School
Ash'arism
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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 -
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 replies127 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 replies207 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