Mesbah Yazdi on Primitive Propositions

Among contemporary Islamic philosophers، Mesbah Yazdi has proposed a theory about primitive propositions. He claims، first، that primitive propositions are analytic and secondly that concepts they are made up of، are secondary philosophical concepts. Here، we first introduce his theory of primitive propositions and then give some counterexamples in order to show that this theory does not match with the classical characterization of primitive propositions. Some of these counterexamples are not analytic and others neither are analytic nor composed of secondary philosophical concepts. The upshot is that both Mesbah’s criteria for primitiveness are defective.