Avicenna on the Law of Non-contradiction

Abstract

Aristotle gave seven arguments for the law of non-contradiction. The first one is against a special case of dialetheism, the view that only some contradictions are true, and other six arguments are mostly against trivialism, the view that everything and consequently every contraction is true. Aristotle never argued that dialetheism entails trivialism. Unlike Aristotle, Avicenna, in his defense of LNC, not only considers trivialism and argues against it, but also argues that dialetheism entails trivialism. The argument that dialetheism entails trivialism is called explosion. It is usually known that the first argument for explosion is given by the twelfth century logician William of Soissons. In this paper, we will meet Avicenna’s different argument for explosion and then I will demonstrate that this argument is a non-sequitur.