Books and Their Teachings

Starting with an analysis of the failure of an earlier Western engagement with post-classical philosophy in Islam during the twentieth century, the chapter highlights some startling features of this genre. It shows that different works of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi include, if compared to one another, gross contradictions. Works that he refers to as “philosophical books” are drastically different in their teachings from his books on kalam and other religious sciences. The chapter identifies these “philosophical books” and reconstructs their teachings on two particular subjects: epistemology and the understanding of God. Fakhr al-Din’s position that knowledge is a “relation” between the knower and the object of knowledge is part of a development that goes back to al-Ghazali and was pushed forward by Abu l-Barakat al-Baghdadi. Similarly his view that in God there is a distinction between existence and essence goes back to al-Ghazali’s critique of falsafa, but it also counters it and promotes an Avicennan understanding of God.