Al-Ghazali and the Idea of Moral Beauty rethinks the relationship between the good and the beautiful by considering the work of eleventh-century Muslim theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111).
Sophia Vasalou is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophical Theology at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on philosophical and theological ethics in the Islamic world. Her published works include Moral Agents and Their Deserts: The Character of Mu'tazilite Ethics (2008), Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime (2013), and Wonder: A Grammar (2015).
1. Introduction 2. The Place of Aesthetic Experience in al-Ghazali's Ethics 3. The Good and/as the Beautiful in Context 4. Moral Beauty and the Paradigm of Disinterested Love 5. A Conflict in al-Ghazali's Ethics? 6. Resolving the Conflict: An Interpretive Toolbox 7. Concluding Comment