The Logical Relevance of Poetry in Alfarabi

Abstract

Poetry has managed to keep itself on the agenda throughout the his-tory of philosophy. While Plato approached poetry within the framework of political/religious concerns and tried to control its transformative power in the context of his ideal state, Aristotle gave great importance to the art of poetry. Unlike Plato's approach that we can call content critique, Aristotle dealt with poetry more in the context of form and did not pursue the aforementioned po-litical concern. However, poetry did not emerge as an art directly related to log-ic until Alfarabi. His originality is that he handled poetry in the context of its logical interest. In this article, it is defended that the relationship between po-etry and logic was designed in two aspects by Alfarabi, one pointing to the functionality of poetry in learning philosophy and the context of syllogism types and the other pointing to the aspect of logic that enables poetry to be recognized and differentiated within the five arts.