On Aug 4, 12:42 am, "Robert A. Rohde" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I think you are being a little unfair to Al Ghazali. He set out to
> counter a school of teachings that in parts were directly opposed to
> the contemporary understanding of Islam. The "Islamic philosophers"
> used pure reason (not science as we would understand it) to arrive at
> conclusions about religion that ran directly counter to the Qu'ran.
> Al Ghazali was actually a believer in reason,
A believer in math and formal logic, not in science after his
religious conversion.
> but argued that
> religious conclusions must begin with religious teachings and not
> contradict that foundation. He was a man of faith with noble
> intentions of preserving and passing on the truth of Islam. Very
> different than, for example, trying to ensure corporate profits from
> tobacco. Al Ghazali could not have forseen the unintended effects of
> driving back the "excesses" of reason which had intruded into
> religious studies.
Well, I don't know enough to refute the idea that he could not have
forseen the effect. Did the effect start during his lifetime?
The wiki indicates that his effect was intrenched by the time Ibn
Rushd (Averrose) tried to refute him. Intrenched within a few decade
of his death, having spread from the Middle East to Spain. Averrose,
an Islamic scientist who is now well-known in the West, who was born
15 years after Al Ghazali's death, found himself fighting a losing
battle against Al Ghazili's influence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Rushd
So perhaps the effect did start during his lifetime.
Would he have cared? Al Ghazli turned to religion after a severe
depression. The depression was not relieved by his former scholarly
pursuits and was relieved by his plunge into the certainty of mystical
meditation. He specifically targeted the contingent, uncertain nature
of scientific truth as insufficient for happiness and even perhaps
evil. I doubt that a guy like that would care about the effect,
similar sorts don't seem to care today.
>
> -Robert Rohde
>
> On Aug 1, 7:00 am, Tom Adams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
>
> > I wonder if there are historical precidents for the gross misuse of
> > skepticism concerning AGW?
>
> > I know of a few examples from a broad philosophical prospective.
> > Probably the greatest applied skeptic of all times was Al Ghazali. He
> > is credited with stopping Islamic scientific progress around 1000 AD,
> > playing a key role in starting a dark age that the Islamic world has
> > not yet emerged from. Al Ghazali accepted mathematics as truth, but
> > he took on Aristotle and Plato using their own logical tools. He
> > attacked the very idea of cause and effect as being unprovable. He
> > advocated mysticism and maintained that the concept of cause and
> > effect was blasphemy since it limited the power of God.
>
> > The Pragmatist philosophical school argued that skepticism was often
> > misused in philosophy. They thought that the skeptical pose of
> > Descartes and Hume was artificial and was not really that useful a
> > tool in the theory of knowledge. They advocated more of a "take your
> > best shot" approach to knowledge.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
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