MODERN SCIENCE AND SCIENTISM A PERENNIALIST APPRAISAL

There have been significant critiques of scientism and certain elements of modern science inspired worldview from various quarters. But perhaps the most thoroughgoing, most uncompromising and most devastating critique that is based on alternative vision of Science and Epistemology and Metaphysics has come from the perennialists. In the present paper modernist scientific worldview shared by the dominant majority of scientists and philosophers of science has been critiqued from the perennialist perspective of Frithjof Schuon. Modern science’s commitment to positivist reductionist naturalist evolutionist worldview and methodology cultivated in transcendence denying secularist framework has been forcefully critiqued by the perennialists. The perennialist critique of scientism has largely gone unnoticed in academic circles. This paper highlights the limitations of orthodox scientistic worldview from the traditionalist perennialist perspective on methodological, epistemological and metaphysical grounds.