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Sunday, March 28, 2010

Meillassoux is an exceptionally clear philosopher

One of the trends of the last hundred years of philosophy has been to think questions of ontology in terms of categories of totality and community. This “episteme” takes an endless variety of forms (Heidegger’s worldhood, Whitehead’s “organism”, Hegel’s system, Wittgenstein’s “language games”, the structuralist’s structures, etc), but generally we can refer to the core thesis behind each of these positions as that of “relationism”, where relations are held to hold ontological priority over parts.


In other words, for the intro student no philosophical text is easy. It doesn’t matter whether you’re teaching Plato’s EuthyphroApology, Mill’s Utilitarianism or Division 1 of Heidegger’s Being and Time. They find it all difficult. In my view, the aim of an intro course is not so much mastery of the texts– hell we labor our entire life trying to master texts –so much as it is a question of acquainting them with basic questions, reasoning and relations between premises and conclusions, key concepts, and the cultivation of textual hermeneutics.

With Meillassoux, for example, I don’t think the issue is one of showing them how correlationism is an interesting intervention in Continental circles (they lack the background to find that important), but rather to acquaint them with the debate between realism and anti-realism and how Meillassoux is attempting to navigate that debate. This question can stand fairly well on its own, independent of its broader context, and especially after they’ve worked through Kant’s Prolegomena and understood its basic argument and what led Kant to that argument…

As for Meillassoux, he’s an exceptionally clear philosopher that clearly outlines his arguments. He’s actually a relief after Hume and Kant… Thus, for example, when I recently taught We Have Never Been Modern, I found that this categorically did not work. The text, as great as it is, just presupposes too much and is not put together very well. 

