Mohammad Alwahaib

This paper clarifies the philosophical connection between Al-Ghazali and Descartes, with the goal to articulate similarities and differences in their famous journeys from doubt to certainty. As such, its primary focus is on the chain of their reasoning, starting from their conceptions of truth and doubt arguments, until their arrival at truth. Both philosophers agreed on the ambiguous character of ordinary everyday knowledge and decided to set forth in undermining its foundations. As such, most scholars tend to agree that the doubt arguments used by Descartes and Al-Ghazali are similar, but identify their departures from doubt as radically different: while Descartes found his way out of doubt through the cogito and so reason, Al-Ghazali ended his philosophical journey as a Sufi in a sheer state of passivity, waiting for the truth to be revealed to him by God. This paper proves this is not the case. Under close textual scrutiny and through the use of basic Husserlian-phenomenological concepts, I show that Al-Ghazali's position was misunderstood, thus disclosing his true philosophic nature.

This paper clarifies the philosophical connection between Al-Ghazali and Descartes, with the goal to articulate similarities and differences in their famous journeys from doubt to certainty. As such, its primary focus is on the chain of their reasoning, starting from their conceptions of truth and doubt arguments, until their arrival at truth. Both philosophers agreed on the ambiguous character of ordinary everyday knowledge and decided to set forth in undermining its foundations. As such, most scholars tend to agree that the doubt arguments used by Descartes and Al-Ghazali are similar, but identify their departures from doubt as radically different: while Descartes found his way out of doubt through the cogito and so reason, Al-Ghazali ended his philosophical journey as a Sufi in a sheer state of passivity, waiting for the truth to be revealed to him by God. This paper proves this is not the case. Under close textual scrutiny and through the use of basic Husserlian-phenomenological concepts, I show that Al-Ghazali's position was misunderstood, thus disclosing his true philosophic nature.

Many claim that Hannah Arendt’s political thought was developed through various stages, and that this development took place through various confrontations with topics such as ideology, totalitarianism and her concerns with the so-called “Jewish question”. Arendt’s political thought is usually characterized by an early emphasis on the priority of the political over that of the mind. In other words, her work is usually read as emphasizing the priority of the mode of living-with-others; action, over the solitary activity of thinking. This ‘early’ emphasis on the priority of politics goes hand in hand with her rejection of all transcendent standards or truths in the sphere of politics. Arendt’s later writings, which were devoted mainly to the life of the mind, are usually read as a reversal of thought: a priority of thinking over action. Arendt’s alleged reversal of thought took place through her witnessing the trial of the war criminal Adolph Eichmann whose crime, Arendt suggested, sprang from the fact of thoughtlessness. Arendt’s new emphasis on the priority of thinking is supposedly something for which her early works made no provision. Almost contradicting everything she believed in before, Arendt’s new ‘political thinking’ allows the introduction of truth and transcendental standards into the political realm. I believe that the above interpretation does not do justice to Arendt’s political thought. To introduce the distinction between ‘early’ and ‘late’ into her works obscures above all the continuity of her thought. I believe that there is a unifying thread that runs through Arendt’s main works whether ‘early’ or ‘late.’ I call this unifying thread ‘political thinking.’ Careful analysis of Arendt’s ‘early’ thoughts on politics shows a considerable emphasis on the importance of thinking in relation to politics or action. It is this specific kind of thinking, political thinking, that does justice to both, the demands of the mind on one hand, and the demands of experience on the other. I explore the development of ‘political thinking’ in Arendt’s major writings beginning from her doctoral dissertation on Rahel Varnhagen to her final thoughts on The Life of the Mind