The Unification of Knowledge

Abstract

As we remember, the last fundamental question of philosophy signalled a reorientation in the history of Western philosophy, but even though it was formulated early in Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900) as “the conditions of the possibility of science in general”, it was only answered later in his Ideas II (1925, 1952), namely, all science is founded on “social subjectivity”. All intentional objects, the objective meanings constituting the “naturalist” and “humanist sciences”, are grounded on the spiritual world. Eventually, those intentional objects would take a life of their own constituting the cultural world as a symbolic universe. This logical path came to a dead end when anthropology became separated from cosmology, the symbolic animal from the rest of the universe. However, this is no longer our fate because we have demonstrated that we can do philosophy again from without the Western tradition by discovering a new world-hypothesis as a result of answering the fundamental questions of philosophy anew using the hypothetico-inductive method. So now we have to continue our philosophical inquiry with the last fundamental question that starts with a pure fact we assume as being the case, namely, that science is grounded somehow. If so, how is the foundation of science possible? We already know the answer because it has been implicit in the main goal of this book, namely, to demonstrate that science in general is grounded on a world-hypothesis. Therefore, now that we already know the answer to the last fundamental question, all that remains to be done is to work out the implications of this philosophical discovery for human knowledge.