Philosophy and Language in the Islamic World

Nadja Germann, Mostafa Najafi

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110552232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia delle religioni

What is language? How did it originate and how does it work? What is its relation to thought and, beyond thought, to reality? Questions like these have been at the center of lively debate ever since the rise of scholarly activities in the Islamic world during the 8th/9th century. However, in contrast to contemporary philosophy, they were not tackled by scholars adhering to only one specific discipline. Rather, they were addressed across multiple fields and domains, no less by linguists, legal theorists, and theologians than by Aristotelian philosophers.

In response to the different challenges faced by these disciplines, highly sophisticated and more specialized areas emerged, comparable to what nowadays would be referred to as semantics, pragmatics, and hermeneutics, to name but a few – fields of research that are pursued to this day and still flourish in some of the traditional schools. Philosophy of language, thus, has been a major theme throughout Islamic intellectual culture in general; a theme which, probably due to its trans-disciplinary nature, has largely been neglected by modern research.

This book brings together for the first time experts from the various fields involved, in order to explore the riches of this tradition and make them accessible to a broader public interested both in philosophy and the history of ideas more generally.

The Reception of Pointers 1.6 in Thirteenth-Century Logic: On the Expression’s Signification of Meaning

Tony Street

Introduction

This volume is loosely limited to the period from 800 to 1200.¹ I am grateful for the latitude the editors have given me in writing the following paper; many of the texts I consult and quote come from the late thirteenth century. They are, however, all directed to a body of doctrine that was first formulated by Avicenna in the first half of the eleventh century. The thirteenth-century treatment of that doctrine was shaped by two books written by Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210) in the late twelfth century, books written to question the rigour of many of Avicenna’s formulations. The thirteenth-century texts quoted here are, in short, part of a process of reception of a doctrine developed and then challenged through the last two centuries of the period on which the volume focuses. Specifically, the texts are devoted to an account of a fundamental aspect of the philosophy of language, namely, the relation of signification (dalāla) between an expression (lafẓ) and the meaning (maʿnan) or – nearly always – meanings (maʿānin) it signifies.

My study of these texts is intended primarily as a contribution to our understanding of the reception of Avicenna’s logic in thirteenth-century texts on logic, though I hope that it also serves a secondary function of introducing elements of a doctrine that plays a central role in Arabic logic after Avicenna.² With these goals in mind, I trace the discussion of signification from Avicenna’s last statement of the doctrine, in al-Ishārāt wa-al-Tanbīhāt (Pointers and Reminders, henceforth al-Ishārāt),³ to the version of the doctrine given by Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī (d. 1277) in al-Risāla al-Shamsiyya fī al-Qawāʿid al-Manṭiqiyya (Epistle on Logical Precepts for Shams al-Dīn, henceforth the Shamsiyya);⁴ this allows a sense of the ­thirteenth-century commentary tradition on Avicenna’s logic to emerge, and more especially a sense of the ways each of its members contributed to logical discussions.⁵ I provide two appendices, the first of which gives Avicenna’s passage along with the sympathetic commentary of Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 1274),⁶ the second, Kātibī’s corresponding passage, extended to include the treatment of equivocation (for reasons noted at the end of section 2 below).⁷

I have looked in the past at other aspects of the thirteenth-century reception of Avicenna,⁸ and it is clear that Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and his followers are the most dynamic agents at work throughout this reception. In the early 1180s Rāzī revised his penetrating critique of Avicenna’s logic, al-Mulakhkhaṣ fī al-Ḥikma wa-al-Manṭiq (The Epitome of Philosophy and Logic, henceforth the Mulakhkhaṣ), and returned soon after to offer a commentary directly on the text of Avicenna’s al-Ishārāt, the Sharḥ al-Ishārāt (Commentary on Pointers, henceforth the Sharḥ).⁹ In these texts, Rāzī set out the burning issues to be resolved in understanding and using Avicenna’s logic. His disciple Afḍal al-Dīn al-Khūnajī (d. 1248) wrote the first major response to Rāzī’s assessment of Avicenna’s logic, Kashf al-Asrār ʿan Ghawāmiḍ al-Afkār (Uncovering Secrets under the Obscurities of Thoughts, henceforth the Kashf). An admirer rather than a disciple of Khūnajī, Kātibī was none the less known as a direct recipient of the Rāzian tradition – he was referred to by his commentator al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī (d. 1325) as “one of the followers of Fakhr al-Dīn”¹⁰ –, writing commentaries on both Rāzī’s Mulakhkhaṣ¹¹ and Khūnajī’s Kashf.¹² He also wrote a major independent text on logic, Jāmiʿ al-Daqāʾiq, not yet published.¹³ At this point, however, Kātibī is still most famous for his Shamsiyya, a short text widely adopted for introducing law students to logic. Objections were raised against the Rāzians by Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī and his student Ḥillī, among others, but the extraordinary success of the Shamsiyya meant that the Rāzians had won the day, at least in terms of the logic that would henceforth be studied in a madrasa education. I hope that the material covered in this paper moves us one step closer to understanding why the Shamsiyya was so widely taken to convey the neatest reception of Avicenna’s logic.

