Al-Ghazali completes The Incoherence of the Philosophers
- Date
- c. 1095 CE
- Category
- Culture, arts & philosophy
- Region
- Middle East
- Era
- Post-Classical / Medieval
- Significance
Around 1095 CE, while serving as professor at the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad, the Persian theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali completed Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), a systematic critique of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophy championed in the Islamic world by al-Farabi and Avicenna (Ibn Sina).
Examining twenty philosophical propositions, al-Ghazali argued that none met the rigorous standard of logical demonstration (burhan), and he singled out three doctrines—the eternity of the world, God's knowledge of universals but not particulars, and the denial of bodily resurrection—as constituting unbelief. His discussion of causality, advancing an occasionalist position in which God is the immediate cause of all events, became one of the work's most influential and debated contributions. The book marked a turning point in Islamic intellectual history, reinforcing the ascendancy of Asharite theology and reshaping the relationship between reason and revelation. It later provoked Averroes (Ibn Rushd) to write a famous rebuttal, The Incoherence of the Incoherence, and, through Latin and Hebrew translations, influenced medieval European and Jewish thought.
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Empires active in c. 1095 CE
- Almoravid Empire1056 CE – 1147 CE
- Song Dynasty960 CE – 1279 CE
- Abbasid Caliphate750 CE – 1258 CE
- Byzantine Empire330 CE – 1453 CE
- Kanem-Bornu Empire700 CE – 1900 CE
- Ghaznavid Empire977 CE – 1186 CE
Related culture, arts & philosophy events
- House of Wisdom and the Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement under al-Ma'munc. 830 CE
- Zhu Xi completes the Neo-Confucian synthesis and the Four Booksc. 1175-1190
- The rise of the European university (Bologna and Paris)c. 1088 (University of Bologna)
- Building of Angkor Wat by Suryavarman IIc. 1122–1150 CE
- Birth of Gothic architecture at Saint-Denisc. 1140–1144 (Saint-Denis choir)
- The Toledo School and the Latin translation of Greek-Arabic learning12th century (Gerard of Cremona d. 1187)
Further reading
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