Islamic Epistemology and Modern Philosophy of Science: Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s Perspective on Contemporary Scientific Paradigms
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Abstract
Contemporary discourse on the relationship between religion and science has reached an unprecedented level of sophistication, yet the distinctively Islamic contribution to epistemological theory has received insufficient attention in mainstream philosophy of science literature. This study addresses that gap by conducting a systematic interdisciplinary analysis of Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s Islamic epistemological framework and its critique of modern scientific paradigms. Nasr Iranian-American philosopher, Professor Emeritus of Islamic Studies at George Washington University, and recipient of numerous international honours including the Templeton Prize nomination has spent six decades developing the most comprehensive contemporary engagement between Islamic intellectual tradition and modern Western philosophy of science. Drawing on Nasr’s major works (1989, 1993, 1996, 2006, 2010, 2016) and a systematic literature review of 60 classical and contemporary sources, this study analyses Nasr’s threefold epistemological framework revelation (wahy), reason (ʿaql), and intuition (kashf/dhawq) against four modern scientific paradigms: Comtean positivism, Popperian critical rationalism, Kuhnian paradigm theory, and postmodern epistemology. The comparative analysis across eight dimensions reveals that Nasr’s framework shares significant common ground with Kuhn’s recognition of the paradigm-dependency of scientific knowledge and with postmodern epistemology’s critique of scientism, while diverging fundamentally from all modern paradigms in its insistence on revelation as the highest epistemological authority and its integration of kashf as a legitimate source of knowledge. Five areas of productive dialogue are identified: the critique of positivist scientism, the social embeddedness of knowledge, the legitimacy of multiple epistemological frameworks, environmental ethics, and the limits of reductionist methodology. The study proposes a model of Complementary Epistemological Engagement (CEE) as a framework for dialogue between Islamic and modern scientific epistemologies that neither subordinates the former to the latter nor retreats into mutual isolation.
Keywords: Seyyed Hossein Nasr; Islamic epistemology; philosophy of science; sacred science; perennial philosophy; Kuhn; positivism; tawhid; wahy; kashf; science-religion dialogue
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