HAS THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE BEEN REWRITTEN: RECLAIMING PRE-SOCRATIC, ISLAMIC AND METAPHYSICAL ROOTS IN THE SECULAR ENLIGHTENMENT NARRATIVE, AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR MODERN RELATIONSHIP OF SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
This piece was originally a final research paper for REL 302/PHL 327 at DePaul University for Winter Quarter (Jan-Mar 26′), continuing investigation into the secular enlightenment and omitted lineages and contributions in the narrative of Western Philosophy, and the consequences of those omissions.
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INTRODUCTION
The Western narrative of the Age of Enlightenment has systematically rewritten the history of science by sanitizing its metaphysical, religious, and non-European roots, particularly pre-Socratic natural philosophy and classical Islamic transmissions1, i.e., physis-centered noetic traditions. This history portrays scientific progress as a purely rational, secular, and individualistic triumph of modernity, while downplaying cyclical, integrative, and noetic traditions. As Terence Keel2 demonstrates, this sanitized history hides how Christian theological patterns of creation and monogenism were reoccupied into modern racial science, enabling Eurocentric hierarchies that denied philosophical agency to non-Western lineages (Keel 23-24). William Rasch3 further reveals the Enlightenment as a quasi-religious formation that reoccupies theological absolutes with secular dogmas of autonomous reason (Rasch 177). David Sorkin4 complicates this by recovering the “Religious Enlightenment” strands that included non-Protestant contributions. Through examination of Islamic preservationist scientific and philosophical contributions to Baron d’Holbach’s material determinism (reflecting Greek cyclical anankē) and Joseph Boscovich’s point-particle theory (reviving Pythagorean unified physics), this paper argues that such revisions create an illusory dichotomy between science and religion. Reclaiming these erased contributions through the hermeneutic recovery of the ancient Greek concept of physis as dynamic generative order reveals science and religion as complementary noetic inquiries into natural laws, cosmic justice and ethical self-mastery, thereby providing a nuanced perspective on myth and narrative, cross-cultural comparison, moral dimensions in racial ethics, textual interpretation, cultural interaction and religion’s societal power dynamics. This analysis draws on close textual interpretation, cross-cultural comparison, and historical genealogy.
- INTRODUCTION
- METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS: PRE-SOCRATIC INTEGRATIVE NOETIC WISDOM AND ERASURE IN WESTERN NARRATIVES
- CLASSICAL ISLAMIC CONTRIBUTIONS TO SCIENTIFIC THINKING: HERMENEUTIC PRESERVATION, ONTOLOGICAL SYNTHESIS AND OMISSION FROM ENLIGHTENMENT LEGACY
- ANCIENT NOETIC UNIVERSALISM AND REFUTATION OF RACIAL HIERARCHIES
- BLUMENBACH AND THE REOCCUPATION OF CHRISTIAN MONOGENISM IN ENLIGHTENMENT SCIENTIFIC RACISM
- ENLIGHTENMENT RECONFIGURATIONS: D’HOLBACH, BOSCOVICH AND THE SANITIZATION OF METAPHYSICAL ROOTSS
- IMPACT
- WORKS CITED
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