School
Ash'arism
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Could the constants have been different? Spinoza says no; the Ashʿarites say God could change them tomorrow
I model oil reservoirs. Every model has parameters, and every morning I change some of them to see what would have happened. So the question "could the physical constants have been different?" feels very concrete to me, and I've found two answers…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani0 replies66 views -
Did Hume ever read al-Ghazali?
Last month I read al-Ghazālī's account of his crisis of doubt, and then went looking for more. I found the part of The Incoherence of the Philosophers about fire and cotton: we see the cotton burn when it touches the fire, but…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies188 views -
What exactly is kasb (acquisition), and is it just compatibilism with God in it?
I am eighteen and taking a gap year, and I have been reading about free will because it is the question that will not leave me alone. In Indonesia the answer I grew up with is that God creates everything, including my…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies131 views -
Is Wheeler’s “it from bit” a physics proposal or a piece of metaphysics?
John Wheeler's slogan "it from bit" says that every physical thing derives its existence from answers to yes-or-no questions: that reality is informational at the bottom. I'm a physicist and I hear versions of it constantly, usually late in the evening at…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies192 views -
The al-Ghazali–Hume parallel is shallower than the textbooks suggest
I teach comparative philosophy, and the sentence I most often have to correct in student essays is "al-Ghazālī anticipated Hume". I'd like to argue that the parallel, though real, is shallower than it is usually made to look. The shared step is…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho5 replies254 views -
Emanation cannot be squared with a God who freely creates, and al-Ghazālī saw exactly why
I model oil reservoirs, so I spend my working days with systems where outputs follow necessarily from inputs. Perhaps that's why the Neoplatonic picture of the world troubles me. In that picture, everything flows from the One the way light flows from…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani6 replies215 views -
Fire and cotton in the Seventeenth Discussion, read beside Hume’s Enquiry
I model oil reservoirs for a living, so causation is a practical problem for me before breakfast. I've been reading the seventeenth discussion of al-Ghazālī's Incoherence of the Philosophers (in Michael Marmura's translation) next to Section VII of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani5 replies170 views -
Mu’tazilis, al-Māturīdī and Aquinas: three ways of saying reason can see part of the moral law
I started reading kalām to understand my own faith better. The question that keeps pulling me back is whether moral knowledge needs revelation. The classical positions, as I understand them: Muʿtazila: good and bad (ḥusn and qubḥ) are knowable by reason. That…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani4 replies208 views -
Kalam atomism did not anticipate quantum theory, however tempting the comparison
I am a reservoir engineer in Dhahran, and I read kalam for pleasure. Twice this year I have sat through talks claiming that the Ash'ari theologians "anticipated quantum mechanics": the world made of discrete atoms, accidents re-created at each instant, no necessary…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani4 replies182 views -
When should someone who isn’t an expert simply defer? What did al-Ghazālī say?
As a data analyst I defer to experts all day: to doctors about my health, to engineers about the bridges I drive over, to the people who built the statistical libraries I use. I can't check them. I'd like to understand when…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman4 replies114 views -
Al-Ghazali and Hume make the same argument about fire. Why do they end up so far apart?
I teach history in Fes, and my students love the story that al-Ghazali "anticipated Hume" by six centuries. I tell it too. But the more I read, the less I think "anticipated" is the right word, and I would like help explaining…
Started by Youssef Benali4 replies222 views -
Reading group: al-Ghazālī and Ibn Rushd on whether the world had a beginning
The longest chapter of al-Ghazālī's Incoherence of the Philosophers is the first, on the philosophers' doctrine that the world is eternal. Nearly a century later Ibn Rushd answered it, line by line, in The Incoherence of the Incoherence. I have read summaries…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani6 replies196 views -
The Mu’tazila were right: reason can know that injustice is wrong before any revelation
I want to defend the losing side of one of the great arguments in kalām. The Mu'tazilī theologians held that acts have moral qualities that reason can recognise: that injustice and lying are bad, that gratitude to a benefactor is owed, and…
Started by Layla Haddad6 replies126 views -
If I can conceive it without contradiction, is it possible? Ash’arites, Hume and Kripke
I started reading the Ash'ari theologians to understand occasionalism, and I noticed how much weight they put on one principle: whatever involves no contradiction is possible, at least for God. Al-Ghazali uses it in the Tahāfut when he says the cotton might…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani5 replies167 views -
Kasb is a real distinction, not a verbal escape: the Ash’ari answer deserves a hearing
Within Islamic theology the free will question produced two sharply opposed answers, and I think one of them gets a worse press than it deserves. The Mu'tazila said that human beings genuinely create their own acts. God is just; he would not…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani5 replies206 views -
Analogy, negation, or “without asking how”: how can finite words say anything true of God?
I teach metaphysics at a seminary, and every year a student asks the question that underlies everything else: when we say "God is good" or "God knows", what do the words mean? If they mean what they mean of us, God becomes…
Started by Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu4 replies148 views -
Al-Ghazālī was right: much of what philosophers call demonstration is only probable reasoning
I lead Friday prayers in Bradford and work as a hospital chaplain, and al-Ghazālī has been my companion for twenty years. I want to defend a claim about him that I think is often misunderstood. People remember al-Ghazālī as the man who…
Started by Imam Bilal Hussain6 replies190 views -
Can reason tell right from wrong on its own, or does it need revelation?
I spent thirty-one years on the bench in Lahore. I applied statutes, precedent and, where the law allowed, the principles of Islamic law. Many times a case was decided correctly by every rule and I went home feeling it had been decided…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan6 replies240 views -
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi was a Persian-born Ash'ari theologian, Qur'an commentator and philosopher who taught across Khwarazm and Transoxiana and died in Herat. He engaged…
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Al-Ash’ari
Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari was a theologian of Basra and Baghdad who trained among the Mu'tazila before breaking with them. The school named after him…