Religion, Philosophy and Science : A Sketch of a Global View
Contents: Preface. 1. Prologue. 2. Historical perspective. 3. Recalling the scientific and philosophical basics of the ancient civilizations. 4. Spread of Islam and Sufism in India. 5. The genesis of science in the Islamic civilization. 6. Interaction between Islam, Judaism and Christendom. 7. History and geography of science. 8. The civilizational dialogue between India, China and some neighbouring countries. 9. Auxiliary linguistic hypothesis supporting the theory of a continuous cultural space. 10. The global spread and presence of European imperialism and its impact on the history of religion, philosophy and science. 11. The magic of zero, gun and gunpowder. 12. Epilogue: naturalism, humanism and beyond. Bibliography. Index.
"The basic presupposition underlying this book is the unity of human knowledge in its very wide sense. Different forms of knowledge and their present-day specializations should not make us blind to their thematic and conceptual overlap. Disciplines like religion, ethics and law have their unmistakable affinity defined in terms of dos and dont\'s. Philosophy, science and cosmology cannot be sharply demarcated because of their historically shifting boundaries. History, sociology and anthropology, in view of their ineliminable human roots, are bound to remain mutually interactive forever. History has no intrinsic metric or period of its own. It is for pressing practical reasons that disciplines of knowledge have always been undergoing change in very many ways, partly theoretical and mainly practical.
Cultural space, unlike political state, knows no boundary. This is evident from the that of we find many religions, various ethnic groups and diverse social structures and practices within the bounds of a single state. With the development and dominance of science, particularly communication systems, all forms of knowledge have been becoming increasingly sharable by peoples living in widely dispersed geographical areas, living under different political systems and speaking different languages and dialects.
A many-sided attempt has been made in this book to indicate that affinity between cultural systems, convergence of political structures and similarity between art forms are all due to continuous interaction and intermixture between the human groups living on the globe. Through the windows and doors of different forms of religion, philosophy and science we can perceive a growingly clear global view of the mankind as a whole. Relying on the findings of diverse disciplines, literary, religious, philosophical and scientific, D.P. Chattopadhyaya has offered a sketch of a veritable global view. Rarely has an interdisciplinary thinker and writer ever tried to present the essences of so many disciplines within such a limited scope. To the reader it will be clear that the author of this book has been guided, besides the published books and the available oral traditions, by his own reflections on and insights into the same." (jacket)
