ABSTRACT
Sophia perennis is intimately connected with "science" in a broad and distinctly premodern sense. "Sacred knowledge must also include a knowledge of the cosmos", Nasr maintains; and in fact, "one can speak of a cosmologia perennis which, in one sense, is the application, and in another, the complement of the sophia perennis which is concerned essentially with metaphysics". An essential feature of the cosmologia perennis is that it views the integral cosmos as a hierarchy of ontological degrees, what in Western tradition has sometimes been termed "the great chain of being", what used to be represented in Ptolemaic days by the so-called planetary spheres. One needs, however, to recognize that the reductionist hypothesis does not stand alone, but is mandated by what Nasr terms "the inherent limitations of the original epistemological premises of modern science". This, in a nutshell, is the fateful "bifurcation" hypothesis which underlies and in a way determines the Weltanschauung of modern science.
