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Article: The Islamic roots of the poetic syllogism.
- Article from:
- College Literature
- Article date:
- February 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 West Chester University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In the Poetics, Aristotle scarcely mentions the syllogism. Yet centuries later, during the classical flowering of Medieval islamic scholarship, the Aristotelian commentators Al-Farabi and Avicenna elaborated complex theories of the poetic syllogism based on Aristotle's Poetics.(1) O.B. Hardison argues that this "warped interpretation"(2) of Aristotle's poetic theories can be explained by the "context theory," according to which the Arabs' erroneous placement of the Poetics within the Organon (an error they inherited from late Greek neo-Platonist scholars by way of the Syriac Christian versions of Aristotle which formed the basis for Arab translations) caused them to ...
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