Recently there have appeared a number of creative but...

Recently there have appeared a number of creative but tentative attempts to re-conceptualize notions of ‘reason’ and ‘intelligence’ along anti-mentalistic or ‘personological’ lines,[^12] several drawing on the experience and practice of older non-Western traditions or even popular ‘folk’ conceptions.[^13] Contemporary materialism is in essence a program of reduction, assimilation, and annexation, which is being applied to meet the felt need to construct a unitary image of the world (ie.

a meta -physics)—and to construct it under the cover of ‘Science’. For the ‘human’ is the “last frontier” of a physicalistically constituted knowledge, being the last part of reality which must be shown to be reducible to empirical observations and verifiable explanations of a materialist nature, resulting in the ‘scientific theory’ of man—identified with the neurophysiological interpretation of the human being.

Having banished the transcendent metaphysic of the spiritual and reduced it to the ‘irrational’, science finds itself searching for a substitute to plug the hole in its knowledge, finding it in a naturalist or physicalistic materialism.

As Hilary Putnam points out: “the appeal of materialism lies precisely in this, in its claim to be natural metaphysics, metaphysics within the bounds of science.” In this manner, materialism “has replaced positivism and pragmatism as the dominant contemporary form of scientism”, which he portrays as being “one of the most dangerous contemporary intellectual tendencies.”[^14] Of course, a chief element of pre-modern scientific thinking was the lack of clear distinction between the sciences and philosophy, thus making the sciences dependent upon philosophy.

This is true at least of the physical sciences, cosmology, and of psychology, which were treated under the category of t}abi>‘iyya>t ‘Physics’ in Islamic philosophy. Modern conceptions of scientific knowledge separate ‘science’ from any philosophical rationalist system, freeing the scientific method of empirical investigation and deduction from the worldview of a philosophic metaphysic.

‘Scientism’ attempts to fill this void by collapsing immaterial dimensions of human experience into the physical. Previous…