Dialogical Foundations of Logic According to Afzal al-Din Kashani

Abstract

Afzal al-Din Kashani’s works on logic have not been that much studied neither by the sucssedant logicians in the tradition nor by the contemporary researchers, although his philosophical work is recently rediscovered for its innovative and revolutionary views. In this paper, I wish to extract some of the insights in those works with respect to the foundations of logic and show the link between them and the overall philosophy of Afzal al-Din. My main thesis is that Afzal al-Din's philosophy has to be understood as a kind of subjectivism whose main theme is self-consciousness. Subjectivism would have specific impacts on logic, and offers interpretations of logical concepts which are different from the conceptions offered by realism, which takes an extensionalist approach with respect to the foundations of logic.In this paper, I discuss the non-extensionalist, in particular the dialogical, explanation of the foundations of logic offered by Afzal al-Din Kashani.