Abstract

From both popular and scholarly works, the images Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad alGhazālī and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola often emerge in stark contrast: Ghazali, as the champion of mystical Islam, purportedly undermined philosophy in the Muslim world with The Incoherence of the Philosophers, a critique of his predecessors in the Arabic philosophical tradition such as al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā.1 In contradistinction to Ghazali's alleged destruction of philosophy, Pico della Mirandola seemingly wrote the manifesto of philosophy's rebirth in the Italian Renaissance with his Oration on the Dignity of Man (Oratio De...