Hany Moubarez

Issue: 9:1 (the thirty third issue)

What are Arabic and Islamic philosophy and sciences? How and where did they come about? I am trying in this preface to provide a short and brief answer to those two questions. Having done this, I sketch the contents of five papers trying to study Arabic and Islamic philosophy and sciences from its perspective to method and truth.

Issue: 9:1 (the thirty third issue)

Most historians and philosophers of philosophy and history of mathematics hold one interpretation or the other of the nature of the method of analysis and synthesis in itself and in its historical development. In this paper, I am trying to prove – through three points – that, in fact, there were two understandings of that method in Greek Mathematics and philosophy, and which were reflected in Arabic mathematical science and philosophy; this reflection is considered as proof also of this double nature of that method. Thus, we have to rethink the nature of Arabic philosophy systems.

Issue: 14:1 (The fifty-second issue)

For a long time, it was believed in Assyriology and related disciplines that šumma sentences, or grammatical conditionals, which appeared in cuneiform texts and tablets of astrology, exorcism, law, extispicy, oneiromancy, medicine, and divination, were linguistic expressions of logical conditionals. F. Rochberg (2010; 2016) extended this belief, suggesting that they are even material conditionals. Andrew Schumann (2017; 2020; 2021) followed this, claiming that, as a result, we can trace the origin of symbolic logic in cuneiform writings, through which it moved to Greece. In this paper, after presenting this approach, I will challenge it by showing that šumma/IF sentences and similar constructs in cuneiform literature are arguments or implications that suffer from the same confusion between conditional and implication that Quine (1953/1966) highlighted when criticizing C.I. Lewis. Keywords: logic, conditional, implication, cuneiform texts, argument, Babylonian science, šumma