And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at

W.W. history of philosophy. net. Today's episode, Special Delivery, Al-Rizali.

If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you have heard an awful lot of philosophy by now.

How has it made you feel?

Hopefully curious, entertained, and occasionally even enlightened.

But it doesn't always produce these beneficial effects.

Some people, unbelievably enough, actually think it is pointless and boring.

Losers.

Others find it all too gripping.

Philosophy bothers them and can even cause anxiety and a kind of existential paralysis.

We might associate that with characters in 20th century novels by Camus,

Sartre or Kafka, but it's something that happened already long ago to one of the greatest and most complex

thinkers of the Islamic world, Abu Hamad al-Jazale.

In his philosophical autobiography, the Munkhedmanad Dalal, or Deliverer from error,

Al-Gazale speaks of a crisis brought on by reflection on the Remember, ancient skeptics like Sextus Empiricus claimed that skepticism could be a road to

a tataxia or freedom from disturbance.

They reported that once they suspended judgment about all possible topics of inquiry, they found that a deep and lasting peace settled upon them, freed as they were from the stressful search for knowledge.

But one man's calm is another's calamity.

When Arazale argued himself into a skeptical corner, he found himself not liberated, but frustrated at an intellectual stalemate. This is one of two life crises he speaks of in the

deliverer from error, the other being a far more serious breakdown in the summer of the year 1095.

In that case, religious reflection on the meaninglessness of his daily occupation as a teacher

caused him to stop eating, and even rendered him unable to speak.

...