The question is why, and I conclude this section by speculating as to the answer.

The question is why, and I conclude this section by speculating as to the answer. Both groups, the Avicennan and the Revisionists, want to be able not only to trace valid inferences, they want also to use the system they produce for extra-logical purposes. They want arguments that are not only valid, but also sound, that is, arguments that are not only formally perfect, but that have true premises.

To use the essentialist reading to say every cow is necessarily four-stomached, as an Avicennan would, is to claim necessarily, every cow is necessarily four-stomached; this is much stronger in one important respect than the Revisionist claim that there are actually cows, and everything that's actually a cow is necessarily four-stomached. Ghazâlî and Logic The twelfth century is one of the most complex periods of transformation in Muslim intellectual history.

This period has been called the Golden Age of Arabic philosophy. The growth of logic in the preceding two centuries was concordant with the advance of the medical sciences and consequently it gained support with a wider audience. The century before had seen the advent of the madrasa as the prime institution of learning in the Islamic world (Makdisi (1981) 27-32), and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) had been appointed to the most prestigious of these new institutions.

Ghazali had successfully introduced logic into the madrasa which attracted much more gifted logicians (Gutas (2002). al-Ghazali took up Alfarabi's arguments in support of the utility of logic for theology and law, especially in his last juridical summa, Distillation of the Principles of Jurisprudence, a text which soon became a mainstay of the madrasa. It is in this period that the major change in the coverage and structure of Avicennan logic occurred.

The late twelfth century also saw Averroes produce what was effectively the last of the work in the Farabian tradition of logic, work which was to be translated into Hebrew and Latin but which was neglected by Arabic logicians. Finally, through the course of the twelfth century, the modified Avicennan logic that would be adopted by the logic texts of the madrasa began to emerge.

Ghazali argued that, properly understood, logic was entirely free of metaphysical presuppositions injurious to the faith.