{ "item_title" : "The Indestructible Argument", "item_author" : [" Narin Hikma "], "item_description" : "There is one word in the middle of the most-copied logic textbook in the history of Islam that should not be there.You know what it is to do careful work that nobody is watching. The hours that produce nothing anyone will thank you for. The suspicion, late at night, that precision is a private habit the world has no use for.In the winter of 1258 a Mongol army took Baghdad in thirteen days, and five centuries of the Abbasid caliphate ended. Najm al-Din al-Katibi was fifty-four years old, in a country that had already been conquered once in his lifetime, and every endowment that had ever paid for a scholar in Persia was gone. He was not a famous man. He held no office. Thirty years of his life have left no trace whatever.Seven years after Baghdad fell, working in an observatory funded with seized religious endowments, he wrote a book of twelve thousand words on the rules of logic. It fits on five sides of folio.It has been taught, without a break, from that day to this - through the Ilkhanids, the Timurids, the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals, in Cairo and Sarajevo and Isfahan and Delhi, and in a fourth-year classroom this morning. By any measure that can be applied, it is the most studied logic textbook ever written.This is a narrative history of the man and the argument, built from the edges - because almost nothing about him survives. No face. No family. No letter. Not one word in his own hand. Two notes in the margin of somebody else's manuscript, and a book.It is also a book that will teach you the logic itself, because a book about a logician that never shows you the work is a book about a costume.Understand why a distinction drawn in thirteenth-century Persia still decides what counts as a good argumentLearn to tell the difference between what is false, what is unproved, and what cannot be proved - three states we collapse every daySee what actually happened when Baghdad fell, with the legends about the burning library and the black river taken apartMeet the men in the room: a Shi'i director who had lived twenty years among the Assassins, a Christian bishop with reading privileges, a Jewish philosopher writing in from BaghdadFind out what one man wrote at the hardest point in his book, with nobody checking and everything to gain from bluffingThis is a book for anyone who has ever kept working on something exact while the world made it clear that exactness was not what it wanted.At the center of the most-copied logic textbook in Islamic history, where the argument would not come out, its author wrote down that he did not know. Four thousand scribes copied the word. Nobody took it out.Open the first page. The rest is patience.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/817/407/9798174072275_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "16.99", "online_price" : "16.99", "our_price" : "16.99", "club_price" : "16.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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