“A Discipline or Part of a Discipline”: Logic on the Border of Metaphysics and Psychology in Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Šifāʾ

Avicenna’s ground-breaking view of logic as both a tool for other sciences and a science in its own right has already attracted the scholars’ attention and has been studied under several different respects. The present paper aims to address a specific issue entailed by considering logic as a science in its own right: that is, assessing the relation in which logic as a science stands to the other sciences, and particularly to metaphysics and psychology. The inquiry will focus on a fundamental, yet tricky, passage of chapter I.4 of Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Madḫal, the opening work of his most comprehensive philosophical summa, the Kitāb al-Šifāʾ. Due to the obscurity of some of Avicenna’s references, chapter I.4 ‘on the subject-matter of logic’ has stimulated from the Middle Ages to nowadays numerous attempts at interpretation. In the paper, I will attempt to provide a new reading of the chapter in light of Avicenna’s definition of the epistemological status of science in Burhān II.7.