Abstract

Knowledge and time, truth versus falsehood, unity versus dualism, these and the like are the subjects for philosophical discourse in the light of the two contrasting worldviews of unity of knowledge versus rationalism. The emerging formalism also leads to practical considerations in the circular causation model of unity of knowledge. The Qur’an is invoked in this formalism to build the arguments underlying the analysis that follows in comparative perspective. This cultural diversity of intellectual discourse unravels the realism of the arguments taken up here in respect of what delineates the primordial reality - knowledge or time? In the Qur'anic sense, knowledge and time are circularly interrelated within the episteme of unity of divine knowledge. But the functional ontology, which establishes the phenomenology of unity of knowledge, is an exercise in logical formalism. This is taken up here. The arguments proceed through a labyrinth of mathematical philosophical discourse combined with facts from the philosophy of economics. A quantification of the idea in respect of the viability of the model of circular causation between complementary (unifying) entities is tested out. The results establish the practical possibility of the phenomenological model of unity of knowledge, explained in terms of its internal dynamics in the context of the circular causation and the complementary nature of interrelationship between knowledge and time in the philosophical part of the paper. The concept of knowledge, time and spatial entities, jointly comprising the topological mapping of and between multi-systemic events, is developed technically in the paper. It is extended to a technical appendix as well.

Key words: Epistemology, methodology, formal systems, philosophy of science, Qur’an.