Conclusion

The dialogical perspective argues that modern science is a multi-civilizational outcome, in that it had arisen on the basis of inputs or knowledge transmissions from various non-European civilizations into Latin Europe, either direct or indirect. Some of the developments arising from the process of such multi-civilizational exchanges are incontrovertible and firmly established by ample direct evidence, and their effects are well-established, such as Arabic scholarship’s debts to Hindu mathematics and the Greek corpus; Arabic scholarship’s taking of Greek learning to new heights; and Europe’s debts to Arabic scholarship. Our arguments that Greece was a separate and distinct civilization from Latin Europe, and that Greece’s development owed considerable debts to west Asia and Egypt, serve to strengthen the dialogical perspective. We accept dialogism as a valid and important starting point for resolving the positive NQ on a non-essentialist basis and for rebutting conventional Eurocentric accounts. However, we argue that it is necessary to transcend dialogism. This is because, by itself, dialogism is, firstly, unable to resolve the question of why Europe, based upon what it had learnt from non-European inputs, had been able to make the breakthrough into modern science itself, and, secondly and relatedly, it is unable to decisively rebut conventional Eurocentric accounts and to deal with neo-Eurocentric accounts at all. Both inabilities stem directly from dialogism’s fatal limitations as a perspective in theoretical and methodological terms because it does not engage in any analysis of the phenomenon of intellectual development itself. Additionally, from our analysis in Chaps. 8 and 9 , it can be seen that dialogism has also failed to take into account important developments within Latin Europe itself that prepared the ground for the breakthrough into modern science, namely, the work of Buridan and Oresme on motion, and the work of the alchemists on corpuscular theory and the use of experimentation. It is only by transcending dialogism in theoretical and methodological terms that its above-mentioned failures can be overcome, and a satisfactory resolution of the positive NQ on a non-essentialist basis can be achieved, and both conventional and neo Eurocentric accounts decisively rebutted