October 20, 2018 Saturday
Bedtime Story
Other Schools of Logic
Last night I had introduced something new
and interesting: the logical notion of syllogism.
It is the kind of deductive reasoning that
is universally applicable to events and professional activities as varied as
criminal and forensic science, elementary police investigation, criminal law
and to a physician arriving at diagnosis from various complaints, history,
symptoms and signs.
It was not just Aristotle or Socrates or
the Enlightened Ancient Greeks who understood the inherent power of logic.
Other advanced civilizations at their peak
too took cognizance of the potential embedded both in logic and mathematics.
For instance having studies Aristotelian
logic, the Persian Ibn Sina or Avicenna in the Anglicized version during the
Golden Age of Islam (around 1000 AD) developed his own system of logic which
had totally replaced the original Greek one in the Islamic world.
In fact, centuries before Bacon he was a vocal
critic of the Aristotelian logic system considering it purely a deductive
system bereft of any component of induction.
Ibn Sina developed his own system of logic
which was an evolution over Aristotelian one in which he had incorporated the
system of both inductive logic and syndrome.
Syndrome, as many of you will know, is a
collection of symptoms and signs that point towards a particular disease or
disorder.
Following Ibn Sina, Ibn Hazm of the Muslim
Spain or Muslim Iberia wrote a treatise ‘Scope of Logic’ where beyond logic he
stressed upon the input from sensual perceptions as a source of knowledge.
In his words, “first sources of all human
knowledge are the soundly used senses and the intuitions of reason, combined
with a correct understanding of a language.”
I find it strange that even though he was a
powerful intellect and a polymath, he gave sanction to the revelation in Islam
and going a step further he advocated the use of logic (as opposed by traditional
theologians) to propagate and preserve the true teachings of Islam.
Similarly, like the ancient Greeks and
later the Islamic scholars the Hindus too (perhaps in parallel) had developed
their independent school of logic known as Nyaya, which literally stands of “recursion”
but its meaning is very similar to “syllogism” of “inference”.
The primary author of the Hindu school of
logic was a logician by the name of Gautama who by all historical evidence and
corroboration lived around 6th century BC thereby making him a
contemporary of both Buddha and Mahavira (and preceding Aristotle by three
centuries or perhaps half a century lesser than that).
The text written by Gautama is known as
Nyaya Sutras that consists of five books each with two chapters.
The text of Gautama, much like Bacon’s
treatise ‘Novum Organum Scientiarum’ is also written in the form of a list of
aphorisms, though in Hindu system of education the aphorisms go by the names of
sutras.
We shall briefly go through some of these interesting
sutras.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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