SOURCE: Gyekye, Kwame. “Al-Fārābi on the Logic of the Arguments of the Muslim Philosophical Theologians.” In Journal of the History of Philosophy 27, no. 1 (January 1989): 135-43.

In the following essay, Gyekye focuses on a treatise written by al-Fārābī concerning the logical structures used by Muslim philosophical theologians.

Introduction

My intention in this paper is to discuss those portions of al-Fārābī's treatise—mistitled by Nicholas Rescher as Al-Fārābī's Short Commentary on Aristotle's Prior Analytics¹—which bear on certain methods of logic generally preferred, appropriated and developed by the Muslim philosophical theologians, Mutakallimūn (rendered also as dialectical or rationalist theologians). Logic, as a rational system relevant and valuable in arguments, was a subject that held some attraction for the Muslim philosophical theologians, who regarded it as an organ, a tool (āla) which would provide their religious doctrines with an impregnable...