Once you're in a kind of revealed religious tradition, you wind up having to explain how the things said about God in the Bible or the Qur'an or whatever religious text you're dealing with, why these statements are true.

Al-Ghazali is the most important philosophical theologian of classical Islam, and Moderation in Belief is among his most important works. It sets out al-Ghazali's Ash?arite theology with unusual clarity and provides important background for such well-known works as his autobiographical Deliverance from Error and his attack on Avicenna in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. This first English-language translation, with notes that bring out the argumentation and background of the work, is thus very much to be welcomed.

The world around you is some kind of distraction at best, and evil at worst, and you should be turning away from it.

The importance of Plotinus is not only his own philosophical ideas which are quite interesting, but his historical impact as the founder of neo-Platonism which is the main philosophical tradition of late antiquity.

In fact Plotinus thought not only that soul in general is eternal so that you always have soul, but he thought that each person's soul is eternal.

The soul must be distinct from intellect because even at its best, what the soul does when it's thinking, is it thinks linguistically, it thinks in a temporarily extended way, so it for example, might go through the steps of an argument chain, as if you were going through a syllogism and seeing that something followed from the premises, whereas intellect simply grasps the forms.

We do have intellects and Plotinus controversially thought that even though we might not be aware of it, our souls are always connected to the intellect. They never fully descend as he would put it.