Friday, March 19, 2010

Schopenhauer missed this embalming living Spirit of Grace

The Modern review
Ramananda Chatterjee - 1941
(Sri Aurobindo and the New Age). And yet in Philosophy India still stands foremost in the world. ... When Schopenhauer read the Upanishads in a Latin translation of a Persian translation from the Sanskrit, he felt that he had at last ...
K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar - 1972
... for two days and then go into the dumps, evolving a gospel of earthquake and Schopenhauer plus the ass and all the rest of it. ... But there can be no doubt about who this Aurobindo is — it is, I presume, Aurobindo the fourth, ...
Kishor Gandhi, Sachidananda Mohanty ... - 1997 - 239 pages
"Apart from man, no being wonders at its own existence," said Schopenhauer. Of course, we can dispute the thesis that the lion who in its ... As Sri Aurobindo says in The Life Divine: The animal is satisfied with a modicum of necessity; ...
Sri Aurobindo: the supramental avatar   
V. Madhusudan Reddy - 1972
... the Darwinian theory of evolution, the positivism of Comte, the philosophy of Hegel, Kant, Spinoza and Schopenhauer, ... in a pure and unmistakable manner,2 in the Upanishads. 1. Sri Aurobindo Manual, No. 26, p. 44. 2. Ibid., p. 44. ...
Sri Aurobindo: pt. 1. Avatarhood and human evolution
V. Madhusudan Reddy - 1972
... the Darwinian theory of evolution, the positivism of Comte, the philosophy of Hegel, Kant, Spinoza and Schopenhauer, ... in a pure and unmistakable manner,2 in the Upanishads. 1. Sri Aurobindo Manual, No. 26, p. 44. 2. Ibid., p. ...
Śaivism and the phallic world        
Brajamādhaba Bhaṭṭācārya - 1975 - 1048 pages
Schopenhauer missed this embalming living Spirit of Grace. Buddha too had missed it. But what Buddha had missed in ... or Will Power, is a Power Divine, which later was elaborated by Sri Aurobindo. Whereas in the Will of Tantra the ...
Light on Life Problems - Sri Aurobindo's Views on Important Life ...
Kishor Gandhi - 2007 - 240 pages
Endless gratitude is due to Sri Aurobindo for not only sanctioning the proposal to run this series but also for sparing his extremely valuable time to see and approve each instalment of it before publication. Kishor Gandhi April 24, 1950.
Journal of Sri Aurobindo Study Society   
Aurobindo Ghose - 1949
"Rebirth" in Sri Aurobindo's Vision A summary of Part 1, "The Doctrine of Rebirth", which appeared in the last issue ... Many great thinkers, which include Bruno, Schopenhauer, Leibnitz, Fichte, Emerson, Thoreau, have professed a belief ...
Journal of South Asian literature  
Michigan State University. Asian Studies Center - 1988
And yet there are other readers like Kathleen Raine who consider Aurobindo primarily a philosopher and an interpreter of Indian thought.4 In my essay "Sri Aurobindo as a Poet: A Reassessment" I have tried to argue that a proper and ...
Rama Shanker Srivastava - 1968 - 464 pages
... of Hegel or the unconscious Will of Schopenhauer could have served his purpose better and he could use it as the general principle of evolution with far greater success than the principle of the nisus to deity. ...
Sri Aurobindo: The Upanishads; texts, translations and commentaries        
Aurobindo Ghose - 1970
... Beethoven, Napoleon, Schopenhauer, the creators in poetry, art, science, music, life or thought, who possessed imagination, we might then have found an use for their unused imaginations in the greater preparatory richness they gave ...
Aurobindo Ghose - 1970
And if this existence were, as the cosmic pessimist imagines, a dream or an illusion or, worse, as Schopenhauer would have it, a delirium and insanity of the soul, we might accept some such law of inconsequent consequence. ...
Contemporary Indian idealism (with special reference to Swami ...   
Ripusudan Prasad Srivastava - 1973 - 212 pages
Schopenhauer, a contemporary of Hegel's, had already championed the cause of this theory of Will. He regarded this world to be the manifestation of the Absolute Will. Schelling held that the nature of Reality which Is pure identity of ...
Sri Aurobindo: Letters on yoga     
Aurobindo Ghose - 1970
What I want of you besides aspiring for faith? Well, just a little thoroughness and persistence in the method! Don't aspire for two days and then go into the dumps, evolving a gospel of earthquake and Schopenhauer plus the ass ...
Sujata Nahar, Michel Danino, Shankar Bandyopadhyay - 2005
Don't aspire for two days and then sulk into the dumps, evolving a gospel of earthquake and Schopenhauer plus the jackal and all the rest of it. Give the Divine a full sporting chance. When he lights something in you or ...
Talks with Sri Aurobindo [by] Nirodbaran         
Nirodbaran, Aurobindo Ghose - 1989
Sri Aurobindo: Quite so. That is the well-known Nazi position against the coloured races. ... Sri Aurobindo: He is also depriving coloured people of the Government service. 6 December 1940 M : When the Gita says "I shall deliver you ...
The supramental manifestation, and other writings      
Sri Aurobindo - 1989 - 530 pages
Her philosophy was at first a very great but too drily intellectual statement of truths that get their living meaning only in the intuitive experience, but afterwards in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as in Wagner it developed the intuitive ...
Joseph Vrinte - 2002 - 568 pages
However, for Sri Aurobindo the psychic is an expression of the Divine, while Ken Wilber leaves out this primary oneness with ... 93 When describing the ethics in the Over-Soul, Ken Wilber gives a quotation of Schopenhauer in which he ...
Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch    
Schopenhauer Gesellschaft - 1977
A de- tailed study of our problem in the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo should pay special attention to his essay The Superman /Pondicherry 1960/, and to the book TheFuture Evolution of Man /ibid. 1963/. The first vol. ...
The Advent  
Sri Aurobindo Ashram - 1998
Dr. VP Verma rightly evaluates the political strategy of Sri Aurobindo and remarks: "He was not in full sympathy however, ... 9 Philosophers like Max Muller, Schopenhauer and Emerson were very impressed with India's rich heritage and ...
Inleiding Comparatieve Filosofie II: Culturen in Het Licht Van Een ... - Page 619   
Ulrich Libbrecht - 1999 - 636 pages
288-313. Haym, Rudolf: Die Romantische Schule, 1961. Hecker, Max F. : Schopenhauer und die Indische Philosophie, 1 897. Heeks, P.: Sri Aurobindo, 1989. Hegel, GWF: "Die Phantastische Symbolik" (over Indische kunst), Vorlesungen über die ...
Transformations in consciousness: the metaphysics and epistemology ... - Page 45
Franklin Merrell-Wolff - 1995 - 326 pages
... and even, as in the case of Schopenhauer, is viewed as ontologically identical with original Being. ... capable philosophy of Sri Aurobindo Ghose we find precisely this kind of valuation. To bring out in clear relief an orientation ...

