Intended meaning
This passage links human development with the development of the tools of perception and knowledge available to humans: knowledge moves from direct sense perception to language, then to symbols and mathematics. This means that human cognition becomes increasingly abstract and precise as this progression advances.
The atom’s structure in the atlas
- Type of argument: historical
- Argument movement: presenting the development of knowledge from sense to mathematical abstraction.
- Central terms: sense, language, symbols, mathematics.
- Degree of centrality: pivotal.
It traces an ascending path for the tools of human cognition, from the direct to the abstract, making knowledge the result of a historical accumulation in means of understanding rather than a fixed given.
Reading aids
- Muhammad Shahrur, The Book and the Qur’an
- History, development, and Sunna
- Human knowledge is relative and progresses from sense to mathematics
Basis
- Supporting text: “The passage links the development of human beings and the development of the tools of perception and knowledge, from sense to language and then to symbols and mathematics.”
Place of support in the book
- Book: The Book and the Qur’an.
- Location: in the middle section of the book
- Type of support: near witness.
- Verification cue: this expression developed into an alphabet
- Reading note: this location is suitable as support because it explains the development of the expression of knowledge from drawing to the alphabet and then to the arts, and it is close to the atom’s sequence.
Degree of documentation
- Level: directly documented
- Meaning of the level: the atom relies on an explicit witness close to the wording of the claim.
- Limits of reading: the formulation above is an analytical summary and should not be treated as a verbatim quotation unless the witness is quoted textually.
Function in the book
Its function here is declarative; it establishes a result on which what follows in the argument depends.
Related to
Editorial note
The atom serves a developmental conception of human consciousness.