Love vis-à-vis Beauty for Avicenna and Suhrawardi

In modern modal logic, the relations between modality and quantification are shown by Buridan and Barcan formulas. Zia Movahed, Lotfollah Nabavi and Mahdi Azimi have shown Ibn Sina’s anticipation of the formulas. In this paper, I show that Ibn Sina anticipated just in de re and de dicto modalities and his points in Shifa and Isharat do not verify the attribution of the formulas to him. Even his followers, beginning from Bahmanyar to Fakhr Al-Din Razi, have not deducted the formulas from his writings. The first who stipulated the formulas was Afdal Al-Din Khunaji, who, as we shall show, denied them for the actualist reading of the quantifiers, and in his discussion of the formulas for the possibilist reading, there were some ambiguities, which are present in his commentators and his followers. Then came shams Al-Din Samarqandi and Qutb Al-Din Razi, who opposed Khunaji; so, we cannot attribute the belief in the formulas to Ibn Sina, nor his followers.