Sunday, March 14, 2010

I.A. Richards, the great Hegelian who in my opinion exerted a great influence over Cousins and Sri Aurobindo


English studies, as Raymond Williams (pioneer in Cultural Studies) has shown, arose precisely as a way to reach people who were excluded from the conservative educational programs of the day, working people and women; it was later absorbed into institutional education and made conservative of God-and-Nation values (think I.A. Richards, the great Hegelian who in my opinion exerted a great influence over Cousins and Aurobindo)…
As near as I can tell, Cultural Studies is as integral a project as any other: recall Gramsci's calls for integral history, for starters (I cover some of this stuff here and in the micropolitics essay)… Cultural Studies is hardly a comfortable home for "pomo." It has instead been one of the few spaces in which a rigorous, historically-conscious, and in this sense integral critique of rhetorics of the "postmodern" have been possible. Further, it should be obvious (particularly following Dews) that "pomo" and "Critical Theory" are hardly subsumable under one another or equatable… Further, I submit that if you want a way out of the impasse of post-Wilberian integral theory, you will do well to take Critical Theory seriously as an already-integral project. 

I’m still laid low by my cold, which oddly seems to only be getting worse, so this evening I found myself groping for something to read just to distract myself. There aren’t very many books that I find myself picking up now and then just for the sheer pleasure of reading them, but Kenneth Burke’s A Grammar of Motives definitely falls into that category. It is difficult to describe the pleasure of Burke. His writing is lucid and sparkles with wit and insight, has a deep rigor to it, yet is also strangely exploratory and meandering. 
A Grammar of Motives is one of those rare books that you find yourself flipping through just for the sheer pleasure of following the “grammar” he discovers or uncovers in this or that particular structure. Yet above all, I think, Burke’s works are the sort of things you read to learn how to think. In other words, you don’t really read Burke to understand Burke (at least I don’t), but rather you read Burke because he teaches you how to think and analyze the world about you. Where you might read Badiou, Derrida, Deleuze, Kant, etc., to learn what these thinkers think, Burke, rather, gives you tools for thinking for yourself.


This problem of the left hijacking science was recognized by my favorite philosopher, Michael Polanyi, as early as the mid-1940s. I just started reading another book on him yesterday, and so far it is the best introduction I've found. I can't give it an unqualified endorsement until I finish it, but if it keeps up this pace, it will definitely be a foundational raccoomendation…
Lewis writes that all this modern scientific fraud is "especially weird because the Left claims to be all in favor of science. Marxism itself was a scientific fraud, of course. In 1848 Marx and Engels claimed to have a 'scientific' theory of history…
Polanyi didn't turn full time to philosophy until the 1950s, and his magnum opus, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, wasn't published until 1958, by which time he was already 67 years of age… And although Polanyi's writings are free of any overt religiosity, I find that they most adequately support my view of a universe that is both absolute and evolving, as it must be if it is to be separate from the Eternal and situated in time; to be precise, it is evolving toward an Absolute that is orthoparadoxically both its origin and its destiny, alpha and omega (more on which below).
I believe Polanyi provides the best framework for an enthusiastic and unambiguous embrace of both science and traditional religion -- which is why the essence of our approach is what we might call "Integral Neo-Traditionalism," or something along those lines.  

from Posthuman Destinies by debbanerji

We give the name of religion to any concept of the world or the universe which is presented as the exclusive Truth in which one must have an absolute faith, generally because this Truth is declared to be the result of a revelation. Most religions affirm the existence of a God and the rules to be followed to obey Him, but there are some Godless religions, such as socio-political organisations which, in the name of an Ideal or the State, claim the same right to be obeyed. To seek Truth freely and to approach it freely along his own lines is a man's right. But each one should know that his discovery is good for him alone and it is not to be imposed on others. The Mother, 13 May 1970 (CWM 13: 213)

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Fodor, Nagel, and Plantinga: total lack of interest in science

