Continuity, limits, and quantity in Al-Farabi's paraphrase of Aristotle's Categories

Despite its position in an introductory work to logic, the account of continuity presented by Abu Nasr Al-Farabi in his paraphrase of Aristotle's Categories is apparently even less accessible to the beginner than Aristotle's original. This is in part because Al-Farabi integrated elements of the accounts of continuity in Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics into an account mainly derived from Aristotle's Categories. While Al-Farabi's account chiefly follows Aristotle's Categories 6 in describing a continuous object that can be divided into parts with a shared boundary, it borrows the terminology of limits from Physics 5 and the notion of quantity as divisible into its parts from Metaphysics 5.13. In doing so, Al-Farabi defines continuity using a notion of a limit without determining whether or not it was part of the continuous quantity. This definition could also accommodate atomists, since it would work even if the limit were an atom or several atoms that were part of the continuous object. The broadness of this definition is probably intended to allow students of logic who may have atomist tendencies to accept the account of quantity in the categories tradition, even though they may not be ready to reject atomism until after studying physics.