Continuity, limits, and quantity in Al-Fārābī’s paraphrase of Aristotle’s <italic>Categories</italic>.

Despite its position in an introductory work to logic, the account of continuity presented by Abū Naṣr Al-Fārābī in his paraphrase of Aristotle’s <italic>Categories</italic> is apparently even less accessible to the beginner than Aristotle’s original. This is in part because Al-Fārābī integrated elements of the accounts of continuity in Aristotle’s <italic>Physics</italic> and <italic>Metaphysics</italic> into an account mainly derived from Aristotle’s <italic>Categories</italic>. While Al-Fārābī’s account chiefly follows Aristotle’s <italic>Categories</italic> 6 in describing a continuous object that can be divided into parts with a shared boundary, it borrows the terminology of limits from <italic>Physics</italic> 5 and the notion of quantity as divisible into its parts from <italic>Metaphysics</italic> 5.13. In doing so, Al-Fārābī 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]