ONLINE COURSE: Ladder of Light to the True Sciences
SeekersGuidance Global is pleased to support Dr Mustafa Styer’s course in classical logic, based on the didactic poem al-Sullam al-Munawraq. Organised by Ha Meem College in the United Kingdom, open to all globally. Register now.
Start date: Sunday, Oct 1st 2017 (15 weeks course)
Time: Sundays at UK (BST) 11 AM, US (CT) -6 hrs, Au (AEST) +9 hrs (subject to daylight savings changes).
Duration: 2 hrs (2 50 min lessons with 20 min break)
Who: All beginner adults welcome
This course is especially relevant for homeschoolers and those wishing to gain confidence in this aspect of the Trivium in English. The lasting relevance of traditional logic as the only realist methodology of the sciences and of learning will be introduced.
Background and context to this course
This course will teach traditional logic in English in an interactive manner aiming to convey confidence in application of logic in simple settings. It will treat logic as one of the liberal arts and trivium and a means for assessing arguments, analysing texts, and producing and ordering knowledge. It will re-position logic within the modern context, but also in the sophisticated discussions of classical Islam rather than in a defensive reformer discourse. A balanced view of logic will be presented which holds that it provide the rules for the unique human faculty by which mankind was worthy of religious obligation: the intellect. However, it acknowledges some scholars stated that holding logic to be the only means to knowledge effectively blocks the higher faculty of the spirit (ruh).
In this context, this text will be taught as a introduction to the science of logic and as a key to further study of commentaries on the Isaghuji, Tahdhib, and Shamsiyya which contain the further tools for applying logic in sophisticated scientific and metaphysical contexts needed to operationalise and take classical disciplines off the shelf and make them a reality and move beyond scientism and nominalism. The course will introduce how the traditional science of logic clarifies misnomers such as distinctions between fact and theory and subject and objective taught in modern education.
This course is designed to empower parents and mature students to operate the classical disciplines in English or to pave the way to seekers of knowledge, especially those who wish to translate classical Islamic knowledge into English, for instance to refute New Atheism and atheism whose arguments are in fact full of logical fallacies or reach out to English audiences.
This core skills of introductory, traditional logic are the method of forming definitions and assembling (or analysing) valid arguments. In addition to teaching these, this course will explain the link between terms and concepts from a realist—as opposed to nominalist or scientistic reductivist—perspective. The traditional understanding of abstraction which explains the relation between particulars and universals—the so-called ‘problem of universals’—will be used to clarify this point.
Future courses will go further into material logic (including epistemology and necessary metaphysics for handling questions in the subject disciplines) and the role of logic in determining the internal organisation of the sciences.
