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PaperclipPerfector  23hr ago (text post)   707 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 27, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up al-Katibi's The Rules of Logic, an apparently influential Arabic logic primer. The book itself is actually quite short, with the commentary by the translator taking up the majority of the pages.

It has recently been said of Peter of Spain’s Summaries of Logic, probably written in the 1230s, that no other book on logic prior to the twentieth century had such wide readership or, in consequence, did so much to shape Western ways of constructing well-formed sentences and putting them together in valid arguments. But perhaps one other logic text has had just as many readers, and as profound an impact on ways of formal discourse and argument. In the Muslim East, al-Risālah al-Shamsiyyah (literally The Epistle [on Logical Rules] for Shams al-Dīn) was written some forty years after the Summaries, by someone who was Peter’s exact contemporary: Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī (d. 675/1276). Al-Risālah al-Shamsiyyah also came to figure in the education of nearly every aspiring young scholar, and is still read in traditional schools.

No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz.

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