Introduction

Introduction

It is well known among the authors of the Arabs that the founder of the science of logic and its originator was Arisṭaṭālis; that he found among those who came before him nothing but the Book of the Categories (al-Maqūlāt); and that he was awakened to its composition and its arrangement by his study of the book of Uqlīdis on geometry. He divided it into nine books, making of each one a volume; all of them were translated in the time of Abū Jaʻfar al-Manṣūr, and were abridged time and again; and all the authors of the Arabs followed their example, though some of them kept a middle course and some expanded at length — except that most of them joined it to metaphysics (al-ilāhīyāt) and physics (al-ṭabīʻyāt). Yet all of them go back to a single spring and a single order, the inquiry in them turning upon utterances (alfāẓ) and their significations, definitions (ḥudūd) and their kinds, the forms of propositions (qaḍāyā) and the manner of their arrangement, their divisions and their branches, the figures of the syllogisms (ashkāl al-aqyisah) and their kinds and their various names, the conditions that must be sought out in the forms of propositions, the kinds of their productive moods, and so forth. And you see the man who sets himself to the study of them never ceasing to whet his mind upon the understanding of the divisions and the kinds, and wearying his understanding in fixing them and memorising their names, until his brain is filled and he grows weary, or stupefaction takes hold of him, so that he is lost among the divisions, and the kinds and the definitions run together upon him, until he knows no way out for himself. And if fortune assists him, after long patience and travail, to complete it, he becomes a man who has learned an instrumental science (ʻilm ālī) proper to utterances and their kinds, the forms of propositions and their names, and the figures of the syllogisms and their divisions — this if he is able of himself to broaden the matter out, or if a guide is vouchsafed him who will train him in extending the rules to various examples and applying them to the conversations of which no man is free on any day; for most authors have a limited stock of examples from which they do not swerve — quite apart from the fact that most of these are unsound, so that once the learner has grown familiar with them they settle in his mind as though they were a primary and fundamental rule, and on their account a great many errors come in upon him. Nor is it hidden that a man, in inquiry and discussion, may not attend to the form of the expressions, because his mind is taken up with the meanings; and for this reason what he has learned of the rules that belong to the forms of expressions is of no profit to him in most instances, especially if the subject is subtle, or if the syllogisms interlock and run on in a chain. What he needed, rather, was an indicator (dalīl) to guide him to the discernment of truth from falsehood without regard to the form of the expression

And so I wished to write what came within my power, after long pursuit and reflection, in answer to the request of certain lovers of knowledge and its champions, seekers of the truth and those who make for it. If I have profited anyone by what I have written, that is the end at which I aim; and if not, then at the least I shall have alerted minds to the need of reforming this important art, in the hope that one of wider learning and reflection than I may be granted success in it

4 al-Muḥarram, the year 1325

Qūl Aghāsī of the general staff (arkān ḥarb) of the Fifth Turkish Corps Muḥammad Salīm al-Jazāʼirī al-Ḥasanī