ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an outline of Muhammad Naquib al-Attas' ontological, cosmological and epistemological premises underlying his philosophy of science, and goes on to aspects of methodology and axiology those premises entail. Frequent references are made to particular western philosophies of science to further inform the discourse and draw attention to wider connections. The continuity between al-Attas' philosophy of science and the classical Islamic intellectual tradition lies in his critical adoption of Ghazalian—Ibn al-'Arabian ontology, cosmology, psychology and epistemology. It is in the Positive Aspects of Tasawwuf that al-Attas first began to outline systematically a philosophical aspect of Sufism which "pertains to what can be developed into an Islamic conceptualization and formulation of the philosophy of science". Al-Attas' cosmology or vision of the structures and processes of phenomenal reality, from galaxies to atoms, flows from his Sufi ontology. In this cosmology, the world of nature is viewed as the analogous but created counterpart to the uncreated, revealed Qur'an.
