Abstract
Despite its position in an introductory work to logic, the account of continuity presented by Abū Naṣr Al-Fārābī in his paraphrase of Aristotle’s Categories is apparently even less accessible to the beginner than Aristotle’s original. This is in part because Al-Fārābī integrated elements of the accounts of continuity in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics into an account mainly derived from Aristotle’s Categories. While Al-Fārābī’s account chiefly follows Aristotle’s Categories 6 in describing a continuous object that can be divided into parts with a shared boundary, it borrows the terminology of limits from Physics 5 and the notion of quantity as divisible into its parts from Metaphysics 5.13. In doing so, Al-Fārābī defines continuity using a notion of a limit without determining whether or not it was part of the continuous quantity. This definition could also accommodate atomists, since it would work even if the limit were an atom or several atoms that were part of the continuous object. The broadness of this definition is probably intended to allow students of logic who may have atomist tendencies to accept the account of quantity in the categories tradition, even though they may not be ready to reject atomism until after studying physics.
Original language | English |
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Journal | British Journal for the History of Philosophy |
DOIs | |
State | Accepted/In press - 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2024 BSHP.
Keywords
- Aristotle
- categories
- continuity
- limits
- quantity