Download PDF | Leone Gazziero - Fallacies in the Arabic, Byzantine, Hebrew and Latin Traditions-Brepols (2024).
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Introduction
1. Prolegomena
As suggested time and again’, fallacies are no trifling matter both in their own right and as a cautionary tale about everything that can go amiss when we reason on our own or argue with one another. As a matter of fact, not only the paths of error are every bit as worth exploring as those of truth — and so much more entertaining at that — but flawed, biased, mistaken and outright deceptive arguments also provide pristine evidence about good argumentative practices insofar as illegitimate argumentative moves reveal the principles our arguments abide by to the same extent that they themselves are revealed by the standards and rules they break or twist. The great abundance of current literature on argumentative failures is a testament to the interest fallacious arguments — that is, arguments which appear to be sound but, in fact, are not — have elicited in recent years among specialists and laymen alike. Even if we leave aside bad arguments hit parades*, ludicrous social media’s digests, as well as record-breaking collections of poor reasoning’s specimens‘, and we confine ourselves to a quick inventory of scholarly literature alone, the result is telling. Fallacies have been for some time a well established field of argumentation theory which comes in many varieties, all of which seem to pay a great deal of attention to the topic of faulty arguments.
With so few exceptions as to make little difference’, the ever-growing number of essays, book-chapters, book-length studies, reviews special issues and even handbooks on the subject — which are easily counted by the hundreds — share a peculiar feature: namely, all these works suffer from a definite lack of interest in Mediaeval theories of fallacies — arguably the most creative stage in the history of argumentation theories. In fact, both specialists and non-specialists have been working under either one of two questionable assumptions®:
1. for all practical purposes, fallacy studies have come to prominence in the early 19708, courtesy of a most influential book by computer science pioneer and distinguished logician Charles Leonard Hamblin’
2. for no apparent reason, after Aristotle got off to a tentative start, the discipline barely held its own until — different men tell different tales — either people at Port-Royal and John Locke or Richard Whately first and John Stuart Mill soon afterwards, revived it in spectacular fashion
When their logical merits are acknowledged at all, Mediaevals are rarely granted more than a grudging recognition for their efforts to tackle fallacies — as Woods bluntly but effectively put it: “there is no deep theory of fallacious inference to be found in Aristotle. Although over the centuries fallacies have remained part of the project of logic, this lack of theoretical depth has persisted, albeit with some rare exceptions. Although there was much logical sophistication in the Middle Ages, Mediaeval logicians made comparatively little headway with the fallacies. John Locke (1690), ete.”
2. For present purposes (and future reference)
If not altogether false, both pictures are inaccurate to say the least and should be dismissed accordingly. “Fallacies in the Arabic, Byzantine, Hebrew and Latin Traditions” will not attempt to replace them with a brand new narrative which would ideally bring to bear the full resources of mediaeval treatment of fallacies — nothing short of a comprehensive, fine-grained and transferable reconstruction of Mediaeval fallacy theories would adequately fill the gaps of the standard story'®. The volume will not confine itself to the casual rescue of some overlooked areas in current scholarship either. As its title implies and the scope and multiple focus of the various contributions attest, “Fallacies in the Arabic, Byzantine, Hebrew and Latin Traditions” will explore in some details how Mediaeval authors (logicians for the most part, but also jurists and theologians) discussed fallacies within and across the Latin West and the Greek East, as well as in the Arabic and the Hebrew traditions — that is, the volume will probe and get its bearings without boundaries or limitations imposed by differences in discipline, language and culture. For — we surmise — this is where both the potential for novelty and the rightful place of mediaeval theories of fallacies lies within contemporary argumentation studies. By working its way from the inside out within each mediaeval tradition, the volume will not only bear witness to mediaeval ingenuity and sophistication when it comes to reckon if an argument fails and why, but it will also compare mediaeval findings and lessons with contemporary views and trends. Whether or not and to what extent “Fallacies in the Arabic, Byzantine, Hebrew and Latin Traditions” actually lays the groundwork for new and better ways of describing and assessing the laws and flaws of argumentation may well remain, for the time being, an open question. What the volume does provide is ample and unambiguous record of the exegetical proficiency, technical expertise and argumentative savoirfaire typically displayed by mediaeval authors on issues whose complexity we either choose to ignore or underestimate to some degree — such as defining what a fallacy is in the first place or asking what the pitfalls of linguistic expression are and how they compare to those of other symbolic notations, etc.
