خلاصة:
This article argues that medieval Christian and Muslim scholarship
employed Greek dialectic to differing purposes. Greek dialectic
aims to defeat an opponent by exposing logical contradictions;
Christian scholarship claims to use the dialectic to search for the
truth in a pedagogical setting; and Muslim scholarship employs it
to arrive at the truth with a degree of certainty. As a result, this
article further argues, Greek dialectic in Christian and Muslim
contexts undergoes some modifications. In the Christian context,
dialectic serves a didactical purpose, which is to find the truth that
resides in the mind of the teacher. In the Islamic context, Greek dialectic
is employed to find epistemological (qaṭʿī) or psychological
(ghalabat al-ẓann) certainty in religious knowledge.
ملخص الجهاز:
Aristotelian Dialectic, Medieval Jadal, and Medieval Scholastic Disputation Mohammad Syifa Amin Widigdo Abstract This article argues that medieval Christian and Muslim scholar ship employed Greek dialectic to differing purposes.
Greek dialec tic aims to defeat an opponent by exposing logical contradictions; Christian scholarship claims to use the dialectic to search for the truth in a pedagogical setting; and Muslim scholarship employs it to arrive at the truth with a degree of certainty.
Widigdo completed his degree in the Department of Reli gious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, with a dissertation on Imam al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī’s theory of jadal (dialectic) and its relation to Sunnī or thodoxy formation in medieval Islam.
Furthermore, regarding the search for truth that becomes the central concern of medieval Muslim jadal and Christian scholastic disputation, such studies tend not to elaborate how truth itself is perceived in Greek dialectic, then to undergo a certain alteration and appropriation when taken up by the later traditions.
Medieval Jadal: Praiseworthy Dialectic in Islamic Context Arabs and Muslims practiced debate and disagreement centuries before their encounter with Aristotle’s dialectical works.
169/785) ordered a translation of Aristotle’s book Top ics in 165/782, he then asked Muslim theologians to refute arguments of heretics and skeptics by incorporating dialectic (jadal) into their scholarly practices and works.
Dialectical questions, the philosophers argued, are those questions that start from accepted premises (endoxa) and aim to make the opponent fall into an inconsistent argument.