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WorkAl-Ghazali

مقاصد الفلاسفة

(lit.: The Aims of the Philosophers)

An Arabic digest of Avicenna's logic, metaphysics and physics, so faithful that Latin Europe took its critic for a disciple.

by Al-Ghazali230 passages held

  • Arabic, the original language
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Overview

Readers of Latin in the thirteenth century knew a philosopher called Algazel, a faithful follower of Avicenna who had produced a masterly digest of his system. The digest was this book. Dominicus Gundissalinus, a translator working at Toledo, put it into Latin in the second half of the twelfth century with a collaborator known as Magister Iohannes, and their version left out the passages in which al-Ghazālī says that he is only reporting views he means to refute. What remained is an exposition without objections: a loose Arabic adaptation of the logic, metaphysics and natural science in Philosophy for ʿAlāʾ al-Dawla, the Persian encyclopedia of the philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā). It explains how a definition is built and a syllogism checked, how everything that exists divides into the necessary and the merely possible, how bodies are made of matter and form, and how the soul comes to know. A short opening and an equally short ending present the whole as groundwork for a refutation, and for a long time the book was read as the preparation for The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Scholars now point out that its terms differ from those of the Incoherence, and they judge that this framing was probably written, or added, after that book was finished. In Arabic it had a modest career, because rival digests of Avicenna soon multiplied. In Hebrew it was translated in 1292 and at least twice more within fifty years, and Moses of Narbonne, a fourteenth-century Jewish philosopher, wrote a commentary on it. The Latin text was printed at Venice in 1506, and it was the only one of al-Ghazālī's books translated in the age when Arabic philosophy reached Christian Europe.

Key concepts

What do “necessary” and “possible” existence mean here?

A necessary being exists of itself and depends on nothing; a possible being exists only through something else. The book adds a twist: a possible thing becomes necessary once its cause is present, so the world is “necessary through another” while only God is necessary in himself. The impossible is the third case, what cannot exist at all. Almost all of the metaphysics reported here is built on these three words.

What are matter and form?

Every body, the book reports, is made of two things: matter, which receives, and form, which makes it the kind of body it is. Neither exists alone. The proof offered is change: water can turn into air and air into fire, so something underlying must persist while the forms come and go. That shared underlying stuff is prime matter. The account is set against the theologians, who built bodies from indivisible atoms.

What are the “inner senses”?

Behind the five outer senses the book lists five inner powers. Common sense gathers what the separate senses report into one picture. A retaining power keeps images once the object is gone, and imagination combines and divides them. Estimation grasps meanings the senses cannot see, such as that something is dangerous or friendly, and memory stores those meanings. Together they bring experience to the point where the intellect can work on it.

What is the active intellect?

The active intellect is a mind outside us, the lowest of the heavenly intellects, which the philosophers make the cause of human understanding. The soul’s images are only potentially understood, and something already actual must make them actually understood, as light makes colours actually visible. In this account the active intellect also gives forms to matter, so one cause stands behind both the shapes of things and our knowledge of them.

Why does the book leave mathematics out?

The book names four parts of philosophy: mathematics, logic, physics and metaphysics. Mathematics, the opening says, contains nothing contrary to reason and nothing anyone could sensibly deny, so there is no reason to deal with it here. Logic is mostly sound too. Physics mixes truth with error, and the errors al-Ghazālī means to refute lie chiefly in metaphysics, which is why those parts are reported in such detail.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

What Cannot Not Exist

Why must there be something that depends on nothing? Al-Ghazālī sets out, without objecting, the argument that a world of dependent things needs one being that exists of itself.

Everything that exists, on the account this book reports, is either necessary in itself or merely possible. A possible thing, taken by itself, leans neither towards being nor towards not being; it exists only when its cause does, and then it exists necessarily through that cause. Follow the causes back and there must be one being that depends on nothing. From that single idea Avicenna's metaphysics draws God's oneness and simplicity, and even his life and joy: he knows himself, so he is alive, and he perceives his own perfection, which is the highest pleasure.