3. Latin Tradition
As John Buridan — faithful to a long and illustrious tradition — aptly put it at the beginning of his Summutae logicales, “logica est” — among other things but first and foremost — “exstirpativa falsarum rationum [logic’s job is to root out false arguments]”". To be sure, Latin logicians took their job very seriously. It would be a bit of an overstatement to claim that everything they adapted from their Roman, Late Ancient, Byzantine and — to a degree — Arabic sources, let alone the logical novelties they came up with by themselves (e.g,, the theory of the properties of terms, most notably suppositio”) was prompted or motivated by a concern with fallacious arguments. That being said, it is unquestionably true that they took fallacious arguments at least as seriously as legitimate ones. It is also true that they used each and every tool in their logical arsenal to cope with the problem of flawed argumentation and even added a few devices of their own invention”.
For, by and large, Latin logicians conceived their contributions to logic — even at its most original — as a continuation of Aristotelian lore rather than as a departure from it's, it does not come as a surprise that Aristotle’s Sophistici elenchi provided the most fertile ground for their keen interest in fallacies. Three of the four papers dealing here with the Western Middle Ages actually focus on issues directly related to Aristotle’s work on fallacies and its fortune in the Latin commentary tradition. The fourth paper shifts its attention to theology, another field which early on relied upon the analysis of fallacies as a formidable tool for ferreting doctrinal error out and defeating heretics.
Sten EBBESEN, Are the Fallacies Topoi? — Fallacies are said in many ways. It then stands to reason to address the issue of defining what a fallacy is to begin with. The way Latin commentators tackled the problem involved asking a question contemporary scholarship has largely passed over, namely whether or not the thirteen types or varieties of fallacies Aristotle introduced to tell spurious arguments apart are, in fact, as many topical patterns. While a closer look to the manuscript tradition reveals that the textual evidence is less clear-cut than modern editions of the Topics and the Sophistici Elenchi seem to suggest, the role fallaciae play in sophistical arguments is essentially the same as the role /oci hold in dialectical ones. This appears to be a safe assumption as far as Aristotle is concerned. More to the point, it was a basic tenet of mediaeval Latin understanding of fallacies. If we go along with the results of Sten Ebbesen’s extensive survey of ancient and mediaeval sources, then we might as well make the most of another largely neglected feature of mediaeval fallacy theories and reintroduce in the ongoing discussion about what fallacies are and how the play out the mediaeval notion of sophistical pseudo-maxims as opposed to (but closely related with) genuine dialectical maxims. If nothing else, fallacies understood in terms of sophistical axioms will help us with figuring out one of the most elusive feature fallacies confront us with, namely the hidden link between the way an argument fools us (what gives an argument its respectable appearance) and the way it actually goes sideways (what makes an argument defective, despite its good looks that is).
Costantino MARMO, The Fallacia Consequentis between Term Logic and Sentence Logic in its Medieval Reception — It’s a commonplace — albeit one Costantino Marmo disputes here — that a main difference between Modern logic, on the one hand, and Ancient as well as Mediaeval logic, on the other hand, has to do with the latter being essentially a logic of terms while the former deals first and foremost with propositions. A few well-known exceptions confirm the rule: the Stoics developed a propositional logic of sorts, Boethius’ tract on hypothetical syllogisms went in the same direction, so did a handful of medieval thinkers such as Peter Abelard in the first half of the twelfth century, Walter Burley at the turn of the fourteenth, as well as later authors of tracts on conmsequentiae. Costantino Marmo’s paper tells a different story, one which advocates further and more extensive revision of the standard narrative by following a thread from Aristotle to the late thirteenth century Latin reception of Aristotle’s work on fallacies, namely the question about what the fallacia consequentis is to begin with and how Mediaevals understood it. To contemporary ears, this fallacy conveys the idea of transgressing one rule or another of modus ponens (either by affirmation of the consequent, or by negation of the antecedent). However, as Costantino Marmo shows, this is only one of two possible interpretations of this kind of fallacies: while Aristotle definitely understood “consequent” as an accident or a property whose possession by a given subject is supposed to follow from the possession of another property or accident (consequent as a predicate), Boethius’ interpretation of the same fallacy paved the way for another reading focusing on conditional inferences between propositions instead (consequent as a proposition). The evolution of the alternate view may be traced back as early as the first reception of Aristotle’s Sophistici Elenchi and is well attested throughout the twelfth to the fourteenth century. Accordinagly, Costantino Marmo’s survey strongly supports the idea that propositional logic was not as foreign to medieval minds as it has been previously suggested.
