Dustin Klinger

Dustin Klinger

Graduate Fellow
A History of Logical Analysis from Aristotle to Medieval Arabic Philosophers, 900-1500
2020-2021 (September-December)
Portrait photo of Dustin Klinger

Biography

Dustin Klinger is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Department of Philosophy at Harvard. His research focuses on questions in the philosophy of language, combining the study of the history of ancient and medieval philosophy, Islamic intellectual history and contemporary philosophy.

 

 

Project Summary

Dustin's dissertation project explores the history of propositional analysis from Ancient Greek to medieval Arabic logic. How to analyze propositions, i.e. sentences with which we say something true or false about the world, has been a central concern in analytic philosophy since the end of the nineteenth century. In his work, Dustin traces discussions on the analysis of propositions through the translation movement from Greek to Syriac to Arabic in nineth century Baghdad and their later developments in medieval centers of learning in the Eastern Islamic world. Interested both in the philosophical lessons to be learned from this unfamiliar story and its sometimes unlikely historical twists, at I Tatti Dustin is studying the early Renaissance reception of some highly influential yet largely forgotten medieval Arabic logicians.