The church state nexus led to an enormous amount of false history, for the priest ruled with the help of lies.
During the Crusades the church adopted reason (not much mention of it in the Bible). The Crusades (after the first) were military failures, therefore, the church adopted reason, as an artifice to be able to convert Muslims, and grab their wealth.
The church actually learned about reason from Muslims, particularly Ibn Rushd (Averroes, whose books were used as texts in Western universities for centuries). Ibn Rushd speaks only of “the philosopher”, but the priests spread the lie that this “philosopher” was “Aristotle”, an early Greek hence “friend of the church”, like the non-existent Euclid. This lie was essential to portray “Aristotle” as theologically correct and enable the church to adopt reason. (Islamic thinkers routinely conflated “Neoplatonic” or sufi philosophers like Plotinus, and Proclus with “Arasto”, and valued the “theology of Aristotle” (or “paganism”), contrary to church dogmas.)
At any rate, Christian priests spread the falsehood that logic began with Aristotle (the way they spread the falsehood that math began with Euclid). To highlight the confusion involved, I have separated the fabricated 12th c. “Aristotle of Toledo” from the historical “Aristotle of Stagira”, Alexander’s tutor and possible recipient of the books that Alexander looted from Persia and Egypt, and got translated into Greek.The story that the Arabic books at Toledo originated from early Greece is a church and racist lie for which there is no evidence.
For any knowledge to develop, the social conditions must be there, and the social conditions provide evidence to the contrary. Indeed, there was no tradition among early Greeks of any long debates, so no need for anyone to develop a syllogism. Aristotle, like Socrates, risked being condemned to death: the usual early Greek way of settling an argument. In contrast, in India there were fierce debates between Buddhist and Jains, or Buddhists and Naiyayikas etc. In India, people debated with each other to establish truth, and did not simply kill their opponents in the manner of early Greeks and the medieval church. Because of these social conditions, all Indian schools developed elaborate syllogisms to put their point across effectively.
Now, “Aristotle of Toledo”, i.e., Arabic literature in the 12th c., comes long after the spread of Indian knowledge to Arabs, in the 8th c. Hence, I have repeatedly pointed out
possible Indian inputs to that knowledge in Arabic texts wildly attributed to early Greeks by dishonest church and racist historians (e.g. in astronomy and “trigonometry”). In 2008, in an essay on logic for an encyclopedia (see reference below), I argued that the Indian Nyaya syllogism could have been similarly mis-attributed to Aristotle (the Jain and Buddhist syllogisms were different).
Why did people believe the foolish stories told by church priests, without checking them? Because they were indoctrinated to trust only what the priest had approved. Likewise, the colonised mind never checks the facts, and only believes what is endorsed by the West: that is it should be mixed with appropriate falsehoods to preserve the falsehoods earlier told by the West.
Not able to stick to the silly story that logic originated with Aristotle, the West has now taken up the task of falsifying my critique by playing some more with history. The email reproduced below tells the story. I am reproducing it publicly since these fellows did not have the courtesy to respond to it so they may quite possibly have an underlying church or racist agenda to preserve false history.
———————-
Monday, May 18, 2020
To:Jens Lemanski
<jens.lemanski@fernuni-hagen.de>
Cc:max@uni-leipzig.de
Dear Dr Lemanski,
This refers to your mail (copied below) to Hopos mailing list.
I must admit I am amused by this belated recognition among Western scholars that logic existed from before Aristotle of Stiagira (wrongly conflated with Aristotle of Toledo, without evidence).
- See, C. K. Raju, “Logic”, in Encyclopedia of Non-Western Science, Technology and Medicine, ed. Helaine Selin, Springer, 2008, 2014, 2016. pp. 2564–2570.
Of course, I have been raising this point abut logic and math from much earlier.
-
“Mathematics and Culture”, in History, Culture and Truth: Essays Presented to D. P. Chattopadhyaya, ed. Daya Krishna and K. Satchidananda Murthy, Kalki Prakash, New Delhi, 1999, 179–193.
-
“Computers, Mathematics Education, and the Alternative Epistemology of the Calculus in the YuktiBhāā”, Philosophy East and West, 51:3 (2001) 325–362.
-
Cultural Foundations of Mathematics: the nature of mathematical proof and the transmission of calculus from India to Europe in the 16th c. CE, Pearson Longman, 2007.
