Al-Ghazali
The jurist who dismantled certainty, resigned Baghdad's finest teaching post, and rebuilt knowledge from direct experience.
Core ideas
- Sense-perception and reason both deceive; certainty needs another ground
- Philosophy's demonstrations cannot prove what they claim
- Skepticism honestly followed can end in trust, not despair
Historical context
His crisis of 1095 — he could no longer trust his own teaching — led to a decade of wandering and a book that anticipated Descartes' methodic doubt by five centuries.
Key works
Deliverance from Error · Incoherence of the Philosophers
Questions they speak to
Minds in conversation
- Ibn Sina (Avicenna)Bukhara → Isfahan
- René DescartesFrance → Netherlands
- RumiBalkh → Konya
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Al-Ghazali