| Summary: | In the ninth and tenth centuries, Arabic ‘logicians’ (manṭiqiyyūn) and Islamic ‘theologians’ (mutakallimūn) constituted distinct and rival groups. The former advocated the use of Aristotelian and Stoic formal modes of inference, whereas the later had a very different and broadly analogical model of argumentation and disputation. In the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a number of prominent Islamic theologians such as al-Ghazali (d. 1111) and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1210) began to adopt Greek-derived formal logic and to concede that the older analogical forms of argumentation were inappropriate to the discipline of theology. Despite an opposition to this process by such figures as Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328), this blending of logic and Islamic theology became predominant by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Henceforth, opposition to logic tended to be confined to Islamic religious circles that were also fiercely opposed to the discipline of theology (kalam).
|
|---|