THE ARGUMENT FROM IGNORANCE AND ITS CRITICS IN MEDIEVAL ARABIC THOUGHT

The earliest debate on the argument from ignorance emerged in Islamic rational theology around the fourth/tenth century, approximately seven centuries before John Locke identified it as a distinct type of argument. The most influential defences of the epistemological principle that 'that for which there is no evidence must be negated' are encountered in Mu'tazili sources, particularly. Abd al-Jabbar and al-Malahimi who argue that without this principle scepticism will follow. The principle was defended on different grounds by some earlier Ash'aris, but was then rejected by al-Juwayni, and was eventually classed as a fallacy by Fakhr al-Din al-Razi whose Nihayat al-'uqul contains the most definitive and comprehensive refutation of classical kalam epistemology and the first ever defence of Aristotelian logic in a kalam summa. According to the eighth/fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun, this debate provided the main impetus for the philosophical turn that Ash. arism took during the sixth/twelfth century.