intellect is a fundamental topic of concern in the peripatetic philosophy. a comparison of al-farabi’s approach to ‘intellect’ (an iranian muslim philosopher with an oriental background) with that of alexander of aphrodisias’ (a greek philosopher with an occidental background) may reveal the contrasting features of aristotelian peripatetic philosophy and the islamic philosophy. basing itself on...

aristotle took per impossibile as a form of hypothetical syllogism which was composed of a syllogistic and a non-syllogistic part. but he didn’t express the relation between these two parts clearly. alexander of aphrodisias and philoponus didn’t add any specific comments to aristotle’s view. al-farabi believed that per impossible includes three deductions: two categorical syllogisms and one exc...

In her important 1979 paper “Aristoteles über Syllogismen ‘aufgrund einer Hypothese’”, 1 Gisela Striker provided an in-depth analysis of these vexing and perplexing Aristotelian arguments. She showed that they were Aristotle’s way of providing a logical vehicle for inferences based on other than term-logical relations; that the ‘hypothesis’ that gives them their name is best understood as a rul...