The Foundation for Seyyed Hossein Nasr Though
The foundation for Seyyed Hossein Nasr thought is the relation between the divine and the world formed into a unity of all that exists. This is, according to Nasr, a precondition for all forms of scientific work.
Traditional civilisation, that is to say one based upon a Divine revelation, depends upon the metaphysical and religious bases of that civilization, the Islamic sciences, as already mentioned, have always echoed and reflected the central Islamic doctrine of unity (taw˛ıd). Just as the Islamic religious and moral sciences have originated from Divine Unity and aim to return man to it, the natural sciences have tried to discover the interrelation of all created beings and the unity which underlies the world of multiplicity. We have already shown that it is a general feature of all medieval cosmological sciences that they seek to express the ‘unicity of all that exists’. This is especially true in the Islamic natural sciences, such as natural history, where this goal has been central, and the idea of the unicity of nature and the interrelatedness of all parts of the Universe has remained complementary to and a necessary consequence of the Oneness of the Creator (Nasr 1981b:124.)