Seyyed hossein nasr biography of michael j
Essential Frithjof Schuon, The, ed. Jump to :. Page 1 of 1. Page : [1] of 1 pages. Holdings: 2 Books. Frithjof Schuon: Messenger of the Perennial Philosophy. Library of His Work. About His Writings. About His Life. Image Gallery. Film Clips. Other Resources. The teleological nature of the Islamic sciences of nature also envisages a hierarchic order in nature.
To explain this, Nasr uses the metaphysical language of traditional Islamic philosophy, whose first premise is to make a distinction between the Principle, i. Just as the generation of the world of multiplicity from the One implies an ontological hierarchy, various levels of existence are also structured in hierarchic units, the cosmos being a special case in point.
Since every level of reality has its own meaning and place in the total economy of Divine creation, none of them can be reduced to one single element, viz. According to Nasr, it is the teleological and hierarchic view of the universe that has prevented the Islamic sciences of nature from falling into the trap of reductionism and materialism.
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For Nasr, the greatest achievement and relevance of Islamic scientific tradition lies not merely in its ability to find the direction of the Kacbah but in its comprehensive outlook based on the metaphysical principles of Islam. In this regard, Islamic science is not just science developed and cultivated by people who happened to be Muslim.
Rather, it is the scientific study of natural phenomena within the matrix of the worldview of the Islamic revelation. Nasr has been one of the most outspoken critics of Western secular science and its effect on the non-Western world. In a number of studies, he has shown that the roots of modern science are traceable to a set of philosophical assumptions that mark the demarcation line between the medieval Christian and the modern West.
Taking the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries to be a turning point in the history of Europe, Nasr focuses on the process of the gradual demise of Christian thought and the rise of the secular view of the universe, and argues that the rise of modern science is not the result of some groundbreaking discoveries in scientific measurement and instruments but rather of a radical change in the worldview of modern man that emerged in Europe after the 16th century.
To substantiate this claim, Nasr identifies six dominant traits of modern science. The first is the secular view of the universe that sees no traces of the Divine in the natural order on the one hand, and denies any telos or purpose to the universe on the other. Consequently, the teleological view of the universe, shared by all traditional civilizations, is rejected by modern science.
Since modern science and philosophy claim to explain everything away in terms of scientific and rational analysis, the universe had to be constructed as a machine so that it would lend itself to the precise methods of analysis and measurement of modern physical sciences. In a commentary on a work by Nasr, Adnan Aslan reports that for Nasr, the various religions are "forms of the eternal truth which has been revealed by God to humankind through various agencies".
Doctrine and method vary from one religion to another but their essence and goal are universal. As a result, no religion is in itself "better" than another, concludes Nasr, since "all authentic religions come from the same Origin", but in practical terms it is nevertheless necessary "to distinguish the possibilities" that remain valid in the current state of "degradation" of each of the religions.
According to Jane I. Smith , Nasr is "one of the most visible partners" of Islamic-Christian dialogue thanks to "his training in Christian theology and philosophy, combined with his remarkable knowledge of all Islamic sciences". Nasr points out that ordinary believers consider their religion to be the religion.
Religion as it is seen in the world, says Nasr, "comes from the wedding between a Divine Norm and a human collectivity destined providentially to receive the imprint of that Norm. Nasr actively participates in the dialogue between Christians and Muslims. For Islam, which is not "theologically threatened by the presence of other religions in the same way that Christianity is", [ ] the influence of secularism occurred much later than in the West, and Sufism, which is its interior dimension, continues to inspire "the most profound doctrines that have been formulated concerning the plurality of religions and the relationship between them".
Seyyed hossein nasr biography of michael w: Seyyed Hossein Nasr (/ ˈnɑːsər, ˈnæsər /; Persian: سید حسین نصر, born April 7, ) is an Iranian-American philosopher, theologian and Islamic scholar. He is University Professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University.
For Nasr, as Jahanbegloo emphasizes, dialogue is "not only a pursuit of truth, but also a challenge to spiritual responsibility" of each religion to try to "heal the wounds of the present-day secularized world" in which we live. Tradition as used in its technical sense [ For Nasr, the tradition therefore presents two aspects: "one is truths that are of a transcendent order in their origin, that came from the Divine, from God", revealed at the birth of each of the great religions and, on the other hand, the transmission of these truths by these same religions and by the civilizations they have generated; tradition is therefore not limited to religion — this is its heart — but it is deployed in all areas of a culture, hence the names "traditional art, traditional sciences, traditional architecture, traditional music, traditional clothing, etc.
The value of tradition, for Nasr, is not manifested by a simple nostalgia for the past, [ ] it stems from the wisdom that this tradition conveys, instructing the human being on his own nature and that of the world, and calling him to achieve his original perfection. That the harmony between man and nature has been destroyed is a fact which most people admit.
