Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, Room 201, 6 Divinity Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138
Najm al-Din al-Katibi (d. 1276) wrote a logic text for intermediate students, The Epistle on Logical Rules for Shams al-Din. It became wildly successful, read by most students in the course of their madrasah education. What made it such a bestseller? Some of Katibi's readers went on to deal with immeasurably more difficult texts like Afdal al-Din al-Khunaji's Disclosure of Secrets from the Obscurities of Thought. How did the Shamsiyyah prepare them for dealing with advanced topics in research on logic? The talk offers some...