Of course, the belief that logic is metaphysical and metamathematical, and decided by authority, is one with which I disagree. I had even earlier argued that the nature of logic (in the real world) depends upon the nature of time; hence quantum logic, at the microphysical level, is quasi truth-functional. (Schrodinger’s cat can be both alive and dead at one instant of time.) See
-
C. K. Raju, Time: Towards a Consistent Theory, Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, 1994. (Fundamental theories of physics, vol. 65.)
For a quick account of how Buddhist logic is quasi truth-functional and gives rise to quantum probabilities, see
-
CKR, “Probability in Ancient India”, Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, vol 7, Philosophy of Statistics, ed. Prasanta S. Bandyopadhyay and Malcolm R. Forster. General Editors: Dov M. Gabbay, Paul Thagard and John Woods. Elsevier, 2011, pp. 1175–1196.
An account of why I disagree with Haldane’s account of Jain logic as three valued, and Kothari’s attempt to incorporate it into an interpretation of quantum mechanics, see
In particular, as I pointed out in passing long ago, with reference to Udyotkara, that Buddhists and Naiyayikas debated inconclusively across 1500 years, because they had different notions of time, hence logic. (Nyaya logic is two-valued.)
-
CKR, “Time in Indian and Western Traditions and Time in Physics.” In: Mathematics, Astronomy and Biology in Indian Tradition, PHISPC Monograph Series on History of Philosophy, Science, and Culture in India, No. 3 (D. P. Chattopadhyaya and Ravinder Kumar eds) ICPR, New Delhi (1995) 56–93.
Therefore, there is no such thing as “Indian” logic in the singular. Alas, in the English language, “logics” is ungrammatical! And “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”.
And, of course, the long-standing belief in Western thought that deductive proofs are infallible, is a completely wrong idea.
All best,
C. K. Raju
On Wednesday, May 13, 2020, 11:12:24 AM GMT+5:30, Jens Lemanski <jens.lemanski@fernuni-hagen.de> wrote:
We’re pleased to announce a CfP for the edited volume “History of Logic and its modern Interpretation”.
Editors: Jens Lemanski (FernUniversität in Hagen) and Ingolf Max (Universität Leipzig).
*******************************************************
With the rise of early 20th century logic, the history of logic was long regarded as an outdated discipline that could no longer contribute to current developments and ideas. The gap between traditional syllogistics and the mathematical or philosophical logic of the early 20th century looked too wide. Some authors simply divided the history of their discipline into two areas: the old and the new logic.
In recent decades, however, researchers have often shown that there are old logics with enormous potential: numerous modern systems in the field of visual reasoning are based on the Aristotelian square of opposition, on the arbor porphyriana or on Euler’s logic diagrams. In Arabic logic the consequence relations show alternatives to modern approaches. Today, Indian logic is often associated with paraconsistency and dialetheism, and in the field of natural language processing, medieval logicians are increasingly used to circumvent the artificiality of many modern systems. In modal logic, Aristotelian and scholastic logics are again increasingly discussed. And in early modern period unique propositional calculi and extended syllogistics are discovered frequently, which pose challenges to interpretation. All this proves that `the old logic’ is still full of new ideas and that current research has to rethink how to rewrite the history of logic in modern terms.
*******************************************************
CALL FOR PAPERS.
Papers on all aspects of research in the history of logic and its modern interpretation are welcome. Papers are expected to have a historical reference and present a modern interpretation of it. Here is a non-exhaustive list of possible historical topics:
– Aristotelian Logic
– Stoic Logic
– Neoplatonic Logic
– Indian Logic
– Arabic Logic
– Medieval Logic
– (Early) Modern Logic
– 19th century Logic
– 20th century Logic
Modern interpretations are meant in the broadest sense, e.g. reassessment or further thinking of historical ideas, connection to modern debates etc. We also welcome submissions that address the methods, goal and purpose of writing history of logic today.
*******************************************************
*Only PDF files will be accepted for review.
*Submissions must be prepared for blind-review.
*Please include a separate PDF file as a cover page with your name, the title of your submission, your current academic affiliation and your e-mail address.
*Deadline: November 2nd, 2020
*If possible, use the LaTeX style ifcolog.cls. All other formats are also accepted for review.
*******************************************************
Accepted papers will be included in the first volume of the new book series “Historia Logicae” published by College Publication. For further details see
http://collegepublications.co.uk/HL/
—
