Tahafut_al-Tahafut-transl-Engl-van-den-Bergh

I say:
essence nor matter’ and their possibility is a relative
attribute, dependent neither on God’s power nor on the
Agent;’ but on what then is it dependent? The difficulties are
therefore turned against them themselves.
I do not know any philosopher who said that the soul has a beginning in
the true sense of the word and is thereafter everlasting except -as Ghazali
relates-Avicenna. All other philosophers agree that in their temporal
existence they are related to and connected with the bodily possibilities,
which receive this connexion like the possibilities which subsist in mirrors
for their connexion with the rays of the suns According to the philosophers
this possibility is not of the nature of the generable and corruptible forms,
but of a kind to which, according to them, demonstrative proof leads, and
the vehicle of this possibility is of another nature than the nature of the
Kyle. He alone can grasp their theories in these matters who has read
their books and fulfilled the conditions there laid down by them, and has
besides a sound understanding and a learned master. That Ghazali
should touch on such questions in this way is not worthy of such a man,
but there are only these alternatives: either he knew these matters in their
true nature, and sets them out here wrongly, which is wicked; or he did not
understand their real nature and touched on problems he had not
grasped, which is the act of an ignoramus. However, he stands too high in
our eyes for either of these qualifications. But even the best horse will
stumble’ and it was a stumble of Ghazali’s that he brought out this book.
But perhaps he was forced to do so by the conditions of his time and his
situation.
Ghazali says, speaking on behalf of the philosophers:
It may be said: To reduce possibility to a judgement of
the intellect is absurd, for the meaning of ‘judgement of the
intellect’ is nothing but the knowledge of possibility, and
possibility is an object of knowledge, not knowledge itself;
knowledge, on the contrary, comprises possibility and
follows it and depends on it as it is, and if knowledge
vanished the object of knowledge would not, but the
disappearance of the object of knowledge would imply the
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