ABSTRACT
This first portion deals with the fundamental nature of the philosophy of science, where two major ideas are developed. The first is Abū’l-Barakāt’s negation of the reigning Aristotelian conception of what comprises a theory of the sciences. In place of the dyadic divisions of the Aristotelian tradition we shall see that Abū’l-Barakāt deals in each science with a few basic concepts. Each science has a basic concept upon which it is based, and from which other conceptions are derived. The next main idea shows how Abū’l-Barakāt replaces the Aristotelian conception with his new conception of the principles and structure of science. The subject of principles is a broad one in the Kitāb. Abū’l-Barakāt in the Burhān, the Posterior Analytics of the Kitāb, works out the conception of the nature of a principle along with the notion of the principles of the sciences. The implication is that the concepts postulated in the sciences can be expressed by principles concerning these concepts. The subject of principles is analyzed anew in the Physics, with a new classification and concrete examples.3 At the beginning of the Metaphysics, what will be emphasized is the broader structure of the principles of science: how the principles of the science are interrelated, and in turn lead up and link with the causal conception of metaphysics. In Chapter 2, we studied the arguments of Abū’l-Barakāt against the dichotomous nature of Aristotelian being. These dyadic divisions of Aristotle have influenced the special sciences throughout. They are embodied, according to the Aristotelian, in the fundamental conceptions of the sciences,4 and are to be conceived as the fundamental pillars of the special sciences, inasmuch as they embody this conception. Form and matter is a basic conception and distinction of the science of physics. The faculties of the soul distinguished and conceived separately from the intellect is the major dyadic division of psychology. The division of the proposition into subject and predicate, corresponding to substance and the accident, is the fundamental notion of logic. We will find that as Abū’l-Barakāt disagrees with the ‘senses of being,’ he disagrees with these fundamental conceptions of the particular sciences and radically alters them. Concerning physics, he alters the notion of form. This broadens Abū’l-Barakāt’s critical and methodological approach depicted concerning existence into a comprehensive encompassing rejection of the basic dyadic notions of Aristotelian science. In place of the Aristotelian notion of substance and the dichotomous distinctions, we shall survey in this study of the sciences the new foundation, consisting of the novel concepts of the basic sciences developed from the notion of the existent with its interrelated intrinsic principles. We first review the background and history of the Aristotelian philosophy of science, beginning with Aristotle through the Neoplatonians, culminating with Avicenna.
