The Game · The search in four streams

The Map

The game is one long search for truth, and it has run in four streams. In religion, prophets bring a revealed book. In religious interpretation, players arrange the pieces with that book on the board. Philosophy arranges them by reason and the senses alone. Science watches the rest and reports its moves. The streams keep trading pieces, and the game is still going.

ReligionThe prophets: a revealed book.

Religious interpretationInterpretationThe pieces arranged with the book on the board.

PhilosophyThe pieces arranged by reason and the senses.

ScienceThe rest’s moves, seen and reported.

The ancient world

Late antiquity

The Middle Ages

The Scientific Revolution

The nineteenth century

The twentieth century

Abrahamc. 2000–1800 BC, by traditionOne God, against the idols of his people.
Mosesc. 13th century BCThe Law given on Sinai: the Torah.
Davidc. 1000 BCThe Psalms, the Zabur.
TThalesc. 624–546 BCExplains the world by nature, not myth. The game begins.
PParmenidesc. 515–450 BCReasons about being itself, and finds that change is an illusion.
Socrates470–399 BCSets up the boardAsks what justice and knowledge are, and shows that no one can say.
Plato428–348 BCThe first matchThe Forms: what is truly real is known by reason, not the senses.
Aristotle384–322 BCInvents logic and brings the Forms down into things: form and matter.
Jesusc. 4 BC–c. AD 30The Gospel: the kingdom of God, and love of God and neighbour.
Philo of Alexandriac. 20 BC–c. AD 50FusesThe first fusion: reads the Torah with Plato.
Plotinus204–270Everything flows from the One, and the soul can climb back to it.
Augustine354–430FusesChristian faith arranged with Plotinus: believe, so that you may understand.
Muhammad570–632The Qur’an, and the seal of the prophets: after him, no new book.
al-Kindic. 801–873FusesThe first philosopher of Islam: Greek reason at work for the Qur’an.
al-Farabic. 872–950FusesThe Second Teacher: Aristotle’s logic, and Plato’s city under a prophet.
HIbn al-Haytham965–1040Checks epistemologyTests claims by controlled experiment: the method of science.
Ibn Sina980–1037FusesGod as the Necessary Being, the world flowing from Him in order.
al-Ghazali1058–1111SeparatesAttacks the philosophers’ metaphysics, keeps their logic, turns to mystic experience.
Ibn Rushd1126–1198FusesDefends the fusion: philosophy and revelation are two roads to one truth.
AThomas Aquinas1225–1274FusesAristotle and the Church: reason and faith each given its own domain.
Ibn Taymiyya1263–1328SeparatesRejects Greek logic itself, and rebuilds from scripture and fitra.
OWilliam of Ockhamc. 1287–1347Only particular things are real. His razor cuts the medieval fusion apart.
CCopernicus1473–1543Checks metaphysicsThe earth is not the centre: man loses his place.
BFrancis Bacon1561–1626Knowledge is power, won by experiment and induction.
GGalileo1564–1642Checks epistemologyThe book of nature is written in mathematics.
KKepler1571–1630Checks metaphysicsThe heavens move in ellipses: the perfect cosmos breaks.
Descartes1596–1650RestartClears the board by doubt and rebuilds on: I think.
Locke1632–1704Every idea comes from experience; the mind starts as a blank page.
SSpinoza1632–1677One substance, God or Nature; mind and body are its two sides.
NNewton1643–1727Checks metaphysicsOne law for heaven and earth: the universe as a clockwork.
Hume1711–1776RestartFollows experience to the end, and cause and the self fall apart.
Kant1724–1804AdjustThe mind shapes experience; knowledge stops at its edge.
HHegel1770–1831Reality is Spirit coming to know itself through history.
SSchopenhauer1788–1860Beneath reason is blind striving Will, and life is suffering.
LLyell1797–1875Checks metaphysicsDeep time: the earth is unimaginably old.
DDarwin1809–1882Checks teleologyPurpose can arise without design, by natural selection.
KKierkegaard1813–1855Truth is lived, not systematised: the single person before God.
MMarx1818–1883Philosophers have interpreted the world; the point is to change it.
PPeirce1839–1914Meaning lies in practical effects, and inquiry corrects itself.
William James1842–1910Truth is what works; religious experience is a fact to study.
NNietzsche1844–1900God is dead, so every value must be weighed again.
FFrege1848–1925Modern logic, and the turn to language.
Freud1856–1939Checks epistemologyThe unconscious: we do not know our own minds.
Bergson1859–1941Time is creative, and intuition grasps what the intellect cuts up.
HHusserl1859–1938Phenomenology: describe experience exactly as it is lived.
Whitehead1861–1947Reality is process; religion has a doctrinal side.
RRussell1872–1970Logic as the method of philosophy: analysis.
Muhammad Iqbal1877–1938FusesReligious experience is knowledge, and must face the tests of reason and science.
BMartin Buber1878–1965God is met, not proved: the relation of I and Thou.
Einstein1879–1955Checks metaphysicsSpace and time are relative to the observer.
CTeilhard de Chardin1881–1955FusesEvolution is creation still going on, moving toward God.
BNiels Bohr1885–1962Checks metaphysicsQuantum physics: at the smallest scale, nature is not a clockwork.
TPaul Tillich1886–1965FusesFaith is ultimate concern; God is being itself.
WWittgenstein1889–1951Many problems of philosophy are confusions of language.
HHeidegger1889–1976Asks again what being is, starting from human existence.
HHubble1889–1953Checks metaphysicsThe universe is expanding, and so it had a beginning.
HHeisenberg1901–1976Checks epistemologyUncertainty: some things cannot be known at once, even in principle.
PPopper1902–1994Knowledge grows by conjecture and refutation, and never ends.
MMaududi1903–1979SeparatesIslam as a complete system, apart from Western thought.
SSartre1905–1980Existence comes before essence: man makes himself.
GGödel1906–1978Checks epistemologyEvery rich enough system holds truths it cannot prove.
HAbraham Heschel1907–1972God in search of man: the prophets as witnesses of divine concern.
QQuine1908–2000No belief is beyond revision, not even logic.
TTuring1912–1954Checks epistemologyComputation: can a machine think?
CCrick and Watson1916–2004 · 1928–Checks teleologyDNA: life runs on a code.
RFazlur Rahman1919–1988FusesReads the Qur’an in its history, to bring its principles into the present.
RRawls1921–2002Justice as fairness: rules chosen behind a veil of ignorance.
KKuhn1922–1996Science moves by revolutions: paradigm shifts.
FFoucault1926–1984Knowledge and power are bound up together.
DDerrida1930–2004Texts undo their own certainties: deconstruction.
ANaquib al-Attas1931–SeparatesKnowledge itself must be made Islamic again.
NSeyyed Hossein Nasr1933–SeparatesThe modern scientific outlook has lost the sacred; return to tradition.
SAli Shariati1933–1977FusesReligion as a force for change, read with Marx and Sartre.

