Le kitāb al-Taḥlīl d'Alfarabi

Abstract

In a departure from the tradition of the Neoplatonic commentators of the Organon, the sequence of summaries in the “Bratislava series” insert two treatises between the Prior Analytics and the Posterior Analytics, namely the Resolution (kitāb al-Taḥlīl) and the Sophistical Refutations. And even though the Taḥlīl is concerned with Book 2 of the Topics, it does not deal with dialectic. Instead, it comments on the summary of the Topics that belongs to the Prior Analytics (I, 27–30), while “completing” it. The contents of kitāb al-Taḥlīl and the different titles that the fahāris give it (e.g., fīiktisăb al-muqaddimāt), lead one to realize that it is an addition to the Prior Analytics offering a theory concerning the generation of the premisses of the syllogism, something that may have appeared to Alfarabi as missing from Kitāb al-Qiyās.