Ibn Rushd (Averroes) · Philosophy
Averroes’s book-length reply to al-Ghazali - a defence of natural causation against the claim that God, not fire, does the burning. Fire burns cotton by its own nature, Averroes insists, and to deny that causes really act is to destroy knowledge, science, and the very idea of a wise Maker.
You learned that al-Ghazali argued there is no necessary connection between cause and effect (God alone burns the cotton), and that Averroes replied that things act by their natures, that knowledge just is knowledge of causes, and that denying causation makes both science and a wise God unintelligible. Explain the cla…
Leads to Al-Ghazali.
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