The Chronicle Review March 7, 2010 Philosophers Rip Darwin By Michael Ruse

Meanwhile evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists like Marc Hauser, at Harvard University, are studying moral behavior with such precision that they are able to pinpoint the parts of the brain involved in ration-al thinking, emotional reactions, and motivations. And, as always, the context is Darwinian. Why did natural selection push things this way rather than some other way?
Exciting times, which makes it all the more remarkable to hear voices from within the mainstream of philosophy questioning the veracity of evolutionary theory. I'll mention three. First there is Alvin Plantinga. Although he teaches at the University of Notre Dame, a Roman Catholic institution, Plantinga is North America's most distinguished Protestant philosopher of religion. A deeply sincere Calvinist, he has never hesitated to argue for his faith and has done groundbreaking work on questions of knowledge and belief. Even if you disagree with his conclusions, you can admire his skill and learn from his arguments. Plantinga, however, has long harbored a distrust, even an ardent dislike, of evolutionary theorizing in general and of Darwinian thinking in particular. In an essay published in 1999, he wrote, "Consider the role played by evolutionary theory in our intellectual world. Evolution is a modern idol of the tribe; it is a shibboleth distinguishing the ignorant fundamentalist goats from the informed and scientifically acquiescent sheep. Doubts about it may lose you your job. It is loudly declared to be absolutely certain, as certain as that the earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun—when it is no such thing at all."

