Zolghadr, Behnam
Junior Fellow: September 2018–August 2019
Research Project: The Opponents of the Law of Non-Contradiction in the Islamicate World
After Avicenna, Aristotelianism became the dominant view in Islamic philosophy and theology. Before that, Islamic theologians mostly resisted accepting Aristotelian logic and philosophy. In fact, at the time, Arabic logicians and Islamic theologians constituted distinct and rival groups. The former advocated the use of Aristotelian logic, whereas the latter were against it. Among non-Aristotelian thinkers, there were some who held that there were some truth value gaps or gluts. There are two main areas where such views were involved. One is the liar paradox, which led some to hold the liar sentence to be a truth value glut and some to hold it to be a truth value gap. The other is Abū Hāshim al-Jubbāī’s theory of states, which is a reply to a problem concerning divine attributes. According to him, states are neither existent nor non-existent, and thus there are truth value gaps. In his Metaphysics of the Cure, Avicenna argues that every truth value gap entails a truth value glut. Consequently, after Avicenna, the theory of states has been notoriously considered as a theory which violates the law of non-contradiction. However, the followers of Abū Hāshim, particularly Bahshamyya, developed his theory of states and challenged the law of non-contradiction in different ways. These violations of Aristotelian bivalence are the subject of this project, though the focus is on Bahshamite theologians. I am particularly aiming at their arguments against bivalence. Exploring these arguments can have valuable results not only from a historical perspective, but also for modern dialetheism.
Behnam Zolghadr earned his PhD at Tarbiat-Modares University in 2017. During the time he was working on his dissertation, “Modal Meinongianism: the Structure of Non-Existent Objects,” he was fortunate enough to spend a while at the CUNY Graduate Center studying with Graham Priest (2015–16).