Abstract

We record the advances made by the eleventh century Persian logician Ibn Sina—known in the West as Avicenna—away from a purely cognitive view of proofs and towards a more computational view, and the kinds of consideration that led him to these advances. Some of Ibn Sina’s new logics, which stand somewhere between Aristotle’s categorical syllogisms and modern first-order logic, can serve as a kind of laboratory for testing what are the differences between Aristotelian and modern logic, and where these differences come from.