Heidegger, Benjamin, Lacan, Baudrillard

Still, without necessarily following Heidegger's turn, we can look at this "error" as a productive one. To do so, we can begin to think a brief bit about Walter Benjamin, whose work had a considerable emphasis on Baudrillard's thought. Benjamin's most famous essay, his "Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility," tackles an issue that may seem somewhat tangential or secondary for Heidegger: the role of new production technologies in changing the nature of the object. But of course it's not tangential at all, since the worldliness that Heidegger writes about in Being and Time is, if we believe Benjamin, in part called into question by these new representational technologies....

Put the Benjamin aside and on hold for a bit, and just let it simmer. Let's recall that Heidegger spends a lot of Being and Time concerned with the way metaphysics has built up a system of thought that hides the more primordial and fundamental ontological question of Being. The separation of beings from Being and the myth of objective reality are all rather essential backdrops for Heidegger's project.

So too for Baudrillard's thought, though for different reasons than the early Heidegger. I think that, and i'll just go ahead and make this clear up front, we can think of Baudrillard's career in many ways as an alternate attempt to deal with the point of confusion identified above in Heidegger. It does so not by reorienting the analysis such that it privileges temporality over the subjectivity of Dasein, but by displacing any question of the subjectal with the objectal, which is to say that Baudrillard explains the dispersal of Dasein into das Man by exposing the subject's overdetermination by the object. As Charles Levin explains, in his book on Baudrillard:

No subject can be posited without an object: the object creates the space-time of thought, and its ontic discreteness (its ‘readiness at hand’, as Heidegger might say) serves as the model for the social individual, as both agency and entity – as a thing that wills...

At this point, it's useful to recall Benjamin's discussion of the authenticity of the object, which relates somewhat obviously to the discussion of Baudrillard thus far, in that it is technological reproducibility that makes automation and the rise of the object possible. But there is a more interesting, though more subtle, way of integrating Benjamin's insight into aura. I quoted Baudrillard earlier as suggesting that we experience automatism as the "imaginary" of the object. in that the object is experienced primarily neither at the level of the symbolic or the Real. We're in the Lacanian register here, obviously, but Baudrillard is way too savvy and antagonistic to simply accept Lacan's terminology. What if the imaginary and the Real also functioned via an auratic economy? We would need to rethink the relation between the registers.

Lacan, for example, was very clear in thinking that the imaginary first comes about through the encounter with a mirror object that is primarily (alright, exclusively) static. But if the object is as ascendant as Baudrillard thinks it is, and this is true because of its mechanical reproduction, its automatism, then to a certain extent it becomes ascendant through the collapse of aura; the fall of latter makes possible the rise of the former, so to speak...By kenrufo March 8, 2007 in Baudrillard, Heidegger Permalink

Adieu Baudrillard

Postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard dies Alarab Online French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, whose provocative, paradoxical style was reflected in the title of his 1991 work "The Gulf War did not take place", has died, his publisher Galilee said on Wednesday. He was 77.

Well-known in the United States, and reportedly courted by the makers of "The Matrix" who wanted help in their futuristic film trilogy, Baudrillard was usually classified as postmodern. But he did not belong to any clearly defined school. He had an iconic status in certain sections of the French intelligentsia, illustrated by the left-wing Liberation daily which carried a full front page photograph of Baudrillard on Wednesday, and covered his death over three pages inside. Baudrillard argued that mass media and modern consumerist society had built up such a complex structure of symbols and simulated experience that it was no longer possible to comprehend reality as it might actually exist. His dense, allusive style, peppered with expressions such as "hyperreality" and "simulation" was typical of the rarefied world of French cultural theory, but a mordant sense of humour underpinned his criticism.

He said that the 1991 Gulf War had been so artfully and comprehensively filtered and interpreted by television that the event apparently unfolding before the eyes of CNN viewers was a "simulacrum" (another favourite word) rather than an actual war. His works on cultural theory and consumer society from the 1970s are still widely read and respected, but he attracted more criticism with later works. These included "America", a high-speed travelogue seeking to lay bare the "banality" of American culture, or articles on September 11, 2001 in which his theoretical reflections seemed to display a lack of sympathy for the victims. Reuters

Creative emergence is rooted in ancient pagan philosophy

Ken Wilber himself affirms that his idea of "creative emergence," by which he attempts to combine spirituality with the recent evolutionary concept of "punctuated" evolution, is rooted in ancient pagan philosophy. It was given its most detailed expression in neo-Platonism, which issued the last major challenge of pagan philosophy to Christian theology at the dawn of Orthodox Christian civilization in the fourth century A.D. [Wilber claims that Plotinus (A.D. 205-270), the main thinker of the neo-Platonic school, was "arguably the greatest philosopher-mystic the world has ever known" (The Marriage of Sense and Soul, p. 19. He sees the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna (second-third century A.D.), who taught that Absolute Emptiness manifests itself as all form, as Plotinus' contemporary counterpart in the East (Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, pp. 638-69, 692-97).] In one form or another, it has been found in virtually every strain of false mysticism (theosophy, kabbalah, etc.) since that time. It is perhaps the highest idea that humanly devised metaphysics can arrive at when the fallen mind of man is not submitted to -- and raised up by -- Divinely revealed theology.

According to the pagan philosophical notion, the deity does not create ex nihilo in the classical Christian sense, but rather diffuses or emanates itself onto creation. Forms and beings appear suddenly, but this is an "emergence" out of an impersonal Godhead rather than a creation by a Personal God Who is in essence wholly "other" than His creation.
As against the pagan view, the Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky elucidates the true meaning of creation according to the Scriptural-Patristic Christian doctrine:
Quote:Creation ex nihilo does mean just such an act of producing something which is "outside of God" -- the production of an entirely new subject, with no origin of any kind either in the Divine Nature or in any matter or potentially of being external to God. We might say that by creation ex nihilo God "makes room" for something which is wholly outside of Himself; that, indeed, He sets up the "outside" or nothingness alongside His plenitude. The result is a subject which is entirely "other," infinitely removed from Him, "not by place but by nature," as it is expressed by St. John Damascene [St. Gregory Palamas writes that "every created nature is far removed from and completely foreign to the Divine Nature" (The Philokalia, vol. 4, p. 382), even though God creates and sustains the creation through His Divine grace (energies).]

