Alfarabi’s Introduction to the Five Rational Arts : Scientific Demonstration, Dialectic, Sophistry, Rethoric and Poetry

“Al-Fārābī’s Introduction to the Five Rational Arts – Scientific Demonstration, Dialectic, Sophistry, Rhetoric and Poetry.” In the Arabic-speaking world, al-Fārābī (d. AD 950) gained the reputation of being “the Second Teacher” (المعلّم الثّاني), the first teacher being Aristotle. Only recently have the reasons for al-Fārābī’s magisterial position been more adequately explored and articulated, in, for example, the scholarship of Muhsin Mahdi and others. In a series of books forming introductions and commentaries on Aristotle’s Organon, al-Fārābī reveals not only his absorption of the thought of the Sagirite, but these books show his ability to rearticulate Aristotle’s intention in critical and decisive ways. For example, in these books al-Fārābī presents logic as central to all of the five arts, a strategy noted and recommended by Ibn Khaldūn in the fourteen century. These arts al-Fārābī calls syllogistic or rational because they are the most accurate ways of inference between cause and effect in those arts which are made in speech. Although all of these arts, demonstration, dialectic, sophistry, rhetoric and poetry, produce varying degrees of certainty and have different purposes, they share, according to al-Fārābī, in being rational and all are necessary for the attainment of happiness for the individual and for the community. Even poetry and rhetoric are amongst these arts of right reasoning. The purpose of this presentation is to provide a glimpse of the comprehensive vision of these five arts which, in the modern university, continue to shape what counts as argumentation in science, as the best uses and examples of language and literature, and as what is necessary for the harmonious governance of the just and beautiful regime. We will illustrate al-Fārābī’s teachings by reference in particular to one of his introductory books, The Five Aphorisms (الفصول الخمسة).