In the opening chapters of the fourth treatise of his Kitāb al-anwār wa-al-marāqib, the Karaite scholar Yaʽqūb al-Qirqisānī (first half of the tenth century), analyzes nine fundamental principles of logic and epistemology, taken from Kalmāic and philosophic sources. As a theologian and a Karaite legal codifier, Qirqisānī’s main goal is to demonstrate the application of these principles to the realm of legal exegesis of the Written Law—a lucid example of the rationalistic approach of tenth-century Karaism.

The crux of the paper is a Hebrew translation of these chapters, including critical notes. The introduction to the translation analyzes the philosophic and historical significance of Qirqisānī’s stances. The main points on which the analysis focus are Qirqisānī’s nine logical-epistemological principles, and the background of their Kalmāic sources; Qirqisānī’s identification of the function of the ‘illah (the reason that determines the law, the ratio legis), with that of the Middle Term (the term that enables the deductive procedure in the Aristotelian syllogism); and Qirqisānī’s rejection of skeptic empiricism, according to which the Aristotelian syllogism is useless and redundant—a position that is known in the medieval Arabic literature from the writings of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328 CE).