Small 4to. [220], Arabic text neatly hand written, 18 lines to the page, tables, some key words written in red, contemporary full stamped calf, lightly rubbed, light damp stains to margins of few pages, otherwise a very good copy, inscribed 30 March, 1865.

Synopsis

Najam al-Din al-Qazwini al-Khatibi (d.1276) was an Islamic philosopher and logician. His most important work is this work on logic. It was commonly used as the first major text on logic in madrasas, until the twentieth century and is “perhaps the most studied logical textbook of all time”. Al-Katibi’s logic was largely inspired by the formal Avicennian system of temporal modal logic, but is more elaborate and departs from it in several ways. While Avicenna considered ten modalities and examined six of them, al-Katibi considered many more modalized propositions and examined thirteen which he believed were “customary to investigate”.