A Study of Perennial Philosophy and Psychedelic Experience, with a Proposal to Revise W. T. Stace’s Core Characteristics of Mystical Experience ©Ed D’Angelo 2018 -/- Abstract -/- According to the prevailing paradigm in psychedelic research today, when used within an appropriate set and setting, psychedelics can reliably produce an authentic mystical experience. According to the prevailing paradigm, an authentic mystical experience is one that possesses the common or universal characteristics of mystical experience as identified by the philosopher W. (...) T. Stace in his 1960 work Mysticism and Philosophy. Stace’s common characteristics of mystical experience are the basis for the Hood Mysticism Questionnaire, which is the most widely used quantitative measure of mystical experience in experimental studies of psychedelic experience. In this paper, I trace the historical roots of Stace’s common characteristics of mystical experience back to Christian Neoplatonism and apophatic theology, and I trace those, in turn, back to Plato’s concept of the Good and to Aristotle’s concept of God as active intellect. I argue that Stace’s common characteristics of mystical experience are not universal or culturally invariant but are the product of a specifically Christian religious and moral tradition that has its roots in ancient Greek metaphysics. My paper concludes with a revised list of common characteristics of psychedelic experience that is a better candidate for a list of invariant structures of psychedelic experience than Stace’s common characteristics of Christian mystical experience. (shrink)

In order to better cope with the pressures and stresses of the current day, modern psychology is anxiously seeking to find new therapies to address the increasing disorders within the human psyche. In the process new fields of research, such as humanistic and transpersonal psychology, curiously appear to borrow more and more from the wisdom of the ages. This volume, containing eighteen articles by noteworthy expositors of the perennial philosophy such as Huston Smith, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Frithjof (...) Schuon, presents the spiritual psychology of the wisdom traditions as a much-needed antidote to the current impasse in modern psychology. (shrink)

In order to better cope with the pressures and stresses of the current day, modern psychology is anxiously seeking to find new therapies to address the increasing disorders within the human psyche. In the process new fields of research, such as humanistic and transpersonal psychology, curiously appear to borrow more and more from the wisdom of the ages. This volume, containing eighteen articles by noteworthy expositors of the perennial philosophy such as Huston Smith, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Frithjof (...) Schuon, presents the spiritual psychology of the wisdom traditions as a much-needed antidote to the current impasse in modern psychology. (shrink)

Each well-known proposed solution to the mind-body problem encounters an impasse. These take the form of an explanatory gap, such as the one between mental and physical, or between micro-subjects and macro-subject. The dialectical pressure to bridge these gaps is generating positions in which consciousness is becoming increasingly foundational. The most recent of these, cosmopsychism, typically casts the entire cosmos as a perspectival subject whose mind grounds those of more limited subjects like ourselves. I review the dialectic from materialism and (...) dualism through to panpsychism, suggesting that explanatory gaps in the latter stem from assuming foundational consciousness to be perspectival. Its renunciation may yield the notion of an aperspectival, universal, “non-dual” consciousness that grounds all manifestation and is unstructured by subject, object or any differentia. Not only is such consciousness suggestive of a natural successor to cosmopsychism, but it has also been reported to be the direct experience of mystics who claim to have transcended the individual perspective. Their purported insight — that our aperspectival conscious nature is identical to the ground of all being — has been termed “the Perennial Philosophy”. Believing this Perennial Philosophy to offer the most promising way forward in the mind-body problem, I construct from it the foundations of a metaphysical system that I call “Perennial Idealism”. This attempts to account for manifestation in terms of dispositional, imagery-bound subjects. I then address an age-old “Parmenidean” conundrum that I refer to as “the problem of the one and the many”: How can an undifferentiated substratum ground differentia without the ground itself differentiating? The proposed solution takes its cue from mystico-philosophical writings in the Advaita Vedānta tradition, known as the ajāta doctrine. (shrink)

Current and recent philosophy of history contemplates a deep change in fundamental notions of the presence of the past. This is called breaking up time. The chief value for this change is enhancing the moral reach of historical research and writing. However, the materialist view of reality that most historians hold cannot support this approach. The origin of the notion in the thought of Walter Benjamin is suggested. I propose a neo-idealist approach called perennialism, centered on recurrent moral dilemmas (...) and choices. This suggests a view of the relations of moral thought and ontology placed in the diachronic context that historians study. (shrink)

Issues of the truth potential of religions and its alleged incompatibility with scientific objectivity are among the questions that cannot be bypassed in discourses aiming to an integral understanding of society. In this paper, we will examine and compare two specific approaches that share the intention of taking into consideration religious truths when describing and criticising both modern societies and methods permitting their scientific examination within the academic field. As perennialism focuses on common metaphysical truth shared by all religions, and (...) post-secularism deals with a possible form of cooperation between secular and religious morality, it is expected to find that their offered solutions to social crisis phenomena will be essentially different. However, the results show that basically both see the solution as a reorganizational task. (shrink)

The allure of perennial questions in biology: temporary excitement or substantive advance? Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9533-5 Authors Alan C. Love, Department of Philosophy, Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota, 831 Heller Hall, 271 19th Ave. S, Minneapolis, MN 55455-0310, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

The Philosophy of Social Science: A Contemporary Introduction examines the perennial questions of philosophy by engaging with the empirical study of society. The book offers a comprehensive overview of debates in the field, with special attention to questions arising from new research programs in the social sciences. The text uses detailed examples of social scientific research to motivate and illustrate the philosophical discussion. Topics include the relationship of social policy to social science, interpretive research, action explanation, game (...) theory, social scientific accounts of norms, joint intentionality, reductionism, causal modeling, case study research, and experimentation. (shrink)

Moral philosophy continues to be enriched by an ongoing empirical turn,mainly through contributions from neuroscience, biology, and psychology. Thusfar, cultