Ibn Sı̄nā’s view of the practice of logic

In the last half century Ibrahim Madkour revolutionised the study of Arabic logic by making available a modern edition of the text of the Logic section of Ibn Sı̄nā’s Šifā’. Ibn Sı̄nā’s account of logic in the Šifā’ is much fuller than any of his other surviving accounts; it runs to some two thousand pages. It is also — in my view — more radical and more independent of Aristotle than his other accounts of logic, though the Logic section of his Mašriqiyyūn comes close. In this talk I want to take up some important aspects of logic that are discussed in several places in the Šifā’ but hardly at all in Ibn Sı̄nā’s other known logical works. The basic question is this. Logic is a skill, and Ibn Sı̄nā means to teach this skill. But how does Ibn Sı̄nā expect his students to apply this skill in practice? What exactly are they supposed to be able to do after this teaching that they couldn’t do before? What is the aim of the exercise? A fundamental principle in history of science is that you can’t properly assess the work of a past scientist if you don’t know what questions that scientist was aiming to answer. So I claim that the topic of this paper is a prerequisite for any sound assessment of Ibn Sı̄nā’s logic. I thank the World Philosophy Day in Tehran for kindly inviting me to give this paper. I also thank Khaled El-Rouayheb and Tony Street for discussions that helped to generate some of the points made below.