THE ARGUMENT FROM IGNORANCE AND ITS CRITICS IN MEDIEVAL ARABIC THOUGHT

Abstract

Abstract The earliest debate on the argument from ignorance emerged in Islamic rational theology around the fourth/tenth century, approximately seven centuries before John Locke identified it as a distinct type of argument. The most influential defences of the epistemological principle that ‘that for which there is no evidence must be negated’ are encountered in Muʿtazilī sources, particularly ʿAbd al-Jabbār and al-Malāḥimī who argue that without this principle scepticism will follow. The principle was defended on different grounds by some earlier Ashʿarīs, but was then rejected by al-Juwaynī, and was eventually classed as a fallacy by Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī whose Nihāyat al-ʿuqūl contains the most definitive and comprehensive refutation of classical kalām epistemology and the first ever defence of Aristotelian logic in a kalām summa. According to the eighth/fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldūn, this debate provided the main impetus for the philosophical turn that Ashʿarism took during the sixth/twelfth century.

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