But not everyone realizes that this disequilibrium is due to the destruction of the harmony between man and God. It was in , during the Rockefeller Foundation Lectures at the University of Chicago, that Seyyed Hossein Nasr, for the first time, made public the importance that he placed on nature and his concern for its degradation. Tarik Quadir argues that "the ecological crisis, for Nasr, is only an externalization of an inner malaise [ Nasr believes that another cause of ecological problems is found in scientism , that is, the conviction that "modern science provides if not the only, at least the most reliable means to true knowledge" and that it leads thereby "to human progress", [ ] as imagined by those who evaluate a human society solely in terms of its economic growth.
Quadir maintains that for Nasr, it is not by technology that environmental problems can be solved in the long term, being themselves the consequence of this technology. As a consequence, the philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo argues that Nasr's goal "is to negate the totalitarian claims of modern science and to reopen the way to the religious view of the order of nature, developed over centuries in the cosmologies and sacred sciences of the great traditions".
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Nasr says that it was in the Renaissance in the West 14thth centuries that the "modernist" or reductive vision of the human condition and the universe began to take shape, [ ] and spread to other continents during the past two centuries. Nasr considers that after the Renaissance, faith no longer had the monolithic cohesion of the Middle Ages. The "new man" is no longer defined by "his celestial archetype and his Edenic perfection", nor by his "symbolic and contemplative spirit", but by his "individuality, reason, the senses, corporeality [and his] subjectivism".
According to Nasr, given that the wisdom conveyed by the various traditional civilizations finds its origin in a divine revelation, [ ] these civilizations have always transmitted a fair representation of man and his purpose. Lumbard notes, for Nasr, "only tradition can provide the weapon necessary to carry out the vital battle for the preservation of the things of the spirit in a world which would completely devour man as a spiritual being if it could".
To defend the traditional point of view is not to negate the reality of all kinds of evil in the premodern world ranging from wars to philosophical skepticism among the Greeks in the dying moments of that civilization. The major difference is that in traditional civilizations while there was evil, the sacred was ubiquitous and people lived in the world of faith.
Today evil continues in many more insidious ways while the very meaning of life which is the quest and discovery of the sacred is taken away. For Nasr, the results of modern scientific investigation of nature are defined by the "oblivion of intellect" and, thus, are "severed from Divinity and highly compartmentalized".
He maintains that the scientific explanations for the origins of the natural world are " purely physical " and "aimed at reducing man to matter while excluding divinity and teleology from nature". Marietta Stepaniants observes that, for Nasr, "the absurdity of that theory" is that it offers "horizontal and material causes in a unidimensional world, to explain effects whose causes belong to other levels of reality".
He contends that evolutionary biology is a " materialist philosophy " rather than a "real science with a true empirical foundation" and contrasts a Darwinian vision of life with his God-centered perspective of nature based in the traditional Islamic understanding of life and creation. Commenting on an article that Muhammad Suheyl Umar dedicated to him, Nasr speaks of his own "philosophical position":.
I am a follower of that philosophia perennis and also universalis, that eternal sophia , which has always been and will always be and in whose perspective there is but one Reality which can say "I" [ Once that process is achieved, the understanding, "observation" and explication of the manner in which that light shines upon problems of contemporary man constitute for me philosophical creativity in the deepest sense of the term.
Otherwise, philosophy becomes sheer mental acrobatics and reason cut off from both the intellect and revelation, nothing but a luciferian instrument leading to dispersion and ultimately dissolution. For Nasr, the true "love of wisdom" philosophia was shared by all civilizations until the emergence, in the West, of a thought which dissociated itself more and more from the spiritual dimension [ ] as a result of the occultation of the sapiential core of religion and the divorce of philosophical intelligence from faith.
Apart from the case of certain Greek currents such as sophistry and skepticism , [ ] as well as the episode of nominalism towards the end of the Middle Ages , [ ] it was really during the Renaissance , continues Nasr, that "the separation of philosophy and of revelation" began, [ ] despite the maintenance in certain isolated circles of a true spirituality.
Adnan Aslan notes a passage from Nasr in which he endorses Plato 's commentary in the Phaedo , which equates philosophy with "the practice of death"; this death, for Nasr, corresponds to the extinction of the "I", a necessary stage for the realization of the "Self" [ note 11 ] or of the "Truth". Several works by Nasr support critical analyzes of those he considers to be engines of modern deviation: Descartes , Montaigne , F.
Patrick Laude submits that Nasr is "the only foremost perennialist writer to have received an intensive and advanced academic training in modern sciences" [ ] [ note 12 ] while Joseph E. Lumbard contends that "as a trained scientist", Nasr is well suited to argue about the relationship between religion and science. Summarizing Nasr's thought, Lucian W.
Stone, Jr. The natural world or cosmos has a meaning beyond itself, one of which modern secular science is intentionally ignorant".