Leone GAZZIERO, “Qui imperitus est vestrum, primus calculum omittat” Aristotelis Sophistici Elenchi 1 i2 the Boethian Tradition — The prologue of the Sophistici elenchi is about as close an Aristotelian text gets to dealing with language as a subject matter in its own right, only in reverse. Language and its features bear consideration to the extent that they account for some major predicaments discursive reasoning land itself into. That being said, the linguistic pitfalls that trick us into thinking that whatever goes for words and word-compounds is also the case for the things and facts linguistic expressions stand for reveal as much about good linguistic etiquette as they themselves are revealed by the principles and rules we abide by when arguing and discussing. In this connection, Aristotle resorted to a peculiar analogy between words and pebbles which plays a major role in explaining why language is both a tool we cannot dispense with and a powerful source of illusion and deception. In a nutshell, the untrained and the unwary are as easily misled by words as they are by counters, insofar as there’s no guarantee that both words, in the course of the same conversation, and counters, in the course of the same calculation, are always worth the same. As it happened, Aristotle’s Y#por disappeared from Boethius’ translation where one reads ‘calculations’ (compoti) and ‘numbers’ (zumeri) instead. This lead Latin commentators, who trusted Boethius’ translation implicitly and were well aware of Boethius’ views on disputational hazards as opposed to computational reliability, to understand Aristotle’s comparison as if it was an analogy in name only: while, on the one hand, reckoning numbers stand in an unambiguous relation with the reckoned things whose numbers they are and one has to work hard to get off track when crunching figures, many a word, on the other hand, stands in an ambiguous relation to the things it signifies and one has got to work hard to keep on track when dealing with linguistic items. This is still the standard story, but it is neither the only narrative nor the most compelling one Mediaeval commentators came up with. As a matter of fact, despite Boethius’ translation put them at a considerable disadvantage, at least two of them built a strong case in favour of another understanding of Aristotle’s pebble analogy, one which explains why Aristotle brought them together in the first place. This is how Anonymus Bavaricus and William of Ockham’s story goes: being two sets of symbolic variables which are neither entirely free nor entirely bound, words and counters are every bit as tricky. In fact, Aristotle’s analogy has no silver lining: everybody and everything fails — those who reckon and what they reckon with no less than those who argue and what they argue with. Simply put, failure is the whole point here, failure to spot subtle and yet disruptive shifts in the worth of counters and in the meaning of words which plague discussions and calculations alike.
Irene Catazzo, Theology, Fallacious Reasoning and Heresy on the Borders of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Some Remarks on the Fallaciae in theologia and Amalricians — In her paper, Irene Caiazzo studies the relationship between logic and theology in the Fallaciae in theologia, a late twelfth century anonymous tract discovered by Jean Leclerg in 1945, unedited to this day. Her survey of the manuscript tradition adds three witnesses to the seven known to date, one of which, a fifteenth-century Italian copy, attests that the treatise circulated well beyond the milieu of Parisian theological schools and faculies. As Irene Caiazzo shows, the Fallaciae in theologia are a remarkable text for the history of theories of argumentation on at least two counts. For one thing, it is an example of an independent treatise on fallacies — namely, a text that, although showing a certain familiarity with Aristotle’s Sophistici elenchi, is neither a commentary on the Aristotelian text nor a work in the vein of the contemporary growing logical literature on fallacies. Rather, the Fallaciae in theologia are a well reasoned transfer — as opposed to a mere compilation — of theoretical findings about the flaws of argumentation to another field, that of theological debate. For another, the Fallaciae in theologia help us better understand the way logic and theology interacted in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century: Aristotle analysis of argumentative failures, as expounded by earlier and contemporary commentators and master dialecticians, is called upon to explain, in fact refute on logical grounds the errors of the heretics, in this particular instance those of the sect of the Amalricians. For instance, the Anonymous author — in all likelihood a Parisian master, possibly from the circle of Peter the Chanter — saddled his Amalrician foes with two charges of fallacy of equivocation when they argue that charity is in this stone for the Holy Spirit is everywhere (to begin with, the noun ‘charity’ means in turn a virtue and its bearer; next, the preposition ‘in’ refers indiscriminately to essence and inherence).