1 Avicenna on Signification: Basic Notions

In broad terms, the problem of signification deals with the way meanings are conveyed. As treated by Avicenna and his followers, the discussion focuses above all on the way meanings are conveyed by someone uttering an expression to someone else familiar with the conventions of the language,¹⁴ so it is a topic that lies at the heart of the philosophy of language. One way to introduce the topic – followed by Ḥillī – was to say that the signification (dalāla) of a meaning may be by a gesture or by a verbal expression. Some expressions signify meanings without being imposed to signify those meanings, whether naturally (bi-al-ṭabʿ) like “ouch!” for pain, and “aw f…” for annoyance, or by mediation of intellect (bi-al-ʿaql), which is to say, by inference: an articulated sound signifies a voice, in that even from a word we do not understand, we grasp a meaning, that someone has pronounced the word. As noted, most philosophical discussion is directed to the case in which an expression (lafẓ) has been imposed (mawḍūʿ) for a given meaning (maʿnan); in this case, the sense of “an expression’s signifying a meaning” is “the meaning understood by one who is conversant with the imposition from the expression when it is uttered or brought to mind” (fahm al-maʿnā min al-lafẓ ʿinda iṭlāqihi aw takhayyulihi bi-al-nisba ilā man huwa ʿālim bi-al-waḍʿ).¹⁵ Even though this kind of signification originates in a deliberate act of imposition, understanding it precisely may still be problematic. Some problems come about because expressions can be imposed for more than a single meaning, either by the original imposition (waḍʿ) of the first Positor (wāḍiʿ), or by the later convention (iṣṭilāḥ) of a group of language users. Other problems arise due to the containment (taḍammun) of one meaning in another, or the implication (iltizām) of one meaning by another (without the implicate meaning being contained in the implicant meaning).¹⁶ An expression imposed to signify one meaning also signifies necessarily meanings contained in or inseparable from that meaning, and so the question arises as to the precise criteria to distinguish among these three significations and how far they ramify from the meaning for which the expression was imposed. A solution to these issues turns out to be necessary if an account – at any rate, an Avicennan account – is to be given of what signifies the quiddity, or, in other words, what signifies what the thing is.

Such is the cluster of problems activated by Avicenna in al-Ishārāt 1.6, “On the Expression’s Signification of Meaning.” Like so many other passages in the Ishārāt, this one became a classic for later logicians, and is the ultimate model for the parallel passage in Kātibī’s Shamsiyya. Here is the Ishārāt statement of the doctrine, the last of Avicenna’s formulations.¹⁷

Text 1.1: The expression signifies a meaning either by way of correspondence (in that the expression is imposed for the meaning as a counterpart), like triangle signifies figure enclosed by three sides; or by way of containment (in that the meaning is a part of the meaning corresponding to the expression), like triangle signifies figure, not that it signifies figure in being a name for figure, but rather as a name for a meaning part of which is figure; or by way of following and implication (in that the expression signifies a meaning by correspondence, and another meaning necessarily follows on the first meaning as an extrinsic associate, not as a part but as a necessary accompaniment to it), in the way the expression roof signifies wall, and man signifies receptive of the art of writing.¹⁸

So expression E signifies meaning X by signification of correspondence “in that the expression is imposed for that meaning as a counterpart.”¹⁹ Expression E signifies meaning X by signification of containment “in that the meaning is a part of the meaning corresponding to the expression” (so there is a second meaning, Y, for which E is imposed and which E therefore signifies by signification of correspondence, and X is a part of Y; in Avicenna’s example, figure is part of the meaning triangle, so the expression imposed for the meaning triangle signifies figure by containment). Expression E signifies meaning X by signification of implication “in that the expression signifies a meaning by correspondence, and another meaning nec...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Cognisable Content: The Work of the Maʿnā in Early Muʿtazilī Theory
• The Voie Diffuse and Reconstruction: The De Audibilibus and Sībawayhi’s Account of Voicing
• The Causes of Grammar: Ibn Jinnī on the Nature of Language
• Notes around Ambiguity: Ibn Sīnā’s Logic, ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī’s Poetics, Rāghib’s Two-Meanings-at-One-Time, and the Figures of Ibhām, Istikhdām, and Tawriya
• The Reception of Pointers 1.6 in Thirteenth-Century Logic: On the Expression’s Signification of Meaning
• Reason and Revelation in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and the Ashʿarī Tradition
• Informative and Performative Theories of Divine Speech in Classical Islamic Legal Theory
• Understanding Divine Intention: “Conversational Maxims” and the Legal Theory of Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī (d. 1067)
• After Adam: Ibn ʿAqīl on Language Origin, Change, and Expansion
• Reclassification of Linguistic Meaning: An Integrated Approach
• Index of Names
• Index of Subject