 In his autobiography al-Ghazâlî writes that during his time at the Baghdad Nizâmiyya he studied the works of the falâsifa for two years before he wrote his Incoherence of the Philosophers in a third year (Ghazâlî 1959a, 18 = 2000b, 61). It is hardly credible, however, that al-Ghazâlî began to occupy himself with falsafa only after he became professor at the Nizâmiyya in Baghdad. This account is apologetic and aims to reject the claim of some of his critics that he had learned falsafa before his own religious education was complete. Most probably he had become acquainted with falsafa while studying with al-Juwaynî, whose works already show an influence from Avicenna. Al-Ghazâlî’s response to Aristotelianism, the Incoherence of the Philosophers, is a masterwork of philosophical literature and may have been decades in the making. It is accompanied by works where al-Ghazâlî provides faithful reports of the philosophers’ teachings. Two of those works have come down to us. The first is an almost complete fragment of a long book where al-Ghazâlî copies or paraphrases passages from the works of philosophers and combines them to a comprehensive report about their teachings in metaphysics (Griffel 2006, al-Akiti 2009). The fragment unfortunately bears no title. The second work, the Doctrines of the Philosophers (Maqâsid al-falâsifa, on the translation of the title see Shihadeh 2011, 90–92), is a loosely adapted Arabic translation of the parts on logics, metaphysics, and the natural sciences in Avicenna’s Persian work Philosophy for ‘Alâ’ al-Dawla (Dânishnamah-yi Alâ’î) (Janssens 1986). Previously it has been assumed that the Doctrines of the Philosophers was written as a preparatory study to his major work, the Incoherence. This can no longer be upheld. Both reports of al-Ghazâlî stand only in a very loose connection to the text of the Incoherence of the Philosophers. The Incoherence and the Doctrines use different terminologies and the latter presents its material in ways that does not support the criticism in the Incoherence (Janssens 2003, 43–45). The Doctrines of the Philosophers may have been a text that was initially unconnected to the Incoherence or that was generated after the composition of the latter. Only its introduction and its brief explicit create a connection to the refutation in the Incoherence. These parts were almost certainly written (or added) after the publication of the Incoherence (Janssens 2003, 45; Griffel 2006, 9–10).