Abstract

The article comments on the epistemological foundations of medieval Arabic science and philosophy, as presented in five earlier communications, and attempts to draw some guidelines for the study of its social history. At the very beginning the notion of "Islam" is discounted as a meaningful explanatory category for historical investigation. A first part then looks at the applied sciences and notes three major characteristics of their epistemological approach: they were functionalist and based on experience and observation. The second part looks at the theoretical sciences and notes that their epistemology was based on geometrical as well as (b) syllogistic modes of proof, and that the particular approach of scientists and philosophers was determined by (c) whether the motivations of each were scientific or non-scientific (e.g., religious, dogmatic, eristic, etc.). A third part concludes that for medieval Arabic-writing scholars with a scientific motivation the epistemological bases of their work were common to scientists to all cultures, and that the causes of advance or decline of Arabic science and philosophy have to be sought in social factors. In this regard three factors are presented as instrumental: (a) the level of patronage and wealth in any given society within the medieval Islamic world, (b) the cultural attitude of ideological laissezfaire in Sunni Islam which neither imposed nor adopted authoritative solutions in scientific and philosophical issues, and (c) the temporal and local specificity of scientific activity that makes the social contextualization of each science necessary in historical work.