PHILOSOPHICAL BOOKS

Vol. V, No. I. January 1964

AL-FARABI’S SHORT COMMENTARY ON ARISTOTLE’S PRZOR

ANALYTZCS, translated, with an introduction and notes, by Nicholas
Rescher. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963. 132 pages. $3.

Al-Farabi (873-950) was a Muslim philosopher educated and influenced by

Nestorian teachers. His work which is here translated with an introduction
and notes is not really the commentary which its title might lead one to
expect, but an epitome. The introduction delineates al-Farabi’s situation as
a transmitter of the Aristotelian heritage from the Syrian Christians (them-
selves successors to the scholars of Alexandria) to the Arabs, and gives a
thorough analysis and assessment of the general nature of the text. One
surprising feature which emerges is the small proportion of the text devoted
to categorical syllogisms, the main bulk being given over to the discussion
of induction and analogy; modal syllogisms are not mentioned at all. This
shift in the centre of gravity naturally leads to some interesting elaboration,
under Stoic and Syriac influence, of items which were comparatively sub-
sidiary in Aristotle’s Prior Andytics. As translations into Latin of al-Farabi’s
works were later available to the West, and as he was to have the respect of
influential philosophers such as Averroes and Maimonides, his bearing on
the complexion of medieval thought cannot be discounted.
The footnotes supporting sections of the work devoted to categorical
syllogisic admirably clarify and explain al-Farabi’s deductions, and the
points at which they deviate from Aristotle’s. Ecthesis receives its interpreta-
tion in the text as involving the exposition of a part of a class; I fail to see,
however, why Aristotle should hence be branded (in the introduction and
notes) as an intentionalist who selects sub-species of species in ecthesis, as
o p p e d to the allegedly extensional procedure of al-Farabi (pp. 42, 67).
Neither the Kneales (to whom reference is made) nor Lukasiewicz (who is
nowhere mentioned) lend any support to such a contention. Is it not more
likely that the Syrian theologians neglected modal syllogisms on account of
their complexity, rather than out of mere disdain (p.40)? After all, such syllo-
gisms are still a source of trouble to contemporary logicians; indeed, some of
the modal theses made explicit in the notes to the text (e.g. p. 56 n. 6 , p. 57
n. 9) are distinctly puzzling. Note I I to p. 79 prefaces the inference-schemata
for disjunctive sy!logisms in modus toZZendo ponens with what might, to the
unwary reader, appear to be a condition for the validity of such syllogisms,
i.e. the exhaustiveness of their disjunctive premiss; in fact such syllogisms
are unconditionally valid, the exhaustiveness of the disjunction being merely
one of al-Farabi’s devices for ensuring the truth of the premiss in question.
Again, it is difficult to agree that the contributions which the text makes to
inductive logic are unrivalled until the time of (Francis?) Bacon (p. 44); what
of the discussions of Grosseteste, Scotus, Roger Bacon, and Ockham? How,
if logic was not applied to Islamic theology until the late 13th century (p. 23),
I
does it come about that al-Farabi’s syllogistic examples are “theological in
character and apparently adapted to the discussions of the mutukdlimun
(Muslim scholastic theologians)” (p. 35)? One minor point: the Juntine
Aristotle is dated “1550 and later” on p. 38; this should, I believe, read
“ I 562-1574”. DESMOND PAUL HENRY

METAPHYSICS by Takatura Ando. Martinus Nijhoff. 1963. 125 pp.

Guilders 13.25.
To discuss the possibility of metaphysics it would seem a prerequisite that
we know what we are talking about. Professor Ando sets himself the pre-
liminary task of clarifying the concept by tracing its history from Aristotle
to the present. The project sounds eminently sensible; yet these self-imposed
terms of reference, excluding the concrete content of the systems discussed,
create their own problems. Especially where vast historical tracts are
covered in a matter of pages, there is some danger of the story’s turning into
a subject-index of headings or permutations of nomenclature.
The concept from the start contains diverse threads, It is in Aristotle
already the study of first principles and causes; the study of being qua being;
and again it is identified with theology-the study of a particular being,
however special his status. These on the face of it are different inquiries,
though in Aristotle they prove to coalesce. (Yet much of the theory of sub-
stance and of the categories is surely separable from the theology with no
very violent wrench : a possibility Professor Ando does not explore.)
A single compact chapter, covering the Arabian School, the Early,
Middle and Later Scholastics, and the rationalist forerunners of Kant, traces
the variation of these themes in the hands of different thinkers who sought
ways of reconciling their Aristotelian heritage. Professor Ando’s scholarship
is impressive; but readers familiar with the work discussed will surely not
need this compressed account, and those unfamiliar will hardly gain from it.
The great shift of emphasis of modern philosophy, with Kant at the
centre of it, is from metaphysics per se to epistemology; and in Hegel, too,
logic is no longer a methodological preliminary but the thing itself. Yet
Kant, for Professor Ando, is still primarily a metaphysician. We are shown
a philosopher-unlike the Oxford or the post-Wittgensteinian Kant, the
analyst of conceptual structures now coming back intv fashion, (every age
has its own Kanthwhose life’s work was to save metaphysics; even though
its salvation ultimately lay in forbidding the speculative use of reason, SO
as to safeguard its practical postulates-all that remained.
Of the metaphysicians that he discusses Professor Ando seems most
sympathetic to Hegel. Engels, Bergson and Heidegger, his remaining
subjects, gst each a rough handling.
Of Heidegger I am not competent to speak; and what Professor Ando
quotes and summarizes hardly whets the appetite for more-at least not a
normal or healthy appetite. T o Bergson he seems to me rather less than just.
Mind and matter for Bergson, as I understand him, are precisely not “two
heterogeneous areas of reality” (p. 103) which, like Descartes, he can never
2