New Publication: The Redemption of Thinking

The Redemption of Thinking: A Study in Truth, Meaning, and the Evolution of Consciousness, 2020. Truth and meaning: what is their relation? Shall ever the twain be one? This dissertation attempts to show how the ascendancy of a particular method of inquiry since the seventeenth century has forfeit meaning in the pursuit of truth. At…

New publication: Scattered Leaves

I have published a collection of poetry called Scattered Leaves that is now available in Kindle and in print. “Anthology” means “collection of flowers” or “bouquet” in Greek and this is how I saw this volume. Together with my philosophical work, I have always written poetry as another mode of striving to articulate the truth…

Aphorisms on non-duality and the simultaneous presence of the I in all perception (3)

The perception of every object is also the experience of the subject who experiences that object. The object is known as a form while the subject is known in its activity of perceiving that form. Hence, the object is experienced as a noun while the subject is experienced as a verb—in and through its activity….

Further aphorisms and observations on perception and cognition in the spirit of Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom and other early epistemological works (2)

Originally recorded on 30.11.2016 A companion post is here. T H E   anterior unity of the world strives for revelation in the soul of man, as the origin of the thinking that subsequently precipitates into determination as name and form (nāmarūpa). The germ of the      L Ó G O S     is closer…

Miscellany: On the first philosopher, the scientific method in theory and practice, and other subjects

Who was the first philosopher? Ignorant people think naming something just means affixing a label to what has already been disclosed but that overlooks the disclosive function that was necessarily prior and without which there would have been nothing to affix the sayd label to. Hence, Adam was the first phylosopher. (Cf. Genesis 2:20) On the…

Some aphorisms and observations on perception and cognition in the spirit of Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom and other early epistemological works (1)

The human being—as an I—first, in a pre-conscious activity of destruction, strips reality of its coherence. This is not something he does so much as something he is. To wit, the human being is situated in the world in such a manner that he bifurcates and disintegrates it in the manner indicated above as a…

Time and the Archetype of “Reversal” (περιπέτεια, peripeteia) or “the Flip”

Time can be seen as change in abstraction from any concrete substance that is changing. Hence, it can be seen as “the ghost of change.” A more elaborate theory of time would have to address the relationship between this abstract measure of change and the subjective experience of change. Time could be seen as an…

Miscellany: On light, beauty, sense-perception and other topics

On the mystery of cognition: Thinking/cognition weaves together what perception through the senses scattered asunder: namely, the “what” from the “how,” essence from appearance, form from matter. This oscillation between sense and intellection, looking and seeing, outer and inner, exitus et reditus, is the heartbeat of perception and the heartbeat of Creation. On light, beauty,…

Variations on the theme of perception that Plato outlines in the Theaetetus

SOCRATES: Consider a further point: did we not understand them to explain the generation of heat, whiteness, or anything else, in some such manner as the following:—were they not saying that each of them is moving between the agent and the patient, together with a perception, and that the patient ceases to be a perceiving…

On “ecstasy,” (ἔκστασις, from ex- “out of” + stasis “to stand,”) or “reversal”:

“Reversal [peripeteia] is change to the opposite of what happened before”—Aristotle, Poetics Visual consciousness constellates itself in the relationship between the perceived spatial locus of the eye, on the one hand, and the vanishing point, on the other. The soul identifies itself with the first of these poles and defines the periphery of its vision…

Miscellany: On the soul, calculating “risk,” narcissism, and iconoclasm

Some questions: What do we mean when we say “soul”?  If I say that we reincarnate but we don’t remember, then are we actually reincarnating?  What does it mean that, at a specific point in history, the Λóγος (Lógos) “became flesh and dwelt among us?”  Can we discern a continuity through the Theogony of the…

Does time pass?

Many people conceptualize time as something that moves. Hence we employ expressions like “time passes slowly” or “time flies” to designate various experiences of “the flow of time,” or we invoke clichés like “time is a river.” “Scientifically-minded” persons would be liable to point out that these are designations of subjective time and that real…