Greco-Islamic

This article examines a particularly influential development in medieval political philosophy.  This development ensued during the liminal period of the late medieval era’s transition to the modern era.  In the Greco-Islamic tradition of this transition, the Arab philosopher and theologian Averroës (Ibn Rushd) wrote insightful commentaries on the works of logic in Aristotle’s Organon.  From his scholarly studies, Averroës developed a unique approach to advancing the use of inductive logic in dialectical syllogisms.  Among his discoveries, Averroës had identified a rather vague reference in one of Aristotle’s works that suggested the possibility of modifying the logically deductive structure of demonstrative syllogisms.  After further reflection on Aristotle’s reference, Averroës developed the possibility of an “inductive turn” to transform the syllogistic structure of deductive logic into the syllogistic structure of inductive logic.  Averroës contended that an interchange of the major premise with the conclusion of a logically deductive structure of a demonstrative syllogism would result in the transformation of the logically deductive structure into a logically inductive structure and thus into a dialectical syllogism.  By the end of the liminal period, Averroës’s inductive turn had been influential with many scholars in the Latin West, including Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas, analytical philosopher John Buridan in his approaches to understanding science, and the acceptance of the hypothetico-deductive analyses of natural philosophy of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes.