Unveiling the hidden

on the meditations of Descartes and Ghazzali

Mohammad Azadpur

pp. 219-240

in: The passions of the soul in the metamorphosis of becoming, Berlin, Springer, 2003

Abstract

Any reader of René Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy would be amazed at the close resemblance the skeptical beginnings of this work bear to the work of the well-known Muslim philosopher and theologian, Abu Hamid Muhammad alGhazzali, titled Deliverance from Error and Attachment to the Lord of Might and Majesty. This amazement would only multiply when the reader recognized that these two thinkers are not only separated from each other culturally, but that they are also more than five centuries apart historically. Ghazzali was born 1058 AD in northeastern Iran, taught at Baghdad in the Nizamiya, and after travelling widely throughout the Islamic world died in Tus, Iran, in the year 1111 AD. Descartes was born in a village in Tourain, France, in 1596, traveled as a soldier and then as a philosopher throughout Europe, and died in Sweden in 1650. Despite the cultural and historical gulf separating these two thinkers, an investigation of their relevant works is ideal for comparative philosophy, because the momentous cultural and temporal differences weaken the need for (distractive) efforts to establish historical lines of influence. In saying this, I am not dismissing the value of historical scholarship in philosophy.¹ What I am disputing is a tendency towards historicizing philosophy, treating it as merely a subject for historical sciences.

Cited authors

Descartes René