Philosophers' metaphysical theories and not their natural science. Ghazali makes it plain that his purpose is to refute the Islamic In the words of a historian of philosophy, The "philosophers" in the title are literally "lovers of knowledge" (φιλόσοφος) from the Platonic tradition Ghazzālī is not criticizing knowledge itself. On the contrary, he tried to construct a better model of human reason and natural knowledge than past philosophers, hence the title of his book The Incoherence of the Philosophers. The fact is that Ghazzālī nowhere professed that reason or knowledge is useless. Unfortunately Wikipedia is often edited precisely by people who have simply seen popular accounts by people like Tyson (or Skeptoid podcast, or The New Atlantis) produced with no understanding of the history of science or human thought. This is an old myth from the days of Orientalism. It's possible that Neil Tyson's explanation of al-Ghazali has come from what Weinberg has told him. Here is a video of Weinberg explaining this, just before Neil deGrasse Tyson comes to the podium to do his talk. More science worth mentioning in Islamic countries." According to al-Ghazali, a piece of cotton placed in aįlame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because Laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God’s hands Influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, whoĪrgued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of "Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. Steven Weinberg is critical of religion, and has written: Steven Weinberg is a physics Nobel laureate and acquaintance of Neil Tyson. Links to other occasions he's said this before, here are two:Įdit: OK, I'm pretty sure I know what happened. This cuts the kneecaps out of any mathematical advances that would unfold." That the manipulation of numbers is the work of the Devil.
"And in that interpretation (al-Ghazali's) it included the perspective Here is a quote written from one of the versions, found in video link 2 below: Is there any evidence that al-Ghazali said something like manipulating numbers or math is the work of the devil, or maybe sinful, or immoral? And as corollary to that, did he damage the spirit of scientific inquiry in the Islamic world? Sorry about the disputatious annotations made by the poster, but this was the first result I got for "Tyson al-Ghazali". Here is a video of Tyson making this claim. Scientific research in the Islamic world.Īgainst this view, Saliba (2007) has given a number of examplesĮspecially of astronomical research flourishing after the time of His reforms are widely seen as having initiated the decline of
He was a rather influential Islamic scholar in many ways, but specific to the claim that his philosophy led to the decline of science within the Islamic world, I only found the following: Today I came across the Wikipedia article for al-Ghazali and thought I'd spend some time reading about him. I've listened to many of Tyson's talks, and he's mentioned this many times.
Among these was something along the lines that mathematics was, to use Tyson's words "the work of the devil". Then an Islamic scholar named al-Ghazali became prominent, whose ideas took root. The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has said that during the Islamic Golden Age, especially in Baghdad, science and discovery flourished for a few centuries.
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