The Classification of the Sciences Project
(Tartīb al-ʿulūm)

Just as reality is multilateral in its aspects, so is knowledge, in that one may speak of a direct correlation between levels of existence or reality and levels of knowledge. This is a cosmological truth as well as a metaphysical truth, as the world can never be known simply as one-dimensional in the traditional perspective. It is the explication and demonstration of this basic truth that provides a deep-rooted counteraction to the fashionable nominalism, voluntarism, and anti-foundationalism of our times, so often in thrall in their present guises to a philosophically naïve, popular scientism. It is this very correlation between levels of existence or reality and levels of knowledge that has been explored and established afresh in the course of the research undertaken for Tabah’s Classification of the Sciences project. 

The symbolic frame of mind, necessary to any serious metaphysical work, arises from a vision of the universe as wheels within wheels, intertwined and interrelated dimensions revealing a synthetic unity that ensures continuity of theological meaning. From the perspective of the first three papers in the Classification of the Sciences series, this is to see things in reality in their unitive rather than in their separative aspects. This viewpoint sees the world as metaphysically transparent, a place that may be sifted for the understanding of the qualities and attributes of God, and thus allowing us to put everything in its place, and more importantly, to see everything in its rightful place. The logical thus can never contradict the metaphysical, and the metaphysical can never, in turn, be illogical. This seamlessness between the two orders is critical to the safeguarding of a sound intellectual discourse representing no less than a principial underpinning of logic by metaphysics. Although invariably the truths of metaphysics are imposed upon us, much as Reality is imposed upon us, the intellectual realm is there to allow us to expose those truths, uncovering and discovering them by principial deliberation or insight. It is in this way that every age must call for a return to principle, if it is to safeguard the ability for the human soul to understand its existential condition, a condition that remains the same regardless of time and place.