Asir ad-Din al-Abhari

Dzieła

• ok. 1250Hidāyat al-ḥikma (Przewodnik po filozofii)

  Podręcznik całej filozofii w trzech częściach – logika, fizyka i metafizyka – w dużej mierze według Awicenny; dzięki komentarzom, zwłaszcza Mulli Sadry, wniósł filozofię Awicenny do madras Iranu, imperium osmańskiego i Indii.

• ok. 1250Īsāghūjī (Wprowadzenie do logiki)

  Krótkie wprowadzenie do logiki, nazwane od „Isagoge” Porfiriusza: pięć powszechników, definicja, sądy, sylogizm i rodzaje argumentów na kilku stronach; przez stulecia był to pierwszy tekst logiczny uczniów madras, wielokrotnie komentowany, a w 1625 roku ukazał się w przekładzie łacińskim.

Stanowisko

Al-Abhari is on the map as one of the logicians through whom Ibn Sina’s philosophy became the curriculum of the madrasas. His short Isagoge – named after Porphyry’s introduction, but covering the whole of logic in a few pages – was for centuries the first logic text that students read, from the Ottoman lands to India, and his Guide to Philosophy (Hidāyat al-ḥikma) presented logic, physics and metaphysics in one handbook whose metaphysics follows Ibn Sina closely. In his longer works on logic he belonged to the thirteenth-century logicians who revised Ibn Sina. Examining Afdal al-Din al-Khunaji’s reading of propositions according to the essence of their subject, he showed that it would make all universal propositions false and all particular ones true; he therefore restricted that reading to what is possible and added the “mental proposition”, whose subject exists in the mind. Unlike Ibn Sina, he admitted that impossible things can exist in the mind. Al-Katibi and many later logicians adopted this framework. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi answered al-Abhari’s logic in a systematic critique, Adjusting the Standard (Taʿdīl al-miʿyār), one of the main confrontations between defenders of Ibn Sina’s logic and its revisers. Al-Abhari also took up Suhrawardi’s criticism of the distinction between essence and existence. Through the commentaries on his Guide to Philosophy his influence lasted into modern times: Mulla Sadra’s commentary became, in Sajjad Rizvi’s words, the cornerstone of the rationalist curriculum of the Indian madrasa from the eighteenth century.

Życie i kontekst

Athir al-Din al-Mufaddal ibn ʿUmar al-Abhari was born in Abhar, a small town between Qazvin and Zanjan in north-western Iran; his year of birth is unknown, and Wikidata gives 1194. Later reports make him a student of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, but modern scholars doubt that the two ever met. When the Mongols overran the Khwarazmian empire he moved west: by 1228 he was in Erbil, and he studied in Damascus and in Mosul, where he learned mathematics and astronomy from Kamal al-Din ibn Yunus. He taught logic, philosophy and astronomy; among his students were the logician Najm al-Din al-Katibi, the cosmographer Zakariya al-Qazwini and the biographer Ibn Khallikan. Besides his works on logic and philosophy he wrote on astronomy and on Euclid, including an attempt to prove the parallel postulate. He died between 1262 and 1265, according to most accounts in Mosul.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Introduction to Logic (Īsāghūjī)
• Guide to Philosophy (Hidāyat al-ḥikma)
• Tanzīl al-afkār fī taʿdīl al-asrār, on logic (criticised by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi)
• Kashf al-ḥaqāʾiq fī taḥrīr al-daqāʾiq, on logic, physics and metaphysics
• Treatises on astronomy and on Euclid