Plantinga is an open enthusiast of intelligent design, the belief that at some points in life's history an intelligent being intervened to move the process along. I am not quite sure whether this makes him a full-blooded creationist, although he has in the past said he does not think it an impossible position. Some supporters of intelligent design, like Phillip E. Johnson, an emeritus professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Darwin on Trial (Regnery, 1991), seem to reject all forms of evolution. Others, like Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University and author of Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (Free Press, 1996), seem to accept a lot of common descent and might even be called theistic evolutionists, meaning that they think God guides the course of continuous development. Wherever Plantinga stands on this spectrum, he stands with the intelligent-design theorists in strongly emphasizing what they see as the falsity of Darwinian evolutionary biology.
Why does Plantinga feel this way? In his view, Darwinism implies that there is and can be no direction in life's history. All change is a function of randomly appearing new variations (mutations) that are then sifted by the opportunistic mechanism of natural selection. Although new variations are not uncaused, they do not appear according to need. As Darwin himself argued, to think otherwise is to illicitly bring in a directing God. The late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould used to pun that the arrival of the human species was entirely an accident brought on by our lucky stars—a comet that hit the earth 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and allowing for the rise of mammals. It is precisely that kind of thinking to which Plantinga is opposed.
Plantinga's reactions to evolutionary biology are disappointing but understandable. Disappointing because, generally speaking, Calvinists are favorable to science: It is all part of God's sovereignty, and it is our task to discover his immutable laws. As the Victorians used to say about sexual intercourse, if God decided that we should reproduce in such a disgusting way, then it is for us to accept this fact and put it in context. The same can be said about Darwinian evolution. Plantinga's views are understandable because philosophy today tends to be very secular, and there is a lot of sympathy for the claims of the so-called New Atheists—Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens—that if you are a Darwinian, then you ought to be at least an agnostic, if not an outright atheist. Philip Kitcher, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University and author of Living With Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith (Oxford University Press, 2007), has spoken of Plantinga's decision to blurb Johnson's book as revealing "a combination of Schwärmerei [excessive sentiment] for creationist doctrine and profound ignorance of relevant bits of biology," which has caused Plantinga to put his brain "in cold storage."
Much more surprising is the position of the New York University philosopher Thomas Nagel, who has established himself right at the top of the field thanks to a long series of dazzling essays on topics as diverse as the thinking apparatus of a bat and the nature of sexual perversion. Although he states firmly that he does not believe in a deity, he has now come out against Darwinism. If Nagel is not a supporter of intelligent design, one wonders why he says what he does. He has endorsed a book by Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne, 2009), naming it one of the top books of 2009 in the Times Literary Supplement.
In a recent article, Nagel argues that it is proper to teach intelligent design in the classroom. Doubting the Darwinian claim that the sources of variation are undirected, Nagel quotes Behe as an authority. "Are the sources of genetic variation uniformly random or not? That is the central issue, and the point of entry for defenders of ID," Nagel writes. He goes on to tell us that Behe's recent book, The Edge of Evolution, examines the "currently available evidence about the normal frequency and biochemical character of random mutations in the genetic material of several organisms."
Nagel leaves the reader with the impression that Behe's concerns are well taken. Behe, according to Nagel, argues that "widely cited examples of evolutionary adaptation, including the development of immunity to antibiotics, when properly understood, cannot be extrapolated to explain the formation of complex new biological systems. These, he claims, would require mutations of a completely different order, mutations whose random probability, either as simultaneous multiple mutations or as sequences of separately adaptive individual mutations, is vanishingly small."
Like Plantinga, Nagel is skeptical about the whole evolutionary enterprise. Suppose someone says that doubting evolutionary theory is equivalent to thinking the earth is flat. Nagel writes: "This seems to me, as an outsider, a vast underestimation of how much we do not know, and how much about the evolutionary process remains speculative and sketchy." He goes on to tell us that those who think we are now well on the track to understanding the mechanisms of evolution are wrong: "Nothing close to this has been done." And in a comment to which I shall refer below, he writes: "A great deal depends on the likelihood that the complex chemical systems we observe arose through a sufficiently long sequence of random mutations in DNA, each of which enhanced fitness. It is difficult to find in the accessible literature the grounds for evolutionary biologists' confidence about this."
Naturally the origin-of-life issue is raised—and found wanting ("a complete scientific mystery at this point"). It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Nagel thinks that evolutionary biology is more happily accepted by nonbelievers than by theists: "This is just common sense."
Jerry Fodor, no less distinguished than Nagel and Plantinga, is well known for his claim that the mind is composed of separately functioning modules. And he, too, has taken to criticizing Darwinian theory, first in an article in the London Review of Books and now in What Darwin Got Wrong. Fodor finds something deeply flawed in contemporary evolutionary thinking: "An appreciable number of perfectly reasonable biologists are coming to think that the theory of natural selection can no longer be taken for granted. This is, so far, mostly straws in the wind; but it's not out of the question that a scientific revolution—no less than a major revision of evolutionary theory—is in the offing."
To Fodor the notion of natural selection is flawed. He has long been on record arguing that metaphors in science are misleading, and that they must be eliminated as science matures. In the case of Darwinism, we have an analogy or metaphor at work, between the artificial selection that breeders use when they improve livestock—shaggier sheep, beefier cows—and the process of differential reproduction that Darwinians think leads to evolutionary change (in the direction of adaptive advantage). Fodor believes that differential reproduction illicitly brings mind into the natural process:
The present worry is that the explication of natural selection by appeal to selective breeding is seriously misleading, and that it thoroughly misled Darwin. Because breeders have minds, there's a fact of the matter about what traits they breed for; if you want to know, just ask them. Natural selection, by contrast, is mindless; it acts without malice aforethought. That strains the analogy between natural selection and breeding, perhaps to the breaking point. What, then, is the intended interpretation when one speaks of natural selection? The question is wide open as of this writing.
Fodor argues that this problem is insoluble. Fortunately we need not worry much, because in going with selection, evolutionists have been grasping the wrong end of the stick. In his view, today's proper-thinking evolutionary biologists are finding that it is all in the variations anyway. All evolutionary change comes about through the genes and their development. Even if natural selection were at work, Fodor argues, the most it could do is clean up afterward.
What does one say about these critics? One could certainly pick apart individual things, for instance Fodor's claims about selective breeding versus natural selection. The very last thing that Darwin and his followers are trying to do is put mind into nature. In both artifice and nature, some organisms are going to reproduce and others are not, and the reasons for that are (on average) going to be connected to the different features of the winners and losers. To say that a speckled moth is less likely to be eaten by a robin than a dark moth, because the robin can less easily see the speckled moth against the lichen-covered tree, is to say nothing about God or any other conscious being.
One could also pick up on the fact that neither Plantinga nor Nagel seems to have the slightest awareness of the scientific criticisms that have been launched against intelligent design. Every example that supporters of intelligent design produce to suggest that natural causes are not adequate—the bacterial flagellum, the blood-clotting cascade—has been shown to be the exquisite end result of evolution. And one could certainly groan at the tired suggestion that Darwinians are unaware of or threatened by developments in evolutionary development. No evolutionary biologist, least of all Sean Carroll, suggests that one day the eye just appeared. However the new sources of variation play out, selection is going to be there right along with them.
But rather than work over the details, I want to draw attention to the way this crop of critics ignores evolutionary biology—aside from the kind of cherry-picking in which Fodor engages. Nagel may sneer about the failure to find "accessible literature" that answers his worries. In what part of the library was he doing his literature search? Where, for example, is any discussion of the Grants' work on the Galápagos finches? What about a detailed look at the new scholarship that is challenging earlier thinking about the evolution of bipedalism? What about the discoveries of molecular biology and of the similarities (homologies) between humans and fruit flies? And why no mention of Marc Hauser and his work uncovering the secrets of moral thinking? There is a deafening silence on those and other issues. Fodor, Nagel, and Plantinga don't need to turn themselves into biochemists, but some awareness of the issues and advances would not be entirely misplaced.
This total lack of interest in the science is surely suggestive. The critics are being driven by other, for them deeper, concerns… Michael Ruse directs the program in the history and philosophy of science at Florida State University. His latest book, Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science, was just published by Cambridge University Press. He contributes to The Chronicle Review's blog, Brainstorm. 

