Falsafa

Comma for either/or — dharma, courage. Spelling forgiving — corage finds courage.

    philosophy · 11th century · 1 crossing

    Aims of the Philosophers

    مقاصد الفلاسفةMaqāṣid al-falāsifa

    al-Ghazali, in Arabic

    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. 1093–1094 Arabic original

    written by al-Ghazali in Baghdad

    1. c. 1162–1180 Arabic Latin translation attested

      Summa theoricae philosophiae

      translated by Dominicus Gundissalinus and Magister Iohannes in 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.