Editorial

Abstract

The critical dimension and the one that can unify knowledge through systemic interrelationships, is unification of the purely a priori with the purely a posteriori parts of total reality into a congruous whole. This is a circular cause and effect interrelationship between premises. The emerging kind of world view may also be substantively called the epistemic‐ontic circular causation and continuity model of unified reality. The essence of this order is to ground philosophy of science in both the natural and social sciences, in a perpetually interactive and integrative mould of deriving, evolving and enhancing or revising change. Knowledge is then defined as the output of every such interaction. Interaction arises first from purely epistemological roots to form ontological reality. This is the passage from the a priori to the a posteriori realms in the traditions of Kant and Heidegger. Conversely, the passage from the a posteriori to a priori reality is the approach to knowledge in the natural sciences proferred by Cartesian meditations, David Hume, A.N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, as examples. Yet the continuity and renewal of knowledge by interaction and integration of these two premises are not rooted in the philosophy of western science. Husserl tried for it through his critique of western civilization and philosophical methods in the Crisis of Western Civilization. The unified field theory of Relativity‐Quantum physics is being tried for. A theory of everything has been imagined. Yet after all is done, scientific research program remains in a limbo. Unification of knowledge appears to be methodologically impossible in occidental philosophy of science.

Citation

(1995), "Editorial", Humanomics, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 1-91. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb018759