The history of Western philosophy is often portrayed as beginning with the work of Thales and the so called “Milesian school” he inaugurated.1 Because he stands, on such accounts, as the fountainhead of our philosophical tradition, his thought has come to be imbued with a mythological significance. In a sense, this should not be surprising, …
The Timaeus is one of Plato’s most historically influential dialogues, because it, unlike the others, was translated into Latin1 and preserved in the medieval world. Yet it is also one of the hardest to understand. The bulk of this “dialogue” consists of a monologue by Timaeus, a Pythagorean philosopher from Locri, who tells an imaginative …
Friedrich Hölderlin was a German poet and philosopher (1770-1843) devoted to classical Greek culture. Much of his work concerns the memorialization of classical antiquity, blending its mythology with the exhausted Christian mythos of his day, and attempting to clear a space for the departed gods to walk once more with men. As a result, he …
In his book Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New Worldview, Richard Tarnas presents a sustained case for the contemporary applicability of the ancient art of astrology. The first hundred pages or so are devoted to an exposition and critique of the modern mechanistic world picture and the adumbration of what Tarnas believes to be …
The term ‘synchronicity’ was coined by the psychologist Carl Jung to designate a relation between events that is both (i) explanatory and (ii) non-causal.[1] Consider the events x, in which a is F, and y, in which b is G. According to Jung’s terminology x and y would be synchronous, if a’s being F explained …
I recently read Philip Goff’s delightful little manifesto for panpsychism, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. Goff wrote this work for the non-specialist and admirably condenses the key debates in the analytic philosophy of mind to their essentials. He does this to explain and motivate an emerging position which would have been …