The creation is not a kind of spreading out or infinite diffusion of the Godhead.... "The Good diffusing itself by itself" of neo-Platonism is not the God of St. Paul, Who "calleth those things which be not as though they were" (Rom. 4:17).
According to the neo-Platonic idea, since Absolute Being is ultimately impersonal, it has no Personal will. Therefore, the production of beings cannot be an act of free will, but is rather a natural diffusion that occurs by virtue of some necessity of the Divine Nature. In other words, it is the nature of the Godhead to diffuse itself into the realm of form and appearance; there is no "choice" involved.
In the Christian revelation, on the other hand, since God is Personal, he creates by a free act of will, Vladimir Lossky writes:
Quote:The creation is a work of will and not of nature.... In the act of creation God was under no necessity of any kind whatever. There is, in fact, nothing in the Divine Nature which could be the necessary cause of the production of creatures: creation might just as well not exist. God could equally well not have created; creation is a free act of His will, and this free act is the sole foundation of the existence of all beings....
Creation, which is thus a free act of the will, and not (like the shining forth of the Divine energies) a natural outpouring, is an act proper to a God Who is Personal, to the Trinity Whose common will belongs to the Divine Nature.
In the Orthodox Christian vision, then, God creates not out of necessity but out of love. He loves us, His creatures who are in essence external to Him, and He wishes us to meet Him in a personal relationship of love, so that we may participate in Him through His grace. Vladimir Lossky writes that, in the Christian vision,
Quote:the created universe is thus not seen, as in Platonic or Platonizing thought, under the pale and attenuated aspect of a poor replica of the Godhead; rather it appears as an entirely new being, as creation fresh from the hands of the God of Genesis "Who saw that it was good," a created universe willed by God and the joy of His Wisdom, "a harmonious ordinance," "a marvellously composed hymn to the power of the Almighty," as St. Gregory of Nyssa says.
Thus, the impersonal God of the pagan (and neo-pagan) conception is shown to be vastly "weaker" than the God of Orthodox Christianity. It cannot volitionally create ex nihilo in the true sense, but can only of necessity manifest forms out of its own nature.
While this view of "God" and "creation" is indeed nothing new, we have seen how it has been given a new evolutioanry frameowrk in modern times by thinkers like Teilhard and Wilber. In Wilber's words, the ancient pagan teaching of a series of diffusions of the Divine Nature has now been "temporalized" by the modern theory of evolution.
The pagan idea of "creative emergence" appears to fill in all the gaping holes which exist in the currently competing models of naturalistic evolution. Integrated with the "punctuated equilibrium" model devised by atheist/agnostic evolutionists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Edgredge, it provides a vague "Spirit" to explain both the lack of intermediate forms and the lack of a purely naturalistic mechanism of evolution. Once the evolutionist admits a vague concept of deity, the idea that Wilber has synthesized makes absolute sense, fitting in perfectly with the evolutionary framework of billions of years of earth history. According to this view, God has "emerged" into the world over billions of years in successively higher forms. It is still evolution -- as Wilber affirms at every turn -- but it is far removed form the old naturalistic paradigm.

Rose, Fr. Seraphim (2000). Genesis, Creation, and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision. Platina: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000, pp. 557-567. March 02, 2007 Permalink

Wilber, Laszlo, Schumacher, Giddens, Ritzer, Gebser

mark Says: March 2nd, 2007 at 8:47 am I am not against sailing around the world. I am not against Big Pictures. I think that Big Picture theorists like Wilber, Laszlo, Schumacher, Giddens, Ritzer, Gebser, etc are to be applauded for their courage in travelling through all that territory and trying to make sense of it. I am myself at this moment trying to write a PhD thesis that proposes an integral framework for organisational transformational. It’s definitely Big Picture stuff (even if rather poorly painted).

Now here’s the poorly expressed point:- What I find lamentable is the use of the specific term “Theory of Everything” as a label for our very partial Pictures no matter how Big they might be. My proposition of a Theory of Anything is half made in jest as a way of deflating the grandiose TOE label. Labels are important. Let’s not label what integral theorists do as a TOE. Open Integral

Taking the elevator to the next floor

One Cosmos Under God Robert W. Godwin

Time is not an empty and abstract category of mere duration, nor is it merely an illusory by-product of change. Rather, human time -- which is a distant echo and reflection of divine time -- is both full and directional. Of all people, the scientist should be aware of the various developmental stages he had to have traversed in order to end up a scientist capable of detached, abstract cognition about the foundations of reality. A rock cannot do that. Nor an animal, a child, or a radical imam. The changes that occur on the way from child to man are not merely horizontal but vertical. As Ken Wilber has said, true development -- which is to say transcendence -- is not just a matter of rearranging the furniture on the floor of a building, but taking the elevator to the next floor...

Thus, at its very heart, Christianity is clearly both evolutionary and developmental. No Christian could ever maintain that "time is an illusion," for time is of the essence of Christian life -- again, not the abstract quantitative duration of the physicist, but the explicitly qualitative time that distinguishes the spiritual child from the spiritual adult in the arc of salvation. posted by Gagdad Bob at 3/01/2007 08:05:00 AM 25 comments links to this post Thursday, March 01, 2007

Wilber’s writings are far more humble and skeptical

joe perez Says: March 1st, 2007 at 10:49 pm Personally, I find Wilber’s writings far more humble and skeptical than Edward’s comments precisely because Wilber is willing to put more of himself out on a limb, willing to risk being wrong, willing to venture forth opinions that his academic colleagues and friends would hush hush, tut tut. Edward strikes this reader as far too sure of himself and his need for No TOE.

I have read and re-read Edward on the “theory of anything” and I can’t make much sense of it. Must be me. To create a theory of anything, indeed to create a theory of any kind, requires a worldspace which may be more or less adequate to the task of theory-making. Is Edward saying that it’s best to allow one’s worldspace to remain implicit, not to make its boundaries explicit so far as one is able? I would think a theory of anything presupposes a sort of implicit theory of everything, and really the issue at hand is how to best reveal that implicit theory.

Anyways, I do like what Edward has to say about focusing on events, not comparing brussel sprouts and soap. I fail to see how it’s any different from what Wilber is doing, particularly in Integral Spirituality, in which his focus is entirely on hori-zones of arising. I bet there are few words used more frequently in IS than “occasion”. Everything’s an occasion to Wilber. It would help if Edward would actually cite the sources of all those authors of TOEs who he disagrees with and actually presents their case in their own words before huffing and puffing about it. Open Integral

Nietzsche already took - 20 years before Saussure - this step (from which Saussure explicitly refrained)

ANT: Latour’s interests are definitively not primarily epistemological, but ontological ones. He does not focus on the nature of knowledge of the world, but tries to figure out the nature of a world in which knowledge plays a role our world, i.e., the world of science and technology.

To get a feel for ANT, think of the world as a staged play. How does an actor become a character in a play? Only by interacting with other actors and with artefacts, and by speaking about himself, artefacts, events, and so on. What character is he? Look for the artefacts and the actors that surround him and the plots he is involved in. Watch how artefacts mediate to define a character: a crown on his head translates an actor into a king, and vice versa. How does a prop become a particular artefact which plays a definite role in the world of the play? Look how it has become involved in interactions.

On stage, each thing is only constituted solely through its interrelations with, and differences from, everything else. Nothing has any intrinsic features of its own. ‘The properties of a thing are effects on other “things”. If I remove all the relationships, all the “properties”, all the “activities” of a thing, the thing does not remain.’ (Is that a Latour quotation? No, but it could have been. In fact, this is Nietzsche). So, to answer any question about what anything is, and to answer any question about meaning, we have to study how the world in which it plays a role is built up as an effect of interactions, i.e., interactions in which both humans and non-humans are involved. We have to deconstruct the ‘scripts’ that brought actors and artefacts into existence, study their genealogy, and see how in that process they became bestowed with essences.

What is the philosophy behind this? First, call to mind the Saussurian idea (commonplace in semiotics) that there are only differences in language: nothing inherently suits a phoneme for its role in words, the only thing that matters is that it differs from other phonemes. (For example, the phoneme b enters in bat and bed, not in rat and red - that makes b into a distinguished phoneme, but nothing inherently affords b this particular role.) ANT follows up on this. It radicalises this idea, by applying the Saussurean principle to the whole world. Interestingly, ANT is not the first to have done this.

