The present study on al-Dīn Suhrawardī's Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq, develops some preliminary explorations on his logic under the background of his remarkable epistemology of pis some witness of d resence. The paper paves the way for responding to the challenges of Tony Street on the compatibility of Suhrawardī's critique of Ibn Sīnā with the development of a temporal and modal syllogism that at first sight seems quite close to that of Ibn Sīnā. In fact, Suhrawardī's modalities are to be understood as (...) the different ways a predicate relates to its subject rather than as propositional operators. Accordingly, necessarily necessary modality relates actual instances (presences) of the Subject-Term with actual (presences) of the Predicate-Term; in contrast, necessarily contingent modality relates these terms conditionally, notably involving states of the Subject-Term within time intervals. Suhrawardī's main innovation, so we claim, is the explicit dialectical role presences or actual instances have in his modal-temporal logic, and particularly so in shaping his notion of contingency that admits both a generic and an individual or de re form of plenitude. (shrink)

Despite the fact that it has been more than 40 years since Henry Corbin and Hossein Ziai pointed out that the work of Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī (549/1155, 587/1191) has not yet been systematically studied, a thorough investigation of his work is still in its infancy. The present brief study, which aims to contribute to filling such a gap by further developing some of the points contained in Rahman & Seck's (2022) paper, articulates some remarks on the relevance of Suhrawardī's epistemology (...) of presence for contemporary studies on temporal logic. More specifically, we will focus our brief presentation on the fruitfulness of his postulate of the priority of experience of immediate knowledge discussed in the Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq and how this postulate is related to the concept of self-consciousness (وعي الذاتي).Thus the particularity of this study is that Suhrawardī's epistemology of presence, unlike contemporary temporal logic developed for example by Prior, emphasizes the temporalization of the instantiation of an event or the performance of an act rather than of the propositions that express that event or act. Moreover, in Suhrawardī's modal syllogistic, there is an analysis of contingency that differs from most contemporary authors and that also involves several dimensions of time. More generally, Suhrawardī's notion of direct knowledge offers new insights into the logical and ontological status of the now. (shrink)

In the present article we explore the possibilities of applying Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī's (549/1155 - 587/1191) epistemology of presence outside its own historical and systematic context. Indeed, we are convinced that Suhrawardī's ideas on temporality and modality are not only fruitful for analysing the work of his predecessors, but also offer new avenues for an epistemological understanding of logic – that is, a perspective in which logic is conceived as the theory and method of acquiring knowledge through demonstration. As noted (...) in the conclusion, the approach offers a new deontic logic that can be generalised for ethical and legal contexts beyond Islamic thought. (shrink)