The Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and

the LMU in Munich online at www. History of Philosophy.net. Today's episode

By the Book, Ibn Taimia.

It's a thankless job being a critic of philosophy. The anti-philosopher typically winds up getting sucked into the whole business they want to attack.

After all, anyone who mounts a serious case against philosophy is bound to give what amounts to a philosophical argument, which is a bit self-defeating.

And in a bitter irony, the really sophisticated and interesting opponents of philosophy are simply

absorbed into the annals of the subject they so detest.

Haters gonna hate and historians gonna say,

gosh those arguments you gave are really interesting

and in fact we'd like to devote a podcast to you.

So it is that we've covered numerous thinkers who positioned themselves against the

philosophical systems of their day.

From ancient skeptics like Carnayides and Sextus, two Christian theologians hostile to Hellenic philosophy,

like Irenaeus and Tertullian, to opponents of philosophical rationalism in Judaism.

Think of those who instigated the Mymonides controversy.

Among Muslims, Al-Jazali is the most famous critic on the strength of his incoherence of the philosophers.

But as we saw, his attitude towards philosophy as embodied

above all by Avicenna was rather subtle. For one thing, he had a great appreciation

for logic. Not so with the subject of this episode. You'll find no

more strident detractor of philosophy in the Islamic world than Imtaimia. We've cast a broad net in our history of philosophy in the Islamic world, considering not just

logic and Aristotilianism but also rational theology or Kalam, the theory of justification

underlying Islamic law, philosophical Sufism.

...