Sophistry
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 3 anchored passages
al-safsaṭah · equivocation · fallacies · glossed-over wisdom · glossing-over · sophistry · the sophistical art · التمويه · الحكمة المموهة · السفسطة
in the texts
al-Saʻādah fī falsafat al-akhlāq
The art of deceptive reasoning, named from the Greek for glossed-over wisdom, defined by preponderant falsity, and treated in a book that teaches how to guard against its equivocations.
And he made sixth the book in which he mentioned the canons of these things by which one is deceived away from the truth and thrown into perplexity, and brought forward the matters the glosser-over aims at, and made plain the things whose corruption shows, and how one guards against them;
So he composed a book in which he pointed to the modes of the equivocations and the glossings-over and the fallacies, how they occur and whence, and he named it the sophistical art.
Along with that, if a man aims to be a strong dialectician, or an eloquent orator, or a poet who splits open his theme, he inclines towards what he seeks and acquires the book in which the canons of that art were composed, so as to become by them in the highest degree of it and the loftiest rank in it.
Risālat al-Wāridāt
Safsaṭah, sophistry, the recognised name for argument that denies the self-evident: the charge ʻAbduh brings against the harmonising doctrine that God knows things in their change all at once, on the ground that every rational man judges tomorrow not yet to exist.
Nor does this fall below the rank of sophistry (*safsaṭah*) — quite apart from the fact that it does not escape affirming impression, while the likeness and the evidence adduced stand at a great distance from that for which they are adduced and likened.