Being Another Way : The Copula and Arabic Philosophy of Language, 900–1500

Abstract

In Being Another Way, Dustin Klinger recounts the history of how medieval Arabic philosophers in the Islamic East grappled with the logical role of the copula “to be,” an ambiguity that has bedeviled Western philosophy from Parmenides to the analytic philosophers of today. Working from within a language that has no copula, a group of increasingly independent Arabic philosophers began to critically investigate the semantic role that Aristotle, for many centuries their philosophical authority, invested in the copula as the basis of his logic. Drawing on extensive manuscript research, Klinger breaks through the thicket of unstudied philosophical works to demonstrate the creativity of postclassical Islamic scholarship as it explored the consequences of its intellectual break with the past. Against the still widespread view that intellectual ferment all but disappeared during the period, he shows how these intellectuals over the centuries developed and refined a sophisticated philosophy of language that speaks to core concerns of contemporary linguistics and philosophy. “Dustin Klinger’s study of medieval Arabic and Islamic views of the copula is remarkable on a number of counts: its historical range, the number of sources it incorporates, and its engagement with modern philosophical discussions of the analysis of propositions. It is a significant contribution to the field of Arabic-Islamic philosophy and logic.” — KHALED EL-ROUAYHEB, Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard University “In this wide-ranging study, Klinger looks at an issue that was pivotal in both ancient Greek and medieval Arabic philosophy. An important contribution to the exciting fields of logic and the philosophy of language in the Islamic world.” PETER ADAMSON, Professor of Philosophy at LMU Munich