4. Byzantine Tradition
The Byzantine philosophical and theological tradition is rife with references to fallacies, especially with allegations of spurious reasoning and sophistical argumentation. As a matter of fact, despite being of a mixed mind as to whether logical and philosophical training were an asset or a liability, Byzantine scholars were very keen on accusing each other of misusing arguments and syllogisms — as made clear by the like of Michael Psellos (d. after 1076), Nicholas of Methone (d. 1160/1166), Theodore I] Doukas Laskaris (d. 1258), Nicephorus Blemmydes (d. 1269-1272), Barlaam the Calabrian (d. 13.48), Gregory Palamas (d. 1359), Philotheus Kokkinos (d. ca. 1377), etc. who time and again aptly used and even explicitly praised fallacy theory as a powerful tool against questionable views in matters of reason and faith. Unsurprisingly, Aristotle’s treatment of fallacies provided the main framework and most of the tools for dismantling bad arguments. As it happens, while the materials related to the Sophistici elenchi have been thoroughly studied*, other influential texts of the Aristotelian corpus, as reflected in the Aristotelian exegetical tradition, have not yet received the attention they deserve. A case in point is Aristotle’s discussion of fallacies in Rhetoric I, 24 and its interpretation in two twelfth century commentaries — one anonymous, the other by the learned bishop of Trebizond, Stephanos Skylitzes.
Melpomeni Vocrarzi, Byzantine Treatments of Fallacy: The Reception of Aristotle’s Account — Both commentaries as well as other contemporary and later sources (Anonymous Heiberg’s logical compendium, John Italos’ treatise on syllogistic matter and construction, etc.) are discussed by Melpomeni Vogiatzi’s paper in this volume. Vogiatzi shows that the Byzantine commentary tradition focused primarily on the analysis of fallacies as material defects and paid special attention to the identification of the sources of deception (how a given fallacy escape our notice), which they sometime acknowledged as distinct from the sources of error (why a given fallacy is a flawed piece of argumentation). In this connection, Byzantine contribution to the theory of fallacies can hardly be dismissed as derivative or pedantic: Byzantine commentators had an exegetical agenda of their own and did much more than merely reproduce earlier lines of questioning and solutions.
5. Arabic Tradition
In his monumental new book on the formation of Post-Classical philosophy in Islam, Frank Griffel confirms and elaborates upon the fact that Islamicate thought in the twelfth century gave birth to a new, original philosophy — one which was ‘post-classical’ in the sense that it had moved well beyond the translated Greek materials, critically engaging with and building upon the foundational work of Muslim philosophers who would become the new ‘Ancients’: al-Farabi (d. 950) and Avicenna (d. 1037). In scale and influence, post-classical Islamic philosophy must be seen in terms similar to those used to account for Rationalism, German Idealism and British Empiricism. Griffel'® adopts the name commonly used by the practitioners of this new discipline, ikma (wisdom), a discipline that cannot be dismissed merely as rational theology (kalam) under another name; it is, rather, an autonomous though syncretic body of systematic thought with its own concepts and perspectives.
Given that concepts and perspectives are constituted by methods of argument, it is no surprise that these, too, show significant evolution in post-classical Islamic philosophy. Griffel’s insights should be completed by a thorough study of another post-classical development of the twelfth century which took place in among other places — the eastern school of Radi al-Din al-Nisabari (d. 54.4/1149), whose students, especially Rukn al-Din al-‘Amidi (d. 615/1218), promoted a fusion of Avicennian logic and a distinctly Islamic juristic dialectic called jadal or khilaf’”. The streamlining of this fusion takes on — somewhat later — a characteristic inflection in the “protocols of dialectical inquiry and disputantion” (adab albabth wa-l-munazara) of Shams al-Din al-Samarqandi (d. 722/1322), who writes in his Qistas al-afkar: “A custom of earlier scholars has been to append a section on dialectic (jadal) to the end of their logic books. But since, in our times, the science of juristic disagreement ( “ilm al-khilaf) has made this superfluous, I have put in its place rules for the protocols of dialectical inquiry (adab al-bahth) and its proper ordering (tartib), and for directing and cultivating proper discourse. <These protocols > are, for establishing and refining a position (al-taqrir wa-l-tahrir), like logic (mantiq) is for deliberation and reflection’.
