Hence, when one of them happens to be intelligent yet pursues the sciences by the path of the logicians, he becomes verbose and cramped, strained and affected; his utmost achievement is to state the obvious and clarify what is already plain to anyone not tongue-tied. Worse, the exercise may plunge him into various forms of sophistry from which God has spared those who have avoided their method.

They themselves relate, for example, that the philosopher Yaʿqūb ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī once said in debate, “This belongs to the category of the loss of non-existence.” Ponder such long-winded, awkward phrases! They abound in their writings, even in the works of their best latecomers—though he is indeed the best of them and the most articulate.

Their forced efforts at definitions are no less telling. They will, for instance, define man—or the sun—by saying of the sun: “It is a star that appears in the daytime.” Who but the most ignorant would give such a definition? Is anything more obvious to humankind than the sun, that one should define it by something else? As for the person who does not know the word, the remedy is simple translation—which is not the sort of definition they praise. If, however, he has never seen the sun because he is blind, he cannot see daytime or the stars in any case; still, he will inevitably hear people speak of it in ways that make its reality known without recourse to their procedure.

They themselves concede that the first figure of the categorical syllogism suffices for all syllogistic forms, and that casting it into schematic diagrams is a purely theoretical pastime that no one needs to study under them. Indeed, rational inference has no need to be conceived in the manner they claim.

SECTION
Refuting their statement: “Reasoning necessarily requires two and only two premises.”