In fact, Nietzsche already took - twenty years before Saussure - this step (from which Saussure explicitly refrained) to apply the intuition that language is a system of differences to the whole world. So, what we are talking about is a pan-semiotic ontology, a Nietzschean conception of the world as a text, or - as I would prefer - as a staged play.

http://www.easst.net/review/dec1995/devries by Gerard de Vries

Values are an illusion; Nothing can be known with certainty

One Cosmos Under God Robert W. Godwin Let us review the main conclusions of the kosmonkey referenced above:

1) Man is an animal, fundamentally no different than any other.

2) Values are an illusion; nothing is actually any better than anything else (e.g., the Giza Pyramid is a stick in an ant hole and Shakespeare is Maureen Dowd).

3) Emotion and language -- or heart and head, meaning and truth -- cannot actually exist in any human sense. My dog knowing where to poop or when it's time for a walk is no different than the theory of relativity.

4) Nothing can be known with certainty, which is simply another way of saying that nothing may be known except falsehood -- which is no knowledge at all.

5) Ironic though it may be for a "progressive" to say, there is actually no direction in history, no objective standard of measurement, no better or worse. Our unique Western values have nothing whatsoever to do with our extraordinary "success." As the Big Baboon, Jared Diamond, has argued, it's just a matter of geography, disease, and fortuitous placement of natural resources.

6) There is no intrinsic meaning in the cosmos, much less in your life -- which is simply the tail end of the tail end of a random process leading from nowhere to nothing.

7) The secular leftist takes an appallingly violent wrecking ball to the entire realm of the vertical, in that not only are you not special, but you are insignificantly small. Furthermore, the world is not special -- which of course makes us wonder -- but not really -- why all these leftists cheer the fanatical message of Al Gore, which is obviously premised on the doctrinal truth that the earth is of infinite importance; here again, a fine example of the "ape of God."

8) Neither human beings nor the planet are at the center of the universe, since there is by definition no center once the vertical has been demolished by academic monkeys with sticks. Again, the correct doctrine is that of course human beings are at the very center of the cosmic drama if viewed vertically. The center of a three-dimensional cone is a line that descends from the point to the base, not anything located along the base. Reduced from three to two dimensions, we are left with only a circle at the base. This is the self-imposed "circle of hell" inhabited by the the secular left which they -- no different than the Islamists -- would like to impose upon the rest of us. posted by Gagdad Bob at 2/26/2007 06:08:00 AM 48 comments links to this post

Origen, Denys, Eckhart, Blake, and Boehme

One Cosmos Under God Robert W. Godwin

Now, it is surely no coincidence that all of my favorite Christian theologians happen to be mystical theologians, many of whom have at one time or another been branded as heterodox, even heretical: Origen, Denys, and Eckhart; or Blake and Boehme, who would not really be considered theologians but visionaries in a Christian context; the author of Meditations on the Tarot, who was Catholic but calls himself a Christian Hermeticist, part of a perennial wisdom tradition extending back before Jesus and parallel to Moses; or even Balthasar, a nominally Catholic theologian who is regarded with some suspicion because of his close working relationship with a visionary mystic, Adrienne Speyr, who essentially provided him with "channeled" material. There's simply no other way to put it -- for example, Speyr explained in detail to Balthasar exactly what was going on with Jesus while he was dead and in hell all day on Holy Saturday, between the crucifixion of Good Friday and the first Easter Sunday.

And the more I study Frithjof Schuon, I can see that he struggled mightily to situate himself within orthodox tradition -- indeed, it was the entire basis of his life's work -- even though it is obvious to this Coon that he transcended any small-o orthodoxy and abided within O-rthodoxy itself: beyond religion, so to speak, into the source of religion...posted by Gagdad Bob at 2/24/2007 06:02:00 AM 25 comments links to this post

Don’t slide back into some premodern justifications for the state of things

Theory of every thing?

Matthew Newsham Says: February 22nd, 2007 at 10:27 am Have we given up hope that philosophy can be useful? Aristotle created a TOE- he came up with a powerful formalized system of logic that couldn’t be ignored by Christians of the West. Aquinus eventually even incorporated many of those concepts into the thinking of his era. Yes, maybe there is some hubris bound into all this- but what is good, true, and beautiful will continue to be refined in any case. We have to remember that we aren’t talking about any one man or idea here, but the sum total movement of all human understanding. Language, logic, values, calculations- these are all things that will continue to be effected by the overarching “meta” diolauge we are participating in today. Don’t slide into the trap of the green meme- most people’s condition on earth is still far too miserable for us to put up our hats and just think about ourselves. Don’t slide back into some premodern justifications for the state of things-

Stand and fight to move humanity forward towards the good and the true! A person in conflict has to assume that his every action will be effective in winning his battle. He has to be attentive to them and trust them, and as necessary let them go- but he can never give up hope of succeeding.

Matthew Newsham Says: February 22nd, 2007 at 7:25 pm Yea, Aristotle might not have been the best example of a TOE in terms of his reservations about the issue of perfect forms… But then, at its core, Ken’s work isn’t about promoting the abstract dreams of the idealist. I think its entirely pragmatic- and in that sense he share’s something of a “Sophist”-ic attitude, of which Aristotle was probably the next incarnation. (Someone who knows more about that than me may argue that point). I was just pointing out that creating all-encompassing metatheories can produce great results… the next big break after Augustine as near as I can tell.

And yes, I think raising this issue of “arrogance” is kinda green- NOT the issue of making clarifications, which I was just advocating myself a post or two back.I guess I assume that anyone worth their spit won’t be intimidated by a title. -GO full out, I say.

Tusar N. Mohapatra Says: February 23rd, 2007 at 12:01 am
[ http://rainbowther.blogspot.com/2007/02/plato-or-aristotle-hardly-reflected.html ]

I will be more of a Bohr than an Einstein

Re: Re: Mantric Poetry (SA & postmodernism?) by RY Deshpande on Sat 10 Feb 2007 06:15 AM PST Profile Permanent Link I think we should meticulously avoid the danger of slipping into the Grecian kind of speculative explorations or discussions. I will be more of a Bohr than an Einstein. The strong pillar of the physical sciences has been empirical rationalism and walking away from it will be straying into the marshy-foggy places. That is why I detest all talk about quantum mechanics coming from sachchidananda.

Re: Re: The Zero-Point Field (Lab verifications?) RY Deshpande Fri 16 Feb 2007 07:55 AM PST Profile Permanent Link I think, linking up philosophy with science or science with philosophy should always fall in the purview of empirical rationalism if it has to have any meaning for science. To see quantum behaviour of an electron as Shiva’s dance is mixing up issues which belong to different domains—a risky business popularised by Fritjof Capra. Empirical rationalism is a precious gain and should not be frittered away by extraneous considerations. Which also is not to mean that it can abrogate all judgement to itself. Hawkins would like to tell us again and again that, in the imaginary time in which the big bang occurs, there is no need for a God to create a world. Here he is not talking science, and in fields other than science his opinion need not have any value. Similarly, we have to also guard from the opposite tendency.

