Al-Fārābī and Quine on reductio and paradox

If you dislike the conclusion of an argument by reductio, you can rebrand it as a paradox. We did this with Zeno, and more recently McTaggart. But what – if anything – is the principle at play? Is this practice of rebranding justified? Here I argue that sometimes, under certain conditions, it is. The reason why emerges from careful study of paradox and reductio in the distinctively socio-political logic of Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī, the Arabic philosophical tradition’s ‘Second Teacher’ (after Aristotle). As we will see, al-Fārābī gives us a roadmap for a direction suggested by Quine.