#  Khaled El-Rouayheb Awarded 2020 Rogers Prize 

 





April 30, 2021

 

 

 The Department of Philosophy congratulates [Professor Khaled El-Rouayheb](https://nelc.fas.harvard.edu/people/khaled-el-rouayheb) on winning the 2020 Rogers Prize for his article [“The liar paradox in fifteenth-century Shiraz: the exchange between Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Dashtakī and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī.”](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09608788.2019.1616156)

 The Rogers Prize is awarded annually by the [British Society for the History of Philosophy](https://bshp.org.uk/) to the best article published in its journal that year. El-Rouayheb’s article discusses the “bitter and extended dispute” between “Two rival scholars from Shiraz in Persia, Dawānī (d. 1502) and Dashtakī (d. 1498)” over the liar paradox:

 *Their debate on this point marked the most extensive scrutiny of the paradox in Arabic until that time. Dashtakī’s solution was to deny that the statement ‘What I say is false’ is true or false, on the ground that there is one statement and one application of the falsity predicate. Given that – ex hypothesi – there is no other statement, there is no basis for a reiteration of the truth or falsity predicate and describing the statement itself as true or false. Dawānī’s solution was to deny that ‘What I say is false’ is a statement at all, and he argued that it is instead akin to a performative utterance such as ‘I hereby sell you this’.*

 Khaled El-Rouayheb is the James Richard Jewett Professor of Islamic Intellectual History and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations. You can read more about the 2020 Rogers Prize [here](https://bshp.org.uk/news/rogers-prize-2020/).



 

 

 



 

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