But there are deeper issues—in science itself. One of them is how to get out of the Newtonian trap into which we have fallen. Can we apply our old geometrical notions of gross space and time to a world where things have become too subtle—yet material—for us to figure out. 10:07 PM

Both James and Wittgenstein struggled with the question of belief

Daniel Dennett Tufts UniversityMedford, Massachusetts

I myself have looked over large piles of recent religious thought in the last few years in the course of researching my own book on these topics, and I have found almost all of it to be so dreadful that ignoring it entirely seemed both the most charitable and most constructive policy...The arguments Dawkins exposes and rebuts are the arguments that waft from thousands of pulpits every week and reach millions of television viewers every day, and neither the televangelists nor the authors of best-selling spiritual books pay the slightest heed to the subtleties of the theologians either.

Who does Orr favor? Polkinghorne, Peacocke, Plantinga, or some more recondite thinkers? Orr brandishes the names of two philosophers, William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and cites C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, a fairly nauseating example of middle-brow homiletic in roughly the same league on the undergraduate hit parade as Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ (1998) and transparently evasive when it comes to "meticulous reasoning." If it were a book in biology—Orr's discipline—I daresay he'd pounce on it like a pit bull, but like many others he adopts a double standard when the topic is religion.

As Orr says, both James and Wittgenstein "struggled with the question of belief," in their admirable and entirely different ways, but both also steer clear of the issues that Orr chides Dawkins for oversimplifying. I wonder which themes in these fine thinkers Orr would champion in the current discussion, beyond the speculation he cites from James, that "the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe." I'd be curious to know what Orr thinks that means. How should it be clarified and investigated, in his opinion, or does he just want to leave it hanging unchallenged?

Letter exchange between Daniel Dennett and H. Allen Orr regards Richard Dawkins The God Delusion (NYRB) by Rich on Mon 12 Feb 2007 08:16 PM PST Permanent Link 'THE GOD DELUSION' By Daniel C. Dennett, Reply by H. Allen Orr In response to A Mission to Convert (January 11, 2007)

It's a lot like Nietzsche's use of Hegel. Not really fair to Hegel

My paper will be responding directly to Zizek's comments on Buddhism in that link I posted earlier. He actually has a valid point, but his treatment of Buddha Dharma is part of a bigger polemic, of course. It's a lot like Nietzsche's use of Hegel. Not really fair to Hegel, but close enough often enough to be relevent. And this little squirt is actually intended as a response to Bonnita Roy's comments on an integral theory of creativity, also at the Integral Review. I'll be making substantial reference to, well, a bunch of stuff, including some ideas on Shakespeare I've been kicking around for years now. posted by DGA at 7:30 PM

Contemporary Indian Philosophers

Contemporary Indian Philosophy Name / Edited by Cost (Rs.)
Philosophical Reflections,G.C. Nayak 65.00
Doubt, Belief and Knowledge,S. Bhattacharyya 150.00
Towards a Critique of Cultural Reason,R. Sundara Rajan 95.00
Language, Knowledge and Ontology,Kalikrishna Banerjee 225.00
Karma, Causation and Retributive Morality: Conceptual Essays in Ethics and Metaethics,Rajendra Prasad 250.00
Philosophy and Religion: Essays in Interpretation,J.L. Mehta 175.00
The Art of the Conceptual: Explorations in a Conceptual Maze Over Three Decades,Daya Krishna 200.00
Natural Science of the Ancient Hindus,S. Dasgupta 50.00
Sattavisayak Anviksha ( in Hindi),Yashdev Shalya 75.00
The Primacy of the Political,R. Sundara Rajan 190.00
Studies in Phenomenology, Hermeneutics and Deconstruction,R. Sundara Rajan 190.00
Facets of Recent Indian Philosophy,General Editor: R. BalasubramanianVoi.1: The Metaphysics of the SpiritVol.2: Indian Philosophy and HistoryVol.3: Problems of Indian PhilosophyVol.4: The Philosophy of Life,S.P. Dubey 150.00275.00275.00400.00
Confessions and Commitments,S.S. Barlingay 80.00
Social Actions and Non-Violence,R.K. Gupta 125.00
Reference and Truth,Pranab Kumar Sen 175.00
Name / Edited by Cost (Rs.)
Perspectives in Philosophy, Religion and Art: Essays in Honour of Prof. Margaret Chatterjee,R. Balasubramanian and V.C. Thomas 175.00
Freedom Transcendence and Identity: Essays in Memory of Kalidas Bhattacharyya,Pradeep Kumar Sengupta 135.00
Man, Meaning and Morality; Essays in Honour of Prof. Rajendra Prasad,R. Balasubramanian and Ramashankar Mishra. 225.00
Ever Unto God : Essays on Gandhi and Religion,Sushil Kumar Saxena 140.00
The Philosophy of Nikunja Vihari Banerjee,Margaret Chatterjee 150.00
The Philosophy of J.N. Mohanty,Daya Krishna and K.L. Sharma 170.00
The Philosophy of K. Satchidananda Murti,Sibajiban Bhattacharyya and Ashok Vohra 350.00
The Philosophy of Daya Krishna,Bhuvan Chandel and K.L. Sharma 360.00
The Philosophy of G.R. Malkani,Sharad Deshpande 375.00
Realism Responses and Reactions: Essays in Honour of Pranab Kumar Sen 850.00
Readings and Reference
Who's Who of Teachers and Scholars in Philosophy in India,Daya Krishna 20.00
A Union Catalogue of Philosophical Periodicals,Subhas C. Biswas and Bikash K. Bhattacharya 55.00
Select Bibliography of Journal Articles on Philosophy, Religion, Science and Related Aspects of Indian Culture,Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya 40.00
Author and Subject Index of the Philosophical Quarterly (Vols.I-XXXVIII),Daya Krishna and R.S. Bhatnagar 28.00
Author and Subject Index of the Philosophical annual (Vols. I-XI),Daya Krishna and R.S. Bhatnagar 14.00
Author and Subject Index of the Journal of the Indian Academy of Philosophy (Vols. I-XVII),Daya Krishna and R.S. Bhatnagar 20.00
Author and Subject Index of the Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research(Vols.I - X),Daya Krishna and R.S. Bhatnagar 35.00
Ramana Maharishi: A Bibliography,K. Subramanyam 125.00
Author and Subject index of the journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research (Vols. XI-XV)Daya Krishna and R.S.Bhatnagar
Essays in Social and Political Philosophy,Krishna Roy and Chanda Gupta 250.00(HB)90.00(PB)
A Critical Survey of Phenomenology and Existentialism,Mrinal Kanti Bhadra 100.00
Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy,D.P. Chattopadhyaya 290.00
A Glossary of Technical Terms in the Commentaries of Sankara Ramanuja and Madhva on the Brahma-Sutras,K. Jayammal Pt I: 265.00Pt II: 400.00
Language. Testimony and Meaning,Sibajiban Bhattacharyya 250.00
Fundamentals of Logic,Arindama Singh and Chinmoy Goswami 450.00
Philosophy in India : Traditions, Teaching and Research,K. Satchidananda Murty 90.00
Tolerance in Indian Culture,R. Balasubramanian 60.00
History of Indian Philosophy : A Russian View Point,Marietta Stepanyants 150.00
Art and Philosophy : Seven Aestheticians, Sushil Kumar Saxena 240.00
Insights into Inward Consciousness,G. Srinivasan 125.00
The Philosophy of P.F. Strawson,Pranab Kumar Sen and R.R. Verma 425.00
Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical InvestigationsAshok Vohra ( in Hindi) 300.00
A Short Moral Lexicon,R.K. Gupta 100.00
Ludwig Wittgenstein's Culture and Value,Ashok Vohra ( in Hindi) 400.00
Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty,Ashok Vohra (in Hindi) 300.00
Circularity, Definition and Truth,Andre Chaupuis and Anil Gupta 560.00
icpr journal introduction

