They also maintain that in what they call an “enthymeme” one of the two premises is merely suppressed. A syllogism from which one premise has been omitted, they label an enthymeme, asserting that the premise may be left out either because it is already known, or through inadvertence, or in order to deceive.

We reply: if the premise is indeed known, it is no different from any other known premise; and in that case there is no more justification for suppressing one premise than for suppressing two, three, or even four. For if someone may claim, with respect to an argument that truly needs only one premise, that a second premise is merely implicit, he may likewise claim, in an argument that needs two premises, that a third has been omitted, and so on with an argument that needs three. There is no limit to this, and anyone who reflects carefully will see the matter exactly thus.

The weakness and stammering that mark the language of the logicians. Hence, in the speech of the eloquent masters of expression—those who establish decisive proofs in the clearest terms—you will not find the constant resort to two-premise constructions that fills the writings of the logicians. Whoever adopts their method merely constricts the path of knowledge, both in intellect and in tongue. Their meanings are of a piece with their words: full of weakness and hesitation to a degree no rational person would approve.

Yaʿqūb ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī was dubbed “the philosopher of Islam” in his day—that is, a philosopher who happened to live among Muslims, for philosophers themselves are not Muslims. (When some leading judges of our own time were told that Ibn Sīnā was one of the “philosophers of Islam,” one of them retorted, “Islam has no philosophers.”) Al-Kindī would say, in the midst of his discourse, phrases such as “on account of the non-absence of the existence of such-and-such” and other similar constructions.

If one comes across passages of eloquence or rhetorical grace in his writings—or in those of Ibn Sīnā and the like—it is only because they benefited from Muslims, borrowing from their intellects and their language. Had they followed the path of their predecessors and turned away from what they learned from the Muslims, their thought and speech would have resembled those earlier minds and tongues.

The confusion that logic breeds in people who have not grasped its realities. Most of the logicians’ effort, therefore, is expended on audiences incapable of understanding their discourse, yet who venerate them out of sheer ignorance and illusion.