The map stops here only because it has to stop somewhere. The game goes on.

On a phone the map shows names only. Turn the phone sideways, or open it on a wider screen, to see each player’s move.

Reading the map

Two that bring, two that arrange. The outer streams bring material onto the board. The prophets bring a book; the scientists bring news of what the rest has done. Neither arranges the pieces. That is the work of the two inner streams: religious interpretation arranges epistemology, metaphysics and ethics with the book on the board, and philosophy arranges them by reason and the senses alone.

The prophets. Each prophet brings a book: the scrolls of Abraham, the Torah of Moses, the Psalms of David, the Gospel of Jesus, and the Qur’an of Muhammad. Every player in the second stream starts from one of these books, and the dashed lines show where each book first meets Greek philosophy: in Philo, in Augustine, and in al-Kindi.

Science brings the surprises. Scientists do not arrange the pieces. They report the rest’s moves, and each report puts some piece in check. Copernicus moved man out of the centre; Einstein unsettled space and time. The tags say which piece each discovery checked. Philosophy then has to answer: Kant named his own revolution after Copernicus.

Interpretation and philosophy trade pieces. Philo reads Moses with Plato; Augustine reads the Gospel with Plotinus; al-Kindi and Aquinas receive Aristotle. Some interpreters fuse the two streams into one arrangement. Others separate them again: al-Ghazali drives out Greek metaphysics, and Ibn Taymiyya drives out Greek logic too.

Restart and adjust. In philosophy, the tags mark the moves you already know: Descartes and Hume restart, and Kant adjusts.

Parallel moves. Sometimes players in different streams make the same move without meeting. The dotted lines join al-Ghazali to Descartes, who also began from doubt, and to Hume, who also found that we never see one thing cause another.

No one is at the centre. Every player here is one player among many, and every arrangement was followed by another. The one this site studies, Iqbal’s, sits in the stream of religious interpretation: he fuses the book with the philosophy of Bergson and Nietzsche and the science of his day, and the players after him took it in different directions.

Built by Umair Malik while studying Iqbal · Your Commentator