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Proofs as Cognitive or Computational: Ibn Sı̄nā’s Innovations

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Abstract

We record the advances made by the eleventh century Persian logician Ibn Sina—known in the West as Avicenna—away from a purely cognitive view of proofs and towards a more computational view, and the kinds of consideration that led him to these advances. Some of Ibn Sina’s new logics, which stand somewhere between Aristotle’s categorical syllogisms and modern first-order logic, can serve as a kind of laboratory for testing what are the differences between Aristotelian and modern logic, and where these differences come from.

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Hodges, W. Proofs as Cognitive or Computational: Ibn Sı̄nā’s Innovations. Philos. Technol. 31, 131–153 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-016-0242-2

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