Objectively subjective?

The human race is a stubborn species. People often say the Dutch are even more direct than the average humans, but overall, we all want to show how smart we are and that we are definitely right. A good extensive discussion during a dinner among friends is part of the norm. Animals, thus also people, are a competitive species by nature; they need to get through natural selection and be among the fittest to survive. This we can translate into lots of human behaviour, among one is having a difference of opinion with someone. You want to show you’re smarter and more adapted than the other. One will claim his dog can fly and the other will refute his argument by saying he’s never empirically witnessed a dog do that before and hasn’t heard of any scientifical work that agrees with this statement. You could say the last party wins, due to his objectively stated argument. However, is an opinion not always subjective?

To elaborate, we look at the work “Incoherence of the philosophers” by a famous medievalist Al-Ghazali. He claimed that all philosophy that had been done before was bad philosophy. Years and years of ancient theories he refused to assume like everyone else had done. The whole foundation everyone used in their daily thinking and from which they tried to build to their own ideas, needed to be destroyed and replaced by the importance of revelation. Al-Ghazali said that because metaphysics, a part of philosophy that makes an excellent example, can’t be demonstrated and exists completely outside of the scientific realm. This causes it to be of no use to the understanding of religion. He doesn’t refute all the ideas and theories, but says that they’re technically bad, because they’re not scientific.

The fact that philosophy should be scientific, isn’t that however an opinion, therefore subjective? We can see Al-Ghazali and the philosophical studies before that as the two parties having a normal discussion that we talked about before. Therefore, when saying that a theory has to be objective and have the ability to be scientifically demonstrated, which concludes a subjective idea, he contradicts himself. His own theory isn’t proper philosophy, because it’s not objective and can’t be empirically demonstrated.