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Logic in Islam

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Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions
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Rational thinking in Islam

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In the Muslim middle ages, logic was a discipline borrowed mainly from ancient Greece that made it possible to establish rules of sound reasoning. It was, in other words, a way to discover truth independent of theological arguments stemming from revelation. Over the centuries, Arabic philosophers developed logic into an original system.

Logic developed through the Syriac language during the reign of the ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mūn (813–833), though a version of the Topics may have been made at the time of the third ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdī (775–785). The translation movement focused on Porphyry (d. 304)’s Isagoge, Aristotle’s Categories, De interpretatione and Prior Analytics, Galen (d. 200)’s Introduction to logic, and on works by Aristotle’s commentators such as Theophrastus (d. 287 B.C.), Alexander of Aphrodisias (d. 222), Themistius (d. 387), Ammonius (d. 520), and John Philoponus (d. ca. 580). In line with the Alexandrian school...

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Correspondence to Carmela Baffioni .

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Baffioni, C. (2013). Logic in Islam. In: Runehov, A.L.C., Oviedo, L. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8265-8_1459

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8265-8_1459

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