Falsafa

Comma for either/or — dharma, courage. Spelling forgiving — corage finds courage.

    logic · 4th century BCE · 2 crossings

    Topics

    ΤοπικάTopika

    Aristotle, in Greek

    Aristotle's manual of dialectic: how to argue from accepted opinions without contradicting yourself. Exactly the tool a caliph needed for staged interreligious debate, which is how it got its Arabic commission.

    The chain

    c. 350 BCE Greek original

    written by Aristotle in Athens

    1. c. 660–687 Greek Syriac translation attested

      translated by Athanasius of Balad

      Sixth-century Syriac logic had stopped at the early Prior Analytics, following the Alexandrian curriculum. Athanasius, trained at the monastery of Qenneshre, completed the Syriac Organon under Umayyad rule, a century before anyone needed it in Arabic.

      1. c. 782 Syriac Arabic translation attested

        translated by Timothy I and Abu Nuh al-Anbari commissioned by al-Mahdi in Baghdad

        Commissioned by the caliph for staged interreligious debate. Timothy's surviving letters show him asking fellow clerics to search the Mar Mattai monastery library for Syriac versions and commentaries on the later Organon. The Syriac exemplar is presumed to be Athanasius of Balad's version, the only one known; Timothy does not name it.

        • Gutas 1998 the episode documented from Timothy's own correspondence