The second part of al-Samarqandi’s concluding section is devoted to error and its causes (fi /-ghalat wa asbabihi, Qistas al-afkar)”; it corresponds in large part to the sections on fallacy theory in post-Avicennian logic texts. These post-Avicennian texts are already some distance from Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations, not least in leaving the intention of the interlocutor out of the equation; and the rules offered by al-Samargandi help the solitary thinker avoid error in her reflection. Al-Samargandi extends the coverage to deal with, among other things, a version of the Liar Paradox”. In short, by al-Samarqandi’s time we have come to a second current in Islamic philosophy, this time focused on argument theory, that draws on two genetically distinct traditions to produce a new, original and systematic body of thought about proper dialectical method. The two contributions relating to the Islamicate tradition in this volume bear witness to this kind of syncretic convergence, although one deals with a species of causal fallacy before hikma was born, while the other deals with a species of paradox after hikma’s formation and across subsequent centuries of its evolution.
Shahid RAHMAN / Walter E. YouNG, Outside the Logic of Necessity: Deontic Puzzles and ‘Breaking’ Compound Causal Properties in Islamic Legal Theory and Dialectic — Shahid Rahman and Walter E. Young discuss legitimate and illegitimate moves in arguments involving compound causal properties within Islamic juristic dialectic by two of the most important legal theorists of the 11 century CE. Their study examines an objection in Islamic juristic dialectic called kasr, or ‘breaking’ as treated by the dialecticians and legal theorists Abi Ishaq al-Shirazi (d. 1083 CE) and Aba |-Walid al-Baji (d. 1081 CE). The authors focus on the discourse of kasr, namely, the proper and improper paths to challenging and defending the causal components of a correlational argument (giyas) in which the ratio legis ( “illa) of the root-case’s ruling is a compound of two or more properties. The developmental history of this dialectical objection is complicated; long and heated controversies centered on which modes of kasr (and responses to kasr) were fallacious and which were not. There were even those who rejected kasr from the outset, some with arguments paralleling classical and medieval Latinate claims that one cannot refute an argument whose premises have a meaning i” sensu composito by the blunt separation of its parts.
Hassan REZAKHANY, A Forgotten Mereological Paradox — In one of the first studies of its kind in the burgeoning literature devoted to paradoxes in the Islamicate tradition, Hassan Rezakhany offers an example of how a mereological paradox involving concepts of totality — such as the totality (7ajmi‘) of all relations (nisab), discussed from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century by philosophers of the eastern Islamic world (Iraq to India) — provides yet further evidence against the old cliché that post-Avicennian Islamicate thought suffered a decline. Hassan Rezakhany’s paper (which includes an appendix with a number of passages never before translated) documents the most influential formulations of the paradox, solutions thereto, and objections to those solutions. In the ‘Historical Development’ section, it is argued that the paradox is ‘functionally equivalent’ to Russell’s. By functionally equivalent, the author means that “both paradoxes upset the same intuition: both show that not every object (or property) can be used
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to form a sound totality (or set, in Russell’s case)
6. Hebrew Tradition
Jewish concern with fallacious reasoning is as old as the Talmud, but the systematic analysis of fallacies begins with the appropriation of Aristotelian logic by Jewish thinkers, first in Arabic in the lands of Islam, and then in Hebrew in Southern Europe and the Byzantine/Ottoman empires. “The art of logic’, writes Moses Maimonides, “guards the rational faculty from committing errors, and guards speech from fallacy, through providing universal rules that enable external speech to conform to internal thought”™. Perhaps because of Maimonides’s warm recommendation of al-Farabi’s logical writings to his Hebrew translator in Provence, al-Farabi’s Fallacious Topics was one of the first philosophical works translated from the Arabic into Hebrew. It found a readership among the Jews of Southern France, Spain, and Italy during the high and late Middle Ages and was subsequently used by the Provengal intellectual, Joseph ibn Kaspi in his compendium of logic, A Bundle of Silver (1332). A much larger treatment of the fallacies was translated into Hebrew in 1313 by Kalonymos b. Kalonymos of Arles, Averroes’s Middle Commentary, or paraphrase, of the Sophisticis Elenchis. Few of Aristotle’s actual works were translated into Hebrew, so Averroes’s paraphrase became the standard presentation of the fallacies. Shortly after it was translated, an extensive commentary was written on the work by the fourteenth century polymath Levi b. Gershom (Gersonides), who wrote commentaries on almost of all of Averroes’s paraphrases available to him. Not only did Gersonides explain in detail Averroes’s treatment of the fallacies for budding Jewish intellectuals, but he also criticized and expanded that treatment.