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Ideal of an authoritarian and spiritually-endowed state

Getting back to the Hegel Question:

The stance of Hegel, with his pan-logical "mysticism," is the opposite [of historical materialism]: in the world of logical abstraction, the "notion" of the state is ultimately determinative, and the tragic divisions of society are destined to be transcended (aufgehoben) in the inevitable march of history" (M. Rader, Marx's Interpretation of History, page 69)

One political imperative one can draw from this doctrine can be summarized like so: to change the world, change your paradigm, that is, adopt a better worldview in tune with this underlying cosmic consciousness we claim to be real. Why? Because it is through determinative mind-stuff, really important notions, that the logic of History (none other than Spirit) is effected. The inevitable march of history toward a New Age ("evolution") is an epiphenomenon of thoughts, particularly the ideal of an authoritarian and spiritually-endowed state. To unite or integrate a divided world, think integrative thoughts, have integral consciousness, do your yoga. Or rather, do our form of yoga, which is the essence of all possible yogas anyway, the best of the best.

Such is the Hegelian argument, translated into the patois and market strategy of Ken Wilber, much of it claimed from Aurobindo or indirectly from Richard Tarnas's peculiar history The Passion of the Western Mind, and later, to Wilber's surprise, found repeated in Hegel and other right-wing and authoritarian idealists. There is much more to be said about the coincidence of idealism in doctrine with the ideal of the state as an expression of Spirit (the Hegelian state as an "Omega point" as it were, to draw in Wilber's appropriation of Theilhard de Chardin's iteration of this idealism). The state in its ideal form subordinates the subject's mind stuff, matures it spiritually, organizes its freedom: the authoritarian state looks not so very unlike the Wilberian superholon, does it not?

Needless to say, I stand with Althusser, as a historical materialist, against all this. And this is why ideology was my way in to critique integral theory to begin with (a problematic essay, but one I still claim as my own work with some confidence). 7:35 PM 


I am disappointed in how the book Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge, & Truth, written by the fourth Caliph of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community (Mirza Tahir Ahmad), has been largely ignored by writers in the integral studies world. If one is interested in the intersection between knowledge-production and "the sacred" in an interdisciplinary and inter-traditional sense, then this text should be on one's list as an artifact of first significance. If one is objective about it, the thrust of its central arguments seem not so very distant at all from Aurobindo's.

The same can be said for other forms of Islamic, Sufistic, and what might be called for lack of a better word post-Islamic integral culture (of which more below): the Baha'i movement, the Universal Worship of Hazrat Inayat Khan, for instance. These streams are sadly underrepresented in integral studies, not particularly well accounted for. If one wants to argue that history is characterized by certain flowerings of spiritual wisdom (see Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality for instance, The Passion of the Western Mind, or The Future Poetry) then one is suffering from plank-in-the-eye syndrome if one ignores the Islamic world's contributions to integral culture. There are, surely, other examples (Wilber's circle has precious little to say about Gurdjieff and the
Fourth Way for starters).

So I ask: how might the claims made about intellectual history on behalf of World-Spiritual history in Aurobindo Ghose, Ken Wilber, or Richard Tarnas among others be adjusted if they accounted more properly for these flowerings in the garden as well as the European and Hindu traditions?

Mind you, I do not have a particular pony in this race: I am a Buddhist, not a Hindu or a Muslim. The historian in me wants to see a better account of the archive. Do your homework, guys.
...
To be clear, by "post-Islamic" I mean specifically social and cultural movements that arise in an Islamic context, but are not necessarily Islamic in character. The Baha'i Faith, for instance, is not an Islamic movement; it is a Baha'i movement. &c. I am not trying to suggest that Islam has been eclipsed or superseded or whatever, in case any one out there thinks in those terms and wants to imagine I agree with them (I do not).