Seyyed hossein nasr biography of michael
Nasr argues that historically Western science is "inextricably linked to Islamic science and before it to the Greco-Alexandrian, Indian, ancient Iranian as well as Mesopotamian and Egyptian sciences". Denying this heritage, the Renaissance already — despite some resistance —, but especially the 17th century Descartes , Galileo , Kepler , Newton , imposed new paradigms in accordance with the ambient anthropocentrism and rationalism, and with the secularization of the cosmos, which have resulted in a "unilateral and monolithic science, [ While not denying the prowess "of a science limited to the physical dimension of reality", Nasr nonetheless argues that "alternative worldviews drawn from traditional doctrines remain constantly aware of the inner nexus which binds physical nature to the realm of Spirit, and the outward face of things to an inner reality which they at once veil and reveal".
Nasr speaks of "certain intuitions and discoveries" of contemporary scientists, "which reveal the Divine Origin of the natural world", [ ] a deduction that scientism does not want to admit, "the scientific philosophers are much more dogmatic than many scientists in denying any metaphysical significance to the discoveries of science".
Science in and of itself is neutral, and the information that scientific discovery provides is true on its own plane, but science falls into error when it crosses from the realm of scientific investigation into that of scientistic ideology, generalizing and absolutizing a particular vision of the physical domain of the universe that science is able to study and then judging the other disciplines in accord with that narrow vision.
In his reflections on art, Seyyed Hossein Nasr bases himself on "the traditional perspective which is by nature meta-historic and perennial". Thus, in traditional art, specifies Nasr, the artist "is an instrument for the expression of certain symbols, of certain ideas, [ As for sacred art, "which lies at the heart of traditional art [, it] has a sacramental function and is, like religion itself, at once truth and presence"; [ ] it "involves the ritual and cultic practices and practical and operative aspects of the paths of spiritual realization".
For Nasr, the degeneration of Western art since the Renaissance is the consequence of a "view of man as a purely secular and earthly being". According to Nasr, most modern artists "become completely enmeshed in their own egos [ For Nasr, there are artists in the present day, rooted in a true spirituality and who express it or attempt to express it in their art, [ ] with the humility demanded by "light of the truth and the millennial heritage of traditional art, most of which was produced […] by anonymous artists who humbled themselves before the reality of the Spirit and through their transparency were able to reflect the light of the spiritual world in their works".
Nasr is the author of over fifty books [ ] and five hundred articles a number of which can be found in the journal, Studies in Comparative Religion Seyyed Hossein Nasr Author Page on topics such as Traditionalist metaphysics, Islamic science, religion and the environment, Sufism, and Islamic philosophy. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history.
Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikidata item. Iranian philosopher, theologian and Islamic scholar born Tehran , Imperial State of Persia. Scientia sacra Ecotheology Islamic environmentalism Tradition Pontifical and Promethean man Resacralization of nature Desacralization of knowledge Resacralization of knowledge.
Biography [ edit ]. Early life [ edit ]. Education [ edit ].
Back to Iran [ edit ]. Return to the West [ edit ]. Notable aspects of his works [ edit ]. This section relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this section by adding secondary or tertiary sources. October Learn how and when to remove this message. Perennialist or Traditionalist school [ edit ].
God and the world [ edit ]. Human nature and its relationship to the divine [ edit ]. See also: Pontifical and Promethean man. Knowledge and the intellect [ edit ]. See also: Desacralization of knowledge and Resacralization of knowledge.
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Sacredness [ edit ]. Metaphysics [ edit ]. Main article: Scientia sacra. Religion and spirituality [ edit ]. Exoterism and esoterism [ edit ]. Essential unity of religions [ edit ]. Interreligious dialogue [ edit ]. Tradition [ edit ]. Main article: Tradition perennialism. Ecology [ edit ]. See also: Resacralization of nature , Islamic environmentalism , Ecotheology , and Religion and environmentalism.
Critique of modernism [ edit ]. Theory of evolution [ edit ]. Philosophy [ edit ]. Scientism [ edit ]. White professor-at-large, —. Association of Tehran president , Temenos Academy. Editor, with M. With R. With W. Contributor of numerous articles in French, English, Persian, and Arabic to professional journals.
A career scholar and researcher, "Nasr is a leading expert on Islam, having made extraordinary contributions to the study of science, philosophy, mysticism, and Shiism over several decades," wrote Leonard T. Librande in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies. Nasr was born on April 7, , in Tehran, Iran, "into a family of distinguished scholars and physicians," wrote a biographer on the Seyyed Hossein Nasr Foundation Web site.
Nasr received the usual Persian primary school education, and studied additional subjects such as Islam and the French language at home. When he was twelve years old, Nasr came to the United States and continued his education. He embarked on a study of physics, motivated by the "desire to gain knowledge of the nature of things, at least at the level of physical reality.
He sought answers in courses in the humanities, philosophy, the history of science, and related subjects. Though Nasr continued in the physics program and graduated with honors, "his heart was no longer with physics," wrote the Nasr Foundation biographer. Nasr earned a master's degree in geology and geophysics from Harvard in , and later a Ph.
He completed his first book, Science and Civilization in Islam , while studying at Harvard, and it was published by Harvard University Press in Harvard also published his doctoral dissertation in After earning his Ph. Nasr continued his academic career in Iran for many years. He created the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy under the appointment of the Queen of Iran in , attracting top-flight philosophers and scholars from around the world.