This book presents a unified theory of science by challenging some of the lingering myths and anachronisms associated with our understanding of what it means to be scientific. The book presents a new science narrative focused on the dialectics of discovering/inventing new worlds in an age of hermeneutics, and as an alternative to the prevailing view of the history of science as, largely, a confrontation between science and religion. It argues that the development of modern science is, in a complex way, intertwined with the history of the university, a knowledge institution that throughout the centuries has repeatedly managed to reinvent itself—so successfully, indeed, that it has paradoxically led to a fundamental crisis of identity today. The book suggests that, in order to recognize science as a quest for truth in a globalizing world of cognitive horizontalization, we need to transcend the false alternatives of objectivistic certitude (possessing “the Truth”) and relativistic resignation (“post-truth”) by means of a new focus on collegial practices.