At around the same time as Gersonides wrote his commentary, another Provengal Jewish scholar, Hezekiah bar Halafta composed a work on logic that made use of a gloss-commentary of Peter of Spain’s Summule Logicales, which marked the entrance of scholastic treatment of the fallacies into Jewish philosophical circles. This encounter with scholastic logic increased with additional translations of the Peter of Spain’s work into Hebrew, often replacing Peter’s De fallaciis with the Pseudo-Aquinas’s, De fallaciis ad quosdam nobiles artistas, a common substitution in Italy. Finally, one should mention the treatment of the fallacies in the work of a mid-fifteenth century Italian Jewish savant, Judah Messer Leon. Judah wrote for his students in Hebrew a compendium of logic, The Perfection of Beauty, similar to those studied at the universities in Bologna and Padua, which he may have attended, devoting two chapters to insolubles and fallacies. In short, the medieval Hebrew tradition of fallacies in the Middle Ages, though modest in comparison to the Arabic and Latin traditions, is interesting less, perhaps, for its originality than for it appropriation and adaption of the fallacies to a Jewish intellectual context, whether that be scriptural exegesis, philosophical argument, or Talmudic exegesis.
The articles in this collection are devoted to these three topics.
Charles H. MANEKIN, Fallacies and Biblical Exegesis — The Case of Joseph ibn Kaspi — The application of the doctrine of fallacies to scriptural exegesis was undertaken by Joseph Ibn Kaspi, who claimed that the Bible cannot be understood correctly without a proper grounding in grammar and logic. Charles H. Manekin shows how Kaspi drew upon his treatment of the fallacies in his logical compendium to explain difficult passages in the Bible. For example, in explaining how the Israelites were deceived by the Gibeonites into entering into a treaty with them (Joshua 9), he shows that the deception was based on the fallacy of the concomitant accident, i.e., the fallacious inference from the Gibeonites worn clothes and crumbling provisions that they had come from afar. Even Moses committed wellknown fallacies (intentionally) in his speeches to the Israelites for the sake of their welfare. In an appendix to the article Manekin provides an English translation of Kaspi’s section on fallacies from his logic compendium.
Aviram RaviTsky, Fallacies in Rabbinical Thought, in Medieval Jewish Philosophy, and in the Treatise on Talmudic Methodology by Abraham Elijah Cohen — As in the Islamic tradition, Jewish jurists discuss the place of legal fallacies and fallacious argumentation. In his contribution on the subject, Aviram Ravitsky provides examples of how the Talmud views fallacies as a useful heuristic device for sharpening the mind but bans them from practical legal reasoning and ruling. After considering the impact of the Aristotelian concept of fallacies in two Andalusian Jewish philosophers, Ravitsky turns to a late medieval commentary on the thirteen hermeneutical rules of R. Ishmael, the rules of inference by which rabbis were said to derive laws from scripture. With the penetration of philosophy and science into the intellectual world of the rabbis of Southern Europe, attempts were made to find parallels and even identities between these thirteen hermeneutical rules and Aristotelian rules of inference. The commentary, written by one Abraham Eliyahu Cohen, provides a formal analysis of the principles, which reveals his knowledge of Aristotelian logic. A large part of his treatment of a fortiori (gal va-homer) arguments is devoted to instructing the student on how to distinguish fallacious from valid arguments, and he constructs his analysis using terms and concepts taken from Aristotelian logic. Although this approach did not become a trend, much less a school, it is a testament to the impact of Aristotelian logic on Jewish legal writings.
Yehuda Hater, Are Zeno’s Paradoxes of Motion Fallacies? Evidence from the Hebrew Aristotelian Logical Tradition — One of the best-known fallacies in philosophy, at least according to Aristotle and his school, had to do with Zeno’s paradoxes of motion. Although Aristotle’s main treatment of the paradoxes is found in the Physics, the paradoxes were considered in the Arabic and Hebrew peripatetic traditions also in the Topics and the Sophistici Elenchi. Yehuda Halper suggests in his contribution that al-Farabi’s connected the paradoxes with widely held opinions, thus placing them in the context of dialectic, and this might have been due to the atomism that some of the Kalam theologians considered to provide a solution to the paradoxes. Halper traces the place of the paradoxes as dialectical fallacies in subsequent Arabic and Jewish thought, While Al-Farabi focused on the physical theory that would refute Zeno’s paradoxes, Averroes in his Middle Commentary on the Topics focused on the logical argumentation for making and refuting inductions; at least one later Jewish commentator preferred to revert to al-Farabi’s treatment.
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