  • necessary existence
  • existence
  • metaphysics
  • divine simplicity
  • causation
  • substance
  • universals

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Why the Heavens Turn

What keeps the sky in endless motion? The book reports a physics in which the heavens move because they want something, and the world below is shaped by their turning.

The physics part explains bodies as matter joined to form, and motion as the way a thing passes from what it could be to what it is. A stone falls by nature towards its resting place, but the heavens move in circles, always leaving and returning to the same positions, so their motion cannot be natural in that sense. It must come from will and perception, which means the heavens have souls. Through their motions, separate intellects and heavenly bodies prepare matter below for minerals, plants, animals and finally human beings.

  • cosmology
  • celestial motion
  • motion
  • natural philosophy
  • aristotelian physics
  • space
  • time
  • matter and form
  • matter
  • body

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From Senses to Intellect

How does a mind come to know anything it did not know before? The last part sets out the philosophers' map of the soul, from the eye to the active intellect.

The soul, on this account, knows in stages: the outer senses take in shapes and colours, inner powers hold and combine images, and the intellect grasps what is universal. Something must move the intellect from being able to know to knowing, and it cannot be a body, so the philosophers name a cause outside us, the active intellect. Dreams fit the same scheme. In sleep the senses go quiet and the soul receives images from the spiritual world; imagination then preserves them or dresses them in likenesses that need interpreting.

  • soul
  • intellect
  • perception
  • imagination
  • epistemology
  • knowledge
  • analogy

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
230
distinct concepts
324
by passages held, corpus-wide
#319

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “epistemology” and “logic”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 90 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
epistemologylogic10
causationsoul9
cosmologymotion9
motionnatural philosophy8
cosmologynatural philosophy7
causationmetaphysics6
causationmotion5
causationcosmology4
causationlogic4
causationnatural philosophy4
causationepistemology2
metaphysicsnatural philosophy2
cosmologymetaphysics1
cosmologysoul1
epistemologymetaphysics1
epistemologynatural philosophy1
epistemologysoul1
logicmetaphysics1
logicsoul1
metaphysicssoul1
motionsoul1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Deliverance from Error (المنقذ من الضلال)

    An intellectual autobiography, written at Nishapur after his return to teaching in 1106; Claud Field's Confessions of Al Ghazzali first brought it into English in 1909.

     EN
  2. The Alchemy of Happiness (Kīmiyā-yi Saʿādat)

    His major work in Persian, written around 1105 for readers without Arabic, and a shorter companion to the Revival of the Religious Sciences.

     EN
  3. The Incoherence of the Philosophers (تهافت الفلاسفة)

    The book by which he is known in philosophy, finished in Baghdad in January 1095, months before he gave up his chair there and left the city.

     AR
  4. The Just Balance (القسطاس المستقيم)

    One of several answers to the Ismāʿīlīs, this one cast as a dialogue on the road; his autobiography points readers to it instead of repeating its case.

     AR
  5. The Marvels of the Heart (كتاب شرح عجائب القلب)

    The twenty-first of the forty books of the Revival of the Religious Sciences, and the ground for the books on vices and virtues that follow it.

     AR
  6. The Niche of Lights (مشكاة الأنوار)

    Among his late works, and the one in which his thought comes closest to the mystics: three chapters on a single verse of the Qurʾān and a single saying of the Prophet.

     AR
  7. The Standard of Knowledge (معيار العلم في فن المنطق)

    Written after The Incoherence of the Philosophers to explain the philosophers' technical vocabulary to its readers, and to give jurists and theologians a test for their own arguments.

     AR
  8. مقاصد الفلاسفة you are here AR
  9. ميزان العمل

    The second half of a pair: having set a standard for knowing in The Standard of Knowledge, he set one here for acting, still in Baghdad, around 1095.

     AR
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