuring the likes of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
But the link with ancient Greek with 21st century is not that simple – it has many twists and turns in between, the most important and historically decisive of which is the Arbo-Islamic rendering of Greek texts in the medieval period.
It must now be reckoned as a uncontested historical truth that Graeco-Arabic translation movement from the eighth to the 10th centuries – during which almost major works of Greek philosophy and science were translated, rendered and reconstituted into Arabic – was a landmark even in world history. This is so because it was this huge corpus in Arabic that was then translated into Latin, and which eventually resulted in the European Renaissance.
During this movement, many works of Aristotle were translated too, which included his works on logic. This Aristotelian logical tradition was to find its second home in none other than the Islamic world, with the likes of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina carrying the tradition forward with remarkable ingenuity and scholarships. Aristotle’s Organon, which includes the famous logical treatise, Prior Analytics was extremely influential for Arbo-Islamic philosophers who were introduce to formal logic through that work. Ibn Sina was one of those philosophers.
This new book, Avicenna’s Deliverance: Logic, by Dr. Asad Q. Ahmed, who teaches Arabic and Islamic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, is groundbreaking work on Ibn Sina’ logic. An English translation of a treatise of Ibn Sina on logic, it has recently been published as part of the Oxford University Press’s Studies in Islamic Philosophy series and contains introductions by Dr. Syed Nomanul Haque (the series editor), Dr. Tony Street, a humanities scholar at Cambridge University and author himself in which he explains his research goals and methodology.
These introductions provide an historical framework of Islamic philosophy for novice students and the general reader, while simultaneously elaborating on the history of the specific treatise of Ibn Sina and its place within that framework. Through these we come to know about the background of Arabo-Islamic logic, the inner innovation therein, and its link with the Latin West at that time.
For instance, one thing we learn from Street’s introduction is that Ibn Sina’s work on logic did not receive the attention it ought to be, because [t]he movement that secured his reputation as a metaphysician and physician left most on formal logic to one side”. This translation is therefore a welcomed effort which has now brought this important treatise to the forefront of philosophical and historical studies. As noted by Haq, “[w]hat had been placed on one side by the translators of the Medieval Latin West has after centuries been picked up from the back burner and now rendered into English”.
Another remarkable thing we note in Street’s introduction is his observation that “nearly every major logician after Avicenna was an Avicennan logician”, considering that after a certain point, “Aristotle ceased to matter as a cultural coordinate for Muslim scholars”. The reason why it is an important observation is because it helps debunk the myth that Muslims were mere translators who translated Greek works into Arabic and preserved them for centuries for the Latin West. Historians of medieval studies now agree that Arbo-Islamic made conclusive and irreversible readjustments, improvement and advancements to the intellectual corpus of the Greeks, so much so they completely transformed fields such as astronomy (with the works of Al-Tusi and al-Shatir), medicine (with the works of Ibm al-Nafis), and logic (with the work of Ibn Sina).
Ahmed deserves praise for highlighting a forgotten chapter of world’s intellectual heritage. His introduction is a meticulous summary of known manuscripts of The Deliverance, and his traditions divided into 150 sections and into further sub-sections, how serves as a standardized critical editions of the treatise. A highly technical piece of work, it has been rendered into English with extreme care and simplicity for the expert reader for which the translator deserves true praise.
Another remarkable quality of the book is something that lacks desperately in many in amny institutions of higher learning in Pakistan – research tools. Apart from the standardization of an historical text, the translator has included at the end of the book a glossary of logical terms in Arabic with their English renditions. This is will serve as an excellent new tool for their researchers as well as students of Islamic studies.
Ref: Avicenna’s Deliverance: Logic (PHILOSOPHY). Translation and Notes by Asad Q. Ahmed, Oxford University Press, Pakistan, ISBN 9780195479508.
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