Husserl is also a target in Gadamer's impossibily of phenomenological neutrality

kela Joined: 08 27 04 Posts: 1807 Posted: 01/28/07, 6:25 pm Post subject: no, i was not aware of that fact. where does he describe these events? paul hacker, the great shankara scholar, converted to catholicism as well. a few months back, i read an article by williams on language and construction in madhyamika. it was apparently adapted from thesis. while occasionally he make some interesting points, he tends to ramble on and repeat himself, and often he's not very clear about what he's trying to say. while his little book on mahayana buddhism is a nice over-view and useful for undergrads, i'm not all that impressed by his work. when don lopez was on sabbatical in the mid nineties, he went to england to work with williams. he was not all that impressed by him either (nor by england, for that matter.)

Posted: 01/28/07, 7:28 pm Post subject: yes of course. i was simply attempting to get a handle on the phrase, "metaphysics is the myth of the given." the phrase comes from sellars, and by the same token, i imagine that much the same could be said about wilber's relation of sellars as what you say about his relation to quine; in other words, he is not necessarily referring to sellars' quasi-kantian attack on empiricism when he makes use of the phrase. the phrase has, perhaps, come into contemporary jargon of late through the work of rorty.

in "philosophy and the mirror of nature," sellars appears alongside heidegger and the later wittgenstein as one of the great "deconstructors" of the classical modern tradition. it is sometimes pointed out that husserl, in his attack on empiricism, made use of arguments similar to the argument implied by the "myth of the given." but i think that for later 20th century thought, husserl's phenomenology, too, has become a target, a version of the "myth of the given." certainly in rorty's book, as in gudmensen's "wittgenstein and buddhism," the "phenomenogical" and "eidetic" reductions function as analogs to russell's "sense data" analysis (to which gudmensen compares the abhidharma analysis of "dharmas").

husserl is also a target in gadamer's account concerning the impossibily of phenomenological "neutrality," and the necessity of "Vorurteilen" in "historically effected consciousness." at the same time, i cannot resist the temptation to think that perhaps in the back of his mind, wilber is still entertaining the idea that the "given" means some sort of metaphysically a priori assumption. this, of course, would imply a kind of eqivocation on the term "given" and a distortion of what sellars has in mind. but given what i have read in the interview with cohen, this does not appear to be the case.

by the phrase "metaphysics is the myth of the given" he appears to be referring to the idea of "metaphysics" as is implied by the term "post-metaphysics," for which the "foundational epistemology" of husserl and russell is central. even still, what the "post-metaphysical" thinkers mean by "metaphysics" is not at all clear, and not very satisfactory. pehaps it is time for a short piece on the idea of "metaphysics."Back to top

Posted: 01/28/07, 7:51 pm Post subject: interesting. all of this has a quasi-kantian ring to it. compare collingwood's "absolute presuppositions" or gadamer's "Vorurteil" both of which remain opaque since they function as transcendental "grounds," as it were, for all acts of understanding within a particular world-view (we cannot "see" that which "forms" our "seeing" or understanding since any act of "seeing" already presuposes that which "forms").

collingwood does say, however, that the presuppositions of older zeit-geists can however be seen for what they are. in the classical tradition in india the impasse is solved by the presence of "scripture," which not only provides the transcendent norms for the life of the worldly brahmin, but also reveals the trancendental structure that cannot otherwise be seen but that must be transcended for those on the course of release, the samnyasins. presumably, in the modern world, which looks upon "scripture" with suspicion as mere "dogma," "punditry," and so on, it is the siddha himself (da or ramana) who functions as the "transcendent guide" and provides the way out -- an adaptation from anti-brahmanic tantrism. Back to top

Posted: 01/28/07, 8:00 pm Post subject: schumacher...an anarchist of sorts. yes, one would imagine that the idea "small is beautiful" might not quite jibe with the idea of a theory of everything.

How can we claim to discover anything about the fundamental structure of the universe?

The Splintered Mind reflections in philosophy of psychology, broadly construed Monday, December 04, 2006 Chalmers on "Modal Rationalism" Eric Schwitzgebel Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of California at Riverside

In my undergraduate/graduate seminar this quarter, we read David Chalmers's influential book, The Conscious Mind, and now we’re reading some of the subsequent criticism and discussion of it, and Chalmers’s replies. A common theme in many replies -- and my sense, too, is that there’s something fishy about reflecting from the armchair about what we can conceive and reaching conclusions on that basis about the fundamental structure of the universe.

Chalmers’s response to this (in Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, 1999, p. 490; see also "Does Conceivability Entail Possibility?") is interesting. He insists -- correctly, I think -- that either you’re doing empirical exploration or you’re engaged in a “rationalist” enterprise centering on ideas such as “consistency, entailment, and ideal conceivability” -- that either you're doing scientific research or you’re exploring our concepts. In particular, he attacks the idea that something might be conceptually possible but still metaphysically impossible: Metaphysics just is about our conceptual space. This is hard for what Chalmers calls “Type B materialists” to swallow: They want to embrace materialism as a “metaphysical” thesis and at the same time allow that it’s conceivable that materialism is false, that it's conceivable (for example) that “zombies” -- beings physically identical to us but with no conscious experience -- exist.

As I said, I’m inclined to agree with Chalmers about this and disagree with the majority of his critics. But I think this only raises even more sharply the fundamental concern that seems to me to be driving them. If Chalmers’s (and all of our) “metaphysics” is just exploration of our concepts, how can we claim to discover anything about the fundamental structure of the universe thereby -- anything about anything other than our concepts? Metaphysics seems then to become a branch of psychology.

Now, actually, I’m quite happy with that, but I’m not sure Chalmers should be, and it isn’t the tenor of The Conscious Mind as I read it. And if materialism is true, then I’d say it’s not -- or shouldn’t be -- construed as a metaphysical thesis at all, but rather as a scientific thesis, a claim only about the “laws of nature”, and not a claim about Kripkean “a posteriori metaphysical necessity” or the like. Labels: metaphilosophy, metaphysics posted by Eric Schwitzgebel @ 8:37 AM

Prophetic insight of post-modernism

Post Human Variations by Richard Carlson
by Rich on January 25, 2007 08:46PM (PST)

To speak of the post-human is now becoming fairly widespread in our global culture. This is not only due to science fiction but due to critical scholarship as well which has realized the enhancements to the human that technology makes possible. If Nietzsche’s proclamation of the “death of god” helped annunciate the spirit of modernity, Michael Foucault statement about “the death of man” appears to be the prophetic insight of post-modernism. more » Leave Comment Permanent Link

Scotus' view on our freedom, and of the unity of the intellect and will

From: "bill cranston" To: tusarnmohapatra@mail.com CC: Subject: Heidegger and Scotus Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 08:13:54 +0000

Dear Tusar, Having only just discovered that Heidegger wrote his 1915 thesis on Duns Scotus, I have done the obvious thing and googled on 'Heidegger Scotus.' Hence arriving at your piece at

http://savitrieralearningforum.blogspot.com/2005/10/scotus-heidegger-and-derrida.html

You mention how 'difficult' Scotus is. In my (so far limited) mentions of him to others, he is mostly dismissed as 'too subtle.' Thanks for your book recommendations. In return, I would mention the work of Professor Alexander Broadie. He has a major interest in Scottish Philosophy, as you will see from his home page

http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/philosophy/Personnel/alex/

He has studied Scotus in depth. I have a copy of his little book 'Why Scottish Philosophy Matters,' where he assigns a major role to Scotus - and explains that role. For example there are descriptions of Scotus' view on our freedom, and of the unity of the intellect and will, - descriptions which I have been able to follow (although it is hard work!). The book is out of print - but there are a few second-hand copies available via Abe-books, starting at around US $12.00.

Looking below, you will see that I am a member of the British Teilhard Association (www.teilhard.org.uk). There are links between Teilhard and Scotus - these need to be brought out, I think - but that's another topic! -- bill cranston (Membership Sec, British Teilhard Association) 3 Anthony Road, LARGS, Ayrshire, KA30 8EQ, Scotland, UK Tel: 44 (0) 1475 686374

Philosophy comprehends life as a question

Confucianism Is Philosophy Not Religion By Taru Taylor

Contributing Writer The Seoul Times Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Confucianism is much misunderstood. The United Nations, for example, classifies it as a religion. Big mistake. Confucianism is a philosophy, not a religion. What's the difference? Religion believes in god as the final answer. Philosophy comprehends life as a question. Confucianism is a disciplined ethical inquiry — a moral philosophy.
To really understand a moral philosophy one must understand its heroes. Its idealists, not men of action. Here in South Korea that means Confucius and Mencius.
They are tour guides of the magical mystery tour that is Asian civilization. Consider "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" as an analogy. Wonderland is Asian civilization. Alice is every human being who would enter the rabbit-hole into Asian civilization. The White Rabbits are Confucius and Mencius. Notice I said that Confucius and Mencius "are" the White Rabbits, not "were."
Moral philosophy is timeless. Right and wrong never really change. Thus, it is folly to dismiss Confucius and Mencius as mere ancient philosophers of antiquarian interest. It is presumptuous to consider their words only with reference to times past, as if they have nothing pertinent to say to us now.
Many of their political and economic speculations are dated. Obsolete. But that's beside the point. For the theme that persists throughout "The Analects of Confucius" and "The Works of Mencius" is that ethics trumps politics; ethics trumps economics. They insist that the Confucian, as such, must do right even when it is more prudent and more profitable for him to do wrong.
Civilization is like Alice's Wonderland because it is not straight and narrow. It is circuitous and meandering. Mysterious. There is no map; only a compass. Every civilized person is his own pathfinder. There are no leaders or followers. But there are tour guides.
"The Great Learning" and "The Doctrine of the Mean" are the first two of the four Confucian classics. Taken together they provide the moral compass for every person who would find his way through the magical mystery tour of Asian civilization. Again, the other two Confucian classics, "The Analects of Confucius" and "The Works of Mencius." provide tour guides for every Alice who would adventure in the Wonderland of Asian civilization.
Civilization considers every person to be his own authority. Authoritarianism, which is about select leaders finding the right way for everybody else, is diametrically opposed to Confucian civilization. Thus Confucius and Mencius are tour guides, not leaders. Their charges are active disciples, not passive followers.
Confucius speaks to his role as guide, not leader, in Book 18 Chapter 8 of "The Analects." Po-i, Shu-chi, Yu-chung, I-yi, Chu-chang, Hui of Liu-hsia, and Shao-lien, great leaders of his own past, he characterizes with sincere respect. He then characterizes himself: "I am different from all these. I have no course for which I am predetermined, and no course against which I am predetermined."
In Book 7 Part 1 Chapter 26 of "The Works," Mencius distinguishes his role, as a philosophical guide, from the ideological leader. He reports that Yang led men according to the selfish principle: "Each man for himself." That Mo led men according to the altruistic principle: "Love all equally." And that Tsze-mo led men as a mediator between the two. Mencius describes Yang's and Mo's as "one-point principles." conceding that Tsze-mo's was better as a "two-point principle." But just as two wrongs don't make a right, two points don't make a philosophy.
Whereas Yang, Mo and Tsze-mo led according to one-point and two-point ideologies, Mencius guided according to the philosophy of "right principle." As he put it, "The reason why I hate that holding to one point is the injury it does to the way of right principle. It takes up one point and disregards a hundred others."
When Confucius speaks of being neither for nor against any predetermined course, and when Mencius speaks of right principle, what they both speak of, in a word, is circumspection.
Circumspection involves looking at a circumstance as a sphere of infinite sides, not as a coin of two. It characterizes the baduk player who places the stone according to the logic of the board, not a formula. It is the operative word of Confucianism because every Confucian must solve the problems of right and wrong on his own.
Confucianism is a philosophy of personal moral responsibility. It is an existential code of ethics. It is therefore, in essence, neither political, nor economic, nor social. It is no less individualistic than Western Utilitarianism.
Unlike Utilitarianism, which sees the individual as a pleasure-seeker, Confucianism sees him as a moral agent. The Confucian does not pursue happiness. He does the right thing.
The Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived a "hedonistic calculus" for every Utilitarian to calculate maximal pleasure and minimal pain. This is the Western counterpart of the Confucian's moral compass. Enlightened self-interest on the one hand; circumspection on the other.
To every South Korean I ask — Which are you? Pleasure-seeker? Or problem-solver? The Utilitarian maximizing his pleasure just as the businessman maximizes his profit? Or the Confucian solving the problems of civilization just as the baduk player solves the problems of the 361-point board? Imitation Westerner? Or Easterner in command of modern science and technology?

If you have any views visit the discussion board. Related Articles The Children Are Our Present Racism at the University Black History Month: Who Needs It? Mr. Taru Taylor, who teaches English at Sangmyung University in Seoul writes opinion pieces for The Seoul Times. Mr. Taylor majored in philosophy at Pennsylvania's Swarthmore College. His minor was English Literature there. He has been writing columns and other opinion pieces for many newspapers and publications including college ones.

Well-being and the concept of choiceworthiness

T. Scanlon (What we owe to each other, ch. 3) Scanlon assumes that the concept of well-being and the concept of choiceworthiness are not the same concept. Scanlon has many reasons to distinguish the two concepts. Some of these reasons are peculiar to his views about the relation about value and reasons. For example, choiceworthiness can be understood as the life "one has most reasons -all things considered - to choose". Scanlon argues in a different place (ch. 2) that some of our reasons are not teleological (i.e. not reasons to produce some thing or some more thing of value). Posted by Michele at 8:02 PM

A strategy for denying the existence of the concept of well-being

How can we argue that the concept of well-being most philosophers talk about does not exist?First of all: does such a project make sense? Consider Quine's argument in "two dogmas". He tried to show that the alleged distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments is untenable. How does he do it? he shows that every attempt to explicate what the supposed distinction means turns out to be meaningless or viciously circular.

Maybe something similar can be said about the concept of well-being, if it is understood in such a way that its meaning is based upon a previous conceptual distinction, and that this distinction turns out to be empty in the same sense as the analytic-synthetic distinction is, according to Quine. For example many philosophers identify the notion of well-being with the notion of "what is good for a particular subject". They think that when we say that something is “good for p” we appeal to a different concept from the concept(s) we appeal to when we say, for example "you made a good choice by choosing to live like that", “this would be a good and fulfilling life – a life that human being is supposed to lead”, “that is the life that is most desirable or worth aiming at”.

If it can be shown, for example, that we cannot make sense of this distinction, or that, if we make sense of it, neither terms turns out to coincide with the mongrel of intuitions that philosophers are trying to characterize by using the word “well-being”, we have something like a possible line of attack.

I made explicit reference to “the mongrel of intuitions that philosophers are trying to characterize by using the word “well-being”. But how can there be such intuitions, if the concept of well-being does not belong to our conceptual repertory? What we have is really a mongrel of ideas that do not cohere into a concept. But we can still characterize “what philosophers are trying to characterize by using the word ‘well-being’” by describing the peculiar goals such philosophers have in mind, the goals that motivate them to introduce the term. And one of these goals is the goal of making certain distinction, the goal of making sense of some thoughts which seems to be indubitable. We can define this goal, this distinction, and these thoughts without a commitment to their truth and meaningfulness.

Therefore, first of all one needs to identify some salient feature about the concept that philosophers are trying to characterize. I am clearly considering well-being as a technical word, a word that does not have necessarily anything to do with what the man or the woman in the street (or in the wellness centre) calls well-being. This assumption of mine is justified by scepticism about the idea that we could ground a theory of well-being upon the linguistic intuitions that surround the usage of that very term. (A suspicion shared by Griffin. See this post, quote 4.)

The first step in this project consist in the identification of the salient features that a philosophical theory must have in order to present itself, relatively uncontroversially, as a theory of well-being, and not as a theory of something else. Posted by Michele at 6:30 PM Thursday, January 11, 2007

Ethics is Greek or Jewish?

Philosophy. A Note on Lévinas, Putnam, Nozick and Derrida

I was recently reading quickly through Robert Nozick's Philosophical Explanations, a copy I borrowed from an office I use somewhere I gave one course in the last semester, while giving an exam on Derrida. Much to my surprise noticed a reference to a contrast between Greek and Judaic ethics. That created an unexpected link between Nozick and Derrida, since the idea of Greek versus Jewish philosophy, or culture, or ethics, is something that Derrida considers carefully in a long essay on Lévinas, 'Violence and Metaphysics', collected in Writing and Difference .

The context in which Nozick introduces the distinction between Greek and Jew, is the difference between ethical 'push' and ethical 'pull'. The push is Greek, and refers to the concern in Ancient Greek thought with cultivation and flourishing of the self, in an ethics which is based on the balance and health of the self. The pull is Jewish, according to Nozick, and comes from the Old Testament, or what Nozick calls the Hebrew Bible. It is the pull of ethical law, the obligation to follow commands of the kind handed down to Moses as the Ten Commandments.

Where did an Analytic philosopher like Nozick come up with this? How does a philosopher who usually avoids cultural context, and comes from a way of thinking which regards cultural and historical context as highly secondary to philosophical argument, come up with this historical-cultural generalisation? Nozick gives thanks to his Harvard colleague Hilary Putnam in the acknowledgements section. We don't expect cultural-historical generalisations from Putnam either, but Putnam did make one major departure from concentrating on Analytic philosophy.

Two of Putnam's texts refer to Emmanuel Lévinas, whose work took European philosophy since Kant as its departure. Lévinas' work is full of allusions to Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger and belongs to the French Phenomenological work of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Where did Putnam refer to Lévinas and what was that about?Putnam refers to Lévinas in 'Lévinas and Judaism' which can be found in The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas edited by two notable commentators on European Philosophy: Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley.

Putnam's essay is rooted in Putnam's strong Judaism, I am not sure if he is a believer, but then I could say the same about Lévinas who was a Talmud teacher for children as well as an academic philosopher. The point is that Putnam takes Lévinas seriously as an expositor of what Judaic religion is. Lévinas ' s philosophy, most famously in Totality and Infinity, rests on a distinction between Greek Ontology and Judaic Ethics, the latter rooted in the Torah, the "Hebrew Bible" and the tradition of study of it. Greek Ontology takes the 'Same', that is the Ego or the Self, as primary; Jewish Ethics takes the Other as primary. Putnam briefly but significantly refers to Lévinas' views on Ontology and Ethics in Ethics without Ontology.

It looks very much like Nozick got the ex-cathedra judgement that the ethics of Obligation from Lévinas via Putnam. He very probably did not consider Derrida's critical remarks. Like Nozick, Putnam and Lévinas, Derrida was Jewish himself. I won't recapitulate Derrida's argument here, I will just note some problems in equating Greek Ethics (often known as Virtue Ethics) with Self-Cultivation and Jewish Ethics with obligation. One obvious point is that the Biblical Jews were following the commands of the God of their nation rather than abstract obligation as such. Their ethical commands are clearly located in the rules and taboos of antique eastern Mediterranean society.

In any case, how can we locate obligation in a purely Jewish origin? Nietzsche who contrasted Roman master morality, meaning Greek Virtue Ethics, with Judaic Slave Morality, meaning the ethics of obedience to God, also located the origin of ideas of other worldliness and abstract morality in Plato, even as Plato developed a version of Virtue Ethics. Nietzsche clearly though that Old Testament morality was tied to Jewish national identity, and regarded the morality of obligation as Christian rather than Jewish. Christianity meant the teachings of the historical Christ as interpreted by St Paul, the converted Jew, from the point of view of Neo-Platonist philosophy.Heidegger certainly thought of the early Greek ethics, as an Ethos which preceded ethical rules, abstraction and obligation in the way of life as it was lived. Ethical obligation arises in Heidegger from a turning away from Being, something that is phenomenal for Heidegger, towards law outside Being trying to dominate it, that law came from Plato.

Some philosophers have regarded Old Testament Jewish ethics as an extreme example of an ethics of obligation. Hegel presents Judaism as excessive in its sense of obligation, in comparison to Christianity, a view he supports with reference to the story of Abraham and Isaac. Kierkegaard looks at the story in a more favourable way, though his interpretation is a critique of obligation which argues that the story shows the necessity to will the unethical in obligation to God, and that ethics can only be properly rooted in a self-relation which becomes a relation with the absolute externality of God.

Kierkegaard argues for an alternative to the ethics of obligation by looking to the self which has to live with the paradox of ethics founded on following an absolute, subjectivity and God at the same time.ş Kierkegaard classifies Kant's ethics of pure obligation with the Greek following of Ethos of the community, as both examples of following external rules and universality, instead of the paradoxical unity of particularity and universality in absolute subjectivity.

Of course in recent decades a wide variety of thinkers have sought an alternative to obligation ethics in Greek Virtue and flourishing: G.E.M. Anscombe, Michel Foucault, Martha Nussbaum amongst many. Nussbaum though distinguishes between an emphasis in Aristotle on luck and fragility as opposed to the abstraction of a rule obeying moral self in Plato.Nozick's attempt to distinguish between Greek and Jewish cannot be upheld, though he uses it with great force for establishing a central ethical tension. Posted by Barry Stocker at 16:27 13 January 2007 Labels: Ethics, Flourishing, Law, Obligation, Virtue

McLuhan, Whitehead & Freud

McLuhan was a great pioneer of what in academia these days is called, simply, theory. He seemed to care little for the departmental distinctions between literary criticism, sociology, history, philosophy, the humanities, and the sciences. He just rode roughshot along and across the borders of the traditional disciplines. He was overtly dismissive of them, so much so that in “The Mechanical Bride” he mocked Mortimer Adler’s “Great Ideas” endeavor, comparing the cards in the card catalog to tombstones. Today McLuhan’s interdisciplinary approach is a normal mode of academic writing, though there’s little evidence that today’s academic writers possess the wit and facility for metaphor that distinguish McLuhan. posted by Heresiarch @ 9:33 AM 0 comments links to this post Sunday, November 19, 2006

McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message" always struck me as intuitively obvious, and I've always been puzzled by its controversy. The character of an information channel must condition the experience of receiving its content. How could it be otherwise? Only after reading Whitehead'sSymbolism did I see the connection between McLuhan and Freud/Jung. Later other correspondences became apparent:

• Freud/Jung: UNCONSCIOUS - CONSCIOUS
• McLuhan: Medium - Message
• Whitehead: Causal Efficacy - Presentational Immediacy
• Psychology: Sensation - Perception
• Bohm: Implicate/Implicit - Explicate/Explicit
• Marx: Change in Means of Production - Change in Relationships Among Social Classes

In his book, "Archetypal Process: Divine and Self in Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman", David Ray Griffin pulled together a good collection of essays on the compatibility of Whiteheadian process philosophy/theology and Jungian archetypal psychology. posted by Heresiarch @ 12:59 PM Sunday, March 19, 2006

Heresiarch said... In your consideration of models of evolution that include a spiritual/transcedental dimension, you might take a look at the stellar metamorphosis model presented at www.starlarvae.org. I continue to find it extremely stimulating. 9:53 PM

Only Teilhard and Sri Aurobindo postulated a divinisation stage beyond the spiritual mind

Integral Practice, Integral Esotericism - Part Six Alan Kazlev

6-ix . The Cosmic Sphere - Physical Evolution and Evolutionary Cosmology

As mentioned in sect 2-vii, an evolutionary perspective is central to both New Age and Integral understanding. This evolutionary perspective provides a complete Holistic and Integrative system of Science and Arts has to integrate all fields of knowledge, and do so in a way that makes sense, rather than an artificial juxtaposition. Within Integrative studies and the general worldviews of the integral movement, the concept of An evolutionary, teleological cosmology according to which being evolves through successive progressive states of matter, life, and mind, and will still evolve beyond mind to future and higher states seem to be common denominator.

It is found in the writings of Teilhard, Sri Aurobindo, Gebser, Erich Jantsch, Wilber, and many other integral and evolutionary thinkers. This is a theme that goes all the way back to 18th century ideas on the temporialisation of the Great Chain of Being, 18th and 19th century German Idealism represented by Schilling and Hegel; 19th century German Nature Philosophy and English evolutionary thinking, late 19th through to contemporary science fiction, current astrophysics, scientific cosmology, biology, and so on; in 19th and early 20th century Theosophy and Occultism (Blavatsky, Leadbeater, Alice Bailey, etc) and from thence it makes its way to the New Age; and of course in evolutionary philosophers and visionaries such as Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin, Alfred North Whitehead (Process Theology), Jean Gebser, Oliver Reiser (Cosmic Humanism), Edward Haskell (Unified Science)[46], Arthur M Young, Erich Jantsch, Clare Graves and the Spiral Dynamics movement, Andrew Cohen, Wilber, and many many others. In many ways this represents the zeitgeist of our age, occurring in both materialistic science, holistic thought, modern esotericism, and the New Age movement. Perhaps for this reason it can also be considered one of the few fundamental and unified doctrines of the integral movement as a whole.[47].

A few examples are shown here, for the sake of comparison. One could create any number of lists of correspondences, the reason being that these are empirically agreed upon levels. Note that only Teilhard and Sri Aurobindo postulated a divinisation stage beyond the spiritual mind or spiritual adept...

This opens the way for a unifying evolutionary paradigm, as suggested by Haskell in his thesis regarding Unified Science, according to which different branches of knowledge can be understood as pertaining to the different stages or levels of cosmic and planetary evolution. Thus mathematics (in part), physics and astrophysics pertain to the very earliest levels, which constitute the foundation of space-time, the basic nature of the physical universe, elementary particles and the basic laws of physics, then chemistry, geology, astronomy, meteorology, etc to the second level in the table, then biology and paleontology to the third (organic life), then the various social sciences and applied sciences to the socio-cultural level, the various spiritual teachings and traditions to the spiritual level, and finally only a few teachings actually speak about the divinisation of matter, and these pertain to the column on the right.

Following the convention of Vernadsky and Teilhard , one might metaphorically posit terms like spatiosphere or physiosphere and chemosphere or (more accurately) thermodynamo-sphere to precede geosphere, biosphere, and sociosphere or noosphere here, even if "sphere" becomes meaningless (and rather inaccurate) when referring to the known universe as a whole.. The final stage of divinisation, Omega Point or supramentalisation, I refer to as the theosphere (God sphere). Following Werner Schwemmler, the appearance or singularity or symmetry break (Jantsch), which constitutes a new quantum leap of evolution in which each new stage appears can be designated by the suffix -genesis after the appropriate term, as in chemogenesis, biogenesis, sociogenesis, etc...

It follows then that a truly integral and integrative transformation should involve all these multitudinal aspects and branches, rather than bias or revolve around one alone. The attitude of compassion, empathy (including telepathic empathy with animals and the rest of nature, including "devic" forces), and stewardship represented by Deep Ecology, Animal Liberation, and Esoteric Integral Ethics has to be applied universally. It is not just the human species, but all life and all creation that contributes to, represents the Divine unfolding of, and proceeds equally towards the eschatological singularity of supramentalistaion. Thus, a totally new approach to teleology is required, as well as an ontology that recognises the subtle physical reality and its interaction with the gross or dense physical.

Light, perception, mind and consciousness

"Trialogues at the Edge of the West," Chap. 5, part a: Light and Vision

by rjon on December 13, 2006 05:49PM (PST)

I'm posting this portion of Chap. 5 of "Trialogues at the Edge of the West" because I think it may relate to the discussion presently under way re the article titled: "Instruments of Knowledge and Post-Human Destinies." My hope is that some of the new theories now surfacing in contemporary science may support our work in deconstructing the insights presented both in traditional Hindu and Buddhist texts and in Sri Aurobindo's more recent writings. For example, the initial section of "Trialogues" that I quote below raises some interesting ideas about the possible relationship between light, perception, mind and consciousness. (ron) more » Leave Comment Permanent Link