Reflections into the Spirit of the Islamic Corpus of Knowledge and the Rise of the New Science

Abstract

There is no question that contemporary western civilization has been
dominant in the field of science since the Renaissance. Western scientific
superiority is not limited to specific scientific disciplines, but is rather an
ovetall scientific domination covering both the so-called exact and the
human-social sciences. Western science is the primary reference for specialists
in such ateas as physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, economics,
psychology, and sociology. It is in this sense that Third World underdevelopment
is not only economic, social, and industrial; it also suffers
from scientific-cultutal underdevelopment, or what we call "The Other
Underdevelopment" (Dhaouadi 1988).
The imptessive progress of western science since Newton and Descartes
does not meari, however, that it has everything tight or perfect. In
fact, its flaws ate becoming mote visible. In the last few decades, western
science has begun to experience a shift from what is called classical science
to new science. Classical science was associated with the celestial
mechanics of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, the new physics of Galileo,
and the philosophy of Descartes. Descartes introduced a radical division
between mind and matter, while Newton and his fellows presented a new
science that looked at the world as a kind of giant clock The laws of this
world were time-reversible, for it was held that there was no difference
between past and future. As the laws were deterministic, both the past
and the future could be predicted once the present was known.
The vision of the emerging new science tends to heal the division between
matter and spirit and to do away with the mechanical dimension ...