# Aims of the Philosophers

- id: maqasid
- original title: مقاصد الفلاسفة / Maqāṣid al-falāsifa
- author: al-Ghazali
- language: Arabic
- composed: c. 1093–1094, Baghdad
- field: philosophy

Al-Ghazali's lucid survey of the philosophers' doctrines, adapted from Ibn Sina's Persian. Tradition read it as the warm-up for his demolition of those same doctrines in the Incoherence of the Philosophers; recent scholarship questions that tidy story. Latin Europe read it without the ending either way.

## The chain

- **c. 1162–1180** Arabic -> Latin, translation as "Summa theoricae philosophiae" [attested]
  Dominicus Gundissalinus (translator), Magister Iohannes (translator), Toledo
  The translators omitted the prologue in which al-Ghazali announces he is reporting doctrines in order to demolish them; a Latin rendering survives in exactly one Paris manuscript. Read cold, the book made 'Algazel' a faithful Avicennian for four centuries. The print era fixed the error in place: Venice 1506, as Logica et philosophia Algazelis.
  Evidence: Minnema 2014 (manuscript census, the lone surviving prologue, and the 'cave hic' marginalia); Griffel 2025

## Worth knowing

The prologue in which al-Ghazali says he is only reporting doctrines in order to refute them was translated into Latin, then lost from the circulating text. It survives in exactly one manuscript in Paris. Every other copy opened cold with the doctrines, so for four centuries Latin readers took Islam's most famous critic of philosophy for Avicenna's loyal epitomist, while nervous copyists scrawled 'cave hic', beware here, in the margins of some forty manuscripts.

## Sources

- Minnema, Anthony H. (2014). Algazel Latinus: The Audience of the Summa theoricae philosophiae, 1150-1600. Traditio 69.
- Griffel, Frank (2025). al-Ghazali. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Confidence grades: attested (named in the medieval record or settled in scholarship), probable (standard view with real uncertainty), disputed (scholars disagree).