“If a conclusive proof really existed, he certainly produced none.”

He continued, “Whatever Aristotle spoke of in this regard is neither extant nor acknowledged.”

He also said, “As for the two remaining figures that Aristotle listed, they are not employed in the form he laid down. Should they become valid only by inverting their premises so that they revert to the first figure, then whatever we have said about the first figure applies equally to them.”

He made further remarks that are not relevant here. His point is that all the other figures yield their conclusions only after being reduced to the first figure—whether by reductio ad absurdum, which affirms a proposition by refuting its negation, or by using the judgment of the contradictory of the proposition, its simple converse, or the converse of its contradictory. Setting out those figures and explaining how they function is laborious and unnecessary, for the first figure can accommodate every affirmative or negative, universal or particular matter. Since we have already shown that the first figure is of no real benefit, it follows a fortiori that its offshoots—useful solely when reduced to it—are even less beneficial.

The point here is that this community—praise be to God—has always contained people who discern the falsehood in the discourse of the people of falsehood and refute it. Through the guidance God has granted them, they agree—without partisan collusion or prior arrangement—on accepting the truth and rejecting falsehood, both in conviction and in proclamation.

Refuting their claim that theoretical conclusions require two premises

What these critics have observed accords with what we have explained: a syllogism contains two premises, a minor and a major. The major is the more general, the minor more specific, as when one says, “Every nabīdh is wine, and every wine is unlawful.” The contested nabīdh is more specific than wine, and wine is more specific than what is unlawful. The first is the minor term, the last is the major term, and the term that recurs in both premises is the middle term. The upshot of the syllogism is merely to place a particular under a universal.

It is obvious that whoever knows the universal knows that it embraces its particulars, though he may overlook the inclusion of some individual