Mehmed Emın Üsküdari’s Sharh al-Barahin al-khamsa on Infinity Analysis and Critical Edition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the form and content of Sharh al-Barāhīn al-khamsa, written by Mehmed Emīn Üsküdārī (d. 1149/1736-37), an important figure of eighteenth-century Ottoman Turkish philosophical thought, on the problems of the finitude of extensions and the invalidity of the idea of infinite regress. The subject of infinity appeals to a broad range of disciplines, being the mainstay of many theological questions such as the demonstrations for the existence of a necessary existent as well as many other epistemological, ontological, and cosmological issues. This question has historically concerned Peripatetic falāsifa and mutakallimūn from different intellectual traditions and has become part of a cosmopolitan theological and philosophical tradition in which distinct treatises were compiled by scholars of the post-Rāzīan period (mutaʾakhkhirūn). One of the last representatives of the late Ottoman period, Mehmed Emīn Üsküdārī, authored such a treatise on this question. This treatise is important as a window on the infinity question in Ottoman intellectual thought. In addition to the ladder (al-burhān al-sullamī) and collimation (burhān al-musāmata) demonstrations for the discussions on the infinity of extensions, this treatise also uses the mapping (burhān al-tatbīq), correlation (burhān al-tadāyuf), and throne (al-burhān al-ʿarshī) demonstrations as well as two other demonstrations mentioned by the Persian Mīrzā Jān Shīrāzī (d. 995/1587) for the discussions of infinite regress. In this context, Üsküdārī made a short and concise presentation of the aforementioned demonstrations, supporting some of them with geometric diagrams. This article consists of i) an analysis and ii) critical edition as its two main features and examines Üsküdārī’s evaluations of each of the demonstrations, their historical background, and their differences and similarities in terms of novelty and continuity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".