PROGRESSION OF KNOWLEDGE IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION
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Believing that there is no limit to the understanding, perception, comprehension, and progression of knowledge, and that our quest for knowledge we are carrying has been with us from the time when a chimpanzee-figured animal first descended from his nest in a tree and started walking erect with his hands free. Standing upright in an elegant posture, the biped no longer viewed himself an animal; rather he had become a “man.” According to one etymology, the word “man” comes from the Proto-Germanic Mann, or “person,” originating from the Proto-Indo-European root meaning “hand.” Thus, “man” started his journey to know the world in which he had appeared and seek knowledge of everything around him. Though the word “human” was first recorded much later in the mid-thirteenth century, voluminous knowledge of philosophy, science, art, humanities, and literature, dealing with the progression of knowledge—decidedly a big-bag of a treasure-trove—had already started pouring in with the “First Explosion of Knowledge,” which appeared in Greece during the sixth century BCE. The word human, “of or belonging to man,” which comes from the Latin humanus and owes its existence to the French word humain, is thought to be a hybrid relative of homo, meaning “man,” and humus, meaning “earth.” When we raise the status of “man” to the level of a “human being” we assign him a unique characteristics which are not comparable to any other species. The human status of man indicates that he became human due to his inner impulse. His consciousness of himself and awareness of the world gave birth to a Cognitive Revolution. Though the history of knowledge in the West starts from the “First Explosion of Knowledge,” the book Progression of Knowledge in Western Civilization in the hands of the reader also traces the roots of knowledge that first entered into the ancient region of Greece. For this we must first enter the “heaven of invention of knowledge” situated in the ancient town of Ur in Mesopotamia—what is now Iraq—where around 2300 BCE first poetic syllables originated and were rhythmically chanted in what is now Iraq, literature’s first known inventor was born within a great mudbrick palace near the snowmelt waters of the Tigris River. The name Enheduanna, chanted in fevered tones, meaning: “She is the high lord of the moon.” In its original syllables, “En-hedu-‘anna. En-hedu-‘anna. En-hedu-‘anna” this chant is viewed to be the beginning of the invention of literature by man. The city of Ur in Mesopotamia, revered as a place of tremendous imagination, is the same region where Abraham (2167-1992 BCE) the Prophet-patriarch of three revealed religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—was born, and where Zoroaster (c.1400-1200 BCE) had presented a faith which made its impact on the cultures and religions that appeared after him.. This is also the region where the first epic poem, Epic of Gilgamesh (2100-1200 BCE) written on twelve clay tablets and considered the first great work of literature was found. Arguing cogently, we find that though progress is in the nature of almost everything, the pursuit, passion, and progression of knowledge in all fields is exclusively a human legacy. We also know that human beings learn and teach more and more from day to day. They constantly create and add new knowledge, but the progression of knowledge carried forward by the Western civilization is a continuing story of the dynamics of our knowledge. Mirza I. Ashraf believes that history of Western knowledge has long seemed to possess the dynamics and beauty of a great epic drama of philosophy, sciences and literature from the ancient and classical Greece era, the Hellenistic period, imperial Rome, Judaism and the rise of Christianity, and the Islamic Golden period of knowledge during the Middle Ages, the European Renaissance, Reformation, the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Scientific Revolution to the advent of Internet Technology and Artificial Intelligence and onward to our compelling time. Sweep and grandeur, dramatic conflicts and astonishing resolutions have marked the Western mind’s sustained attempt to comprehend the nature of reality from ancient to modern times. Progression of Knowledge in Western Civilization is the narration of a unique story of human knowledge stirred by wonder, imagination, love, emotion, and faith, which is being carried on by the Western civilization. Although there are many scholars in every corner of the world, almost all of them are embraced by the dynamic Western knowledge. I believe this progress will perennially continue and will never cease as long we are living on this planet. The book, Progression of Knowledge in Western Civilization comprising four parts and fifty chapters starts from the First Explosion Knowledge and covering the Second, Third and Fourth Explosion of Knowledge, taxes the mind of the readers with the 50th Chapter of AI’s challenging subject, “Lifting the Lid on the Singularity.”
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About the Book
The word civilization, which is a relatively recent application from eighteenth-century, when came into currency, is generally invoked more with a rhetorical flourish than argued in philosophical perspective. But history of knowledge considers its true object is the study of human mind, to know what his mind has believed, thought, and felt in diverse periods of its progression in the history of a civilization. Mirza Iqbal Ashraf, as a research scholar of Islamic and Western philosophies identifying the “Four Explosions of Knowledge” from ancient to modern time of history of knowledge, offers the readers in Progression of Knowledge in the Western Civilization uniquely within philosophical perspective that the Western world is a civilization of knowledge. This also means, whereas it is important to understand today’s world so that we can deal with our contemporary period’s civilizational challenges, it will be incomplete if we do not assess that modernity is born from the progress made by the knowledge of the past thinkers. But knowledge does not arrive fully formed; it requires many minds, specifically those minds which are free from the civilization’s religious, cultural, and geophysical trappings. In the Progression of Knowledge in Western Civilization, Ashraf has expounded that even in modern time, no knowledge is complete without visiting the knowledge of the past, especially of the great thinkers of Classical Greek period, the scholars at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, and the famous centers of knowledge at Cairo, and Cordova of Arab Spain. In this book, the author has discussed when some other regions of the world might be familiar with philosophy and science, in one way or another, why such a treasure of knowledge emerged particularly in Greece that became a foundation of voluminous work of literature in almost every field of knowledge, and how it amazingly became the foundation of the history of progression of knowledge in the Western civilization, which is timelessly flourishing until today.
About the Author
MIRZA IQBAL ASHRAF—author of, Introduction to World Philosophies, Islamic Philosophy of War and Peace, Rumi’s Holistic Humanism, Diversity and Unity in Islamic Civilization, Human Existence and Identity in Modern Age, and An Anthology of Essays by Ashraf—IS AN INDEPENDENT RESEARCH SCHOLAR OF PHILOSOPHICAL, HUMANTIES, AND MULTI-CULTURAL SUBJECTS. HE HOLDS BACHELOR’S DEGREE IN PERSIAN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY, AND MASTER’S DEGREE IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE, LITERATURE. AND PHILOSOPHY. HE LIVES IN NEW YORK (USA).