Uskudari's Approach To the Elements of the Proposition

Abstract

According to Aristotle, the founder of logic, a simple proposition consists of three basic elements: subject, predicate and nexus. Early Islamic philosophers such as Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Bacce and Ibn Rushd also accepted this triple system. The fourth part of the proposition was brought up for the first time by Kudbuddin Razi, one of the important logicians of the fourteenth century. The important logicians of the same period, such as Teftazani and Curcani, who followed him, also discussed this issue. The discussion about the number of elements of the proposition continued in the texts on both independent and propositional logic until the last periods of the Ottoman Empire. Mehmed Emin Uskudari was one of the important logicians of the Ottoman Empire who cared about this issue and therefore wrote an independent treatise. He tried to analyz the discussion of the elements of the proposition, without naming them, in the minds of the so-called predecessors and the latter. According to him, previous logicians saw the elements of the proposition as consisting of subject, predicate and judgmental link. Later logicians add a fourth and add the elements of the proposition; subject, predicate, the link that relates the subject and the predicate, and the judgmental link. The aforementioned triple and quadruple analysis approaches were also continued in the conditional propositions. According to the previous ones, there are three elements in the conditional proposition as pre-component, post-component and conditional preposition. According to the latter ones, in addition to these, there is a positive or negative element in the proposition. Uskudari contributes to the element analysis of the proposition in two ways. First, it draws attention to the dimensions of the issue by summarizing this issue in an understandable language and level.