Al-Ghazali

Key ideas

In The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali argued that the followers of Aristotle and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) had not proved what they claimed. His most famous argument concerns causation. When cotton touches fire and burns, we observe the two events together, but we never observe the fire making the cotton burn. The connection is not logically necessary; it is a regularity. Seven centuries later David Hume made a closely related argument, which feeds directly into the problem of induction.

His autobiography, The Deliverance from Error, describes a period of radical doubt about the senses and reason, and the way out of it. It is often compared with René Descartes's Meditations. He also discussed choosing between two identical dates, a version of Buridan's donkey, to argue that a will can pick without a reason to prefer.

Life, briefly

Al-Ghazali was born in Tus, in northeastern Iran, and became a leading professor at the Nizamiyya college in Baghdad. In 1095 he suffered a personal crisis, gave up his post, and spent years travelling and in retreat before returning to teaching late in life. He died in his home town in 1111.

Major works

• The Incoherence of the Philosophers
• The Deliverance from Error
• The Aims of the Philosophers
• The Revival of the Religious Sciences

Further reading

• EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Al-Ghazali
• WikipediaAl-Ghazali