Philosophy

A Study of the Nature of Language in Alpharabius’s Philosophy of Language

Document Type : Scientific-research

Author

Narges Zargar

Graduated from the University of Punjab, India

https://doi.org/10.22059/jop.2019.74469
Abstract
The present paper studies Alpharabius’s philosophy of language to shed light on his views on the nature of language. Alpharabius believes that language has two levels. The first is the internal level or what is in mind, i.e. the intellectual and imaginary understanding, which, as he maintains, is the definition of the perceptual world. The second is the superficial level or words, which are the expression of the first part or level of language. These two levels are based on intellect, as the third meaning of utterance he considers three meaning for utterance. In his definition of language, he adds the factor of the speaker’s intention of expression. As a result, language, to Alpharabius, is not just the means of conveyance of words, but formation of meanings as well as expression of those meanings constitute language. It seems that language has no fixed essence, since the nature of language for different people depends on how they use their intellect and how their use of language is based on logic. On the other hand, the formation of intellectual and imaginary understanding of people is different.

Keywords

Alpharabius
Nature of Language
in Conscience
Words
Process of Language
Subjects
ابن سینا، حسین بن عبدالله (1404 ه.ق.)، الشفاء (المنطق)، قم: مکتبة آیت الله المرعشی.
فارابی، ابونصر، محمد بن محمد (1364)، احصاء العلوم، ترجمة حسین خدیوجم، تهران: شرکت انتشارات علمی و فرهنگی.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ  (1391)، المنطقیات للفارابی:  النصوص المنطقیه، مقدمه و تحقیق محمد تقی دانش پژوه، قم: کتابخانه آیت الله مرعشی نجفی.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ (1960 م)، شرح الفارابی لکتاب ارسطو طالیس فی العبارة، بیروت: المطبعة الکاثولیکیة.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ (1986 م)، کتاب الحروف، مقدمه و تحقیق و تعلیق محسن مهدی، بیروت: دارالمشرق.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ (1994 م)، احصاء العلوم، مقدمه و شرح: علی بو ملحم، بیروت: مکتبة الهلال.
قرشی، محمدحسین (1391)، «بررسی و تحلیل زبان و منطق در اندیشه ابونصر فارابی»، پژوهش نامه انتقادی متون و برنامه های علوم انسانی، پژوهشگاه علوم انسانی و مطالعات فرهنگی، سال دوازدهم، شماره اول، 63-84.
Black, Deborah L., (2008), “Al-Farabi,” History of Islamic Philosophy (Vol. 1), Edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman, London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
.ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ, (2012), “Farabi ii. Logic”, Encyclopedia Iranica, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/farabi-ii.
Druart, Thérèse-Anne T. A., (2007) “Islam and Christianity: One Divine and Human Language or Many Human Languages,” Journal of Religion and Society 9: 1-13.
.ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ, (2016), “Logic and Language,” in The Routledge Companion to Islamic Philosophy, Edited by Richard C. Taylor and Luis Xavier Lopez-Farjeat, London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. 69-81.
Germann, Nadja., (2015-2016), “Imitation Ambiguity Discourse: Some Remarks on al-Farabi’s Philosophy of Language,” Melanges de l’Universite Saint-Joseph, Vol. LXVI Dar El-Machreq, Beyrouth Liban.
Street, Tony, (2013)., “Arabic and Islamic Philosophy of Language and Logic,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-language).
Versteegh, Kees., (2005), “The relationship between speech and thought: Al-Farabi on language,” Landmarks in Linguistic Thought III (The Arabic linguistic tradition), London and New York: Routledge. 57-65.
Philosophy
Volume 17, Issue 1 - Serial Number 32
September 2019
Pages 121-140

  • Receive Date 04 January 2020

Home

Contact Us