Terence Kleven

The five-hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation reawakened a long-standing and spirited conversation between philosophic science and religious faith, a conversation which continues to have consequences on how we understand both science and faith. This book brings scholars together to reflect on the topic of the Protestant Reformation, as well as the Roman Catholic Counter Reformation, the nature of science, and the unity of the Church. Five chapters in this collection represent five distinct theological formulations within Christianity; the other seven chapters are from a variety of historic, philosophic, and theological starting points on the topic. These twelve accounts range from theologies informed by the Classical Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle; medieval Jewish and Roman Catholic writers; Moses Maimonides and Thomas More; writers of the Protestant Reformation (Martin Luther, John Calvin, Richard Hooker, and William Shakespeare); the founders of modern science (Francis Bacon and T. H. Huxley), and the modern day theologies of Abraham Kuyper, Flannery O’Connor, H. R. Niebuhr, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

The purpose of this study is to provide evidence that Ibn Bāǧǧa’s commentaries on al- Fārābī’s logical writings reveal a perpetuation of al-Fārābī’s logic in Andalusia and that they also assist us in the recognition of the nature and achievement of this logic. Ibn Bāǧǧa’s Introduction or Eisagoge is a commentary on al-Fārābī’s introductory Letter (Risāla) and the Five Aphorisms (Khamsa Fuṣūl), as well as subsequent logical treatises of al-Fārābī. Ibn Bāǧǧa, in agreement with al-Fārābī, presents logic as consisting of five syllogistic arts, rhetoric, poetry, dialectic, sophistry and demonstration. These arts are constituted by both the form and matter of logic, the matter referring to the five syllogistic arts in which the form of logic is employed. Ibn Ḫaldūn later testifies to this comprehensive account of the five syllogistic arts articulated primarily by al-Fārābī but also in some measure by Ibn Sīnā, and says that, by his time, this account of the syllogistic arts had been replaced by a more limited account of logic. Ibn Ḫaldūn explains that this revised logic separates the form of logic from its matter, discards the matter of logic, and destroys the pillars of logic. This revised notion of logic, Ibn Ḫaldūn says, is in conformity with the methods of kalām and he observes in this version that “the books and methods of the ancients [Aristotle and his commentators] are avoided, as if they had never been, although they are full of the results and useful aspects of logic, as we have stated”. Ibn Bāǧǧa’s commentaries attest to a continuation of the older, more comprehensive, and more Aristotelian account articulated by al-Fārābī, and Ibn Bāǧǧa provides key insights into the recovery of the nature and excellence of al-Fārābī’s logic.