Fri 6 March | Between Al-Ghazālī and Averroës: The Critique of Metaphysics and the Systematization of Islam as a Science
On Friday 6 March, Ahmed Abdel Meguid (Syracuse University) delivered a lecture, entitled: "Between Al-Ghazālī and Averroës: The Critique of Metaphysics and the Systematization of Islam as a Science." This lecture was organised by LUCIS in cooperation with the Institute for Philosophy's Comparative Philosophy Project.
On Friday 6 March, Ahmed Abdel Meguid (Syracuse University) delivered a lecture, entitled: "Between Al-Ghazālī and Averroës: The Critique of Metaphysics and the Systematization of Islam as a Science." This lecture was organised by LUCIS in cooperation with the Institute for Philosophy's Comparative Philosophy Project.
About the lecture
There is increasingly mounting literature on the harmony rather than the classical assumption of conflict between Averroës’s and al-Ghazālī’s projects. In 1985, the leading Moroccan scholar Jamāl al-Dīn al-‘Alawī argued for this harmony tracing the intellectual development of Averroës thought from legal theory to philosophy in light of his relation to al-Ghazālī. In
Ghazālī: La Raison Et Le Miracle, Al-‘Alawī argued that Averroës followed al-Ghazālī’s interest in constructing Islam as a system of metaphysics; however, Averroës was disappointed with the failure of al-Ghazālī to achieve this goal despite his success in incorporating Aristotelian logic in the principles of Islamic law. Al-‘Alawī’s argument was recently adopted and further developed by Franklin Griffel especially in his analysis of Averroës’s commentary on al-Ghazālī’s
Mustaṣfā.
While agreeing with the claim that the relationship between Averroës and al-Ghazālī is one of harmony rather than conflict, this lecture offered a completely new perspective on the longstanding question regarding the relation between Averroës and al-Ghazālī. The lecture explored the attempts of both thinkers to construct Islam as a system of metaphysics and a
weltanschauung through their critique of Avicenna. Carefully examining the philosophical trilogy of al-Ghazālī
Maqāṣid al-Falāsifa and
Tahāfut al-Falāsifa vis-à-vis Averroës’s
Short and
Long Commentaries on the Metaphysics and
al-Kashf ‘an Manāhij al-Adilla fī ‘Aqa’id al-Milla, the lecture demonstrated a key position that they share. Both al-Ghazālī and Averroës were mainly interested in delineating the epistemological (on the level of logic) and ontological distinctions between the domain of physics and metaphysics. While their criticisms of Avicenna’s philosophical system diverge in terms of their themes and purposes, they converge in their claim that Avicenna’s system conflates the distinction between physics and metaphysics. For instance, on the logical/epistemological level al-Ghazālī was concerned with the application of categories like that of causality in physics versus the metaphysics. Similarly, Averroës based on his exacting reading of the
Posterior Analytics on the principles and definition of science argued that Avicenna conflated physics with metaphysics.
The lecture examined the implications of the parallelism between al-Ghazālī’s and Averroës’s critiques of Avicenna for the structure and content of their monumental projects of reforming and restructuring religious sciences. Subsequently, the lecture indicated the way in which the interest in delimiting physics to metaphysics developed in post-Averroës philosophy and theology pointing to the suggested way of harmonizing the systems of both thinkers. The last part of the lecture briefly drew the parallelism between the position of Averroës and al-Ghazālī to that of Leibniz and then Kant in their critique of Scholastic metaphysics and their attempt to reconstruct Christian theology. Through this parallelism the lecture indicated how the project of Enlightenment was possibly influenced by these two major critical projects in Islamic thought. More importantly, the lecture succinctly outlined the difference in the methodology and content of the critique of metaphysics in both contexts.
About Ahmed Abdel Meguid
Ahmed E. Abdel Meguid is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Religion at Syracuse University. He earned his PhD in Philosophy at Emory University. His research generally focuses on Islamic philosophy and theology as well as late 18th through 19th and early 20th centuries German philosophy and phenomenology. He is particularly interested in philosophical anthropology, political philosophy and aesthetics. He is currently working on two book monographs. One is a study of the theory of the self in Ibn al-‘Arabī’s (d. 1240) mystical philosophy. The study traces the origins of Ibn al-‘Arabī’s conception of the self in Avicenna’s philosophy especially through its critical reception by his Andalusian predecessors and Ash‘arī theology. The second book is on the epistemological tension between foundationalism and skepticism in the epistemology of Ash‘arī theology. The study argues that the Ash‘arī system is essentially a critical system of limiting rational claims by empirical observation to establish a rigorous position on common sense. Abdel Meguid has a number of published and forthcoming articles on the Averroes, Avicenna, the question of sovereignty and political subjectivity in Ash‘arī theology, Husserl’s theory of teleological judgment and Kant’s aesthetics and religious thought.