is not true. They call a syllogism in which one premise has been omitted an enthymeme, and say that the premise may be omitted because it is already known, by mistake, or to mislead. The response is this: if it is known, it is like any other known premise. In that case, there is no greater justification for leaving one premise implicit than for leaving two, three, or four implicit. If, in an argument requiring only one premise, one may claim that another premise has been left implicit and omitted, then, in an argument requiring two, one may claim that a third has been omitted; the same applies to an argument requiring three. There is no limit to this. Anyone who reflects on this will find it to be so.

This is why eloquent masters of expression, who establish demonstrations and conclusive arguments in the clearest terms, do not employ two premises in their discourse as frequently as logicians do. Rather, anyone who follows the logicians’ method becomes one of those who constrict the path to knowledge in both thought and expression. Their meanings are of a piece with their wording: one finds in them a feebleness and clumsiness that no rational person would accept.

Ya‘qūb ibn Ishāq al-Kindī was the philosopher of Islam in his day. I mean a philosopher living within the Islamic world; otherwise, the philosophers are not Muslims. Thus, people once asked one of the eminent judges of our time, “Is Ibn Sīnā one of the philosophers of Islam?” He replied, “Islam has no philosophers.”

In the course of his discourse, Ya‘qūb would say, “Nonexistence is the absence of the existence of such-and-such,” and use similar constructions. If anyone finds eloquence or rhetorical excellence in some of his discourse, as one finds in some of the discourse of Ibn Sīnā and others, this is due to what he acquired from Muslims, from their thought and expression. Otherwise, were he to follow the method of his predecessors and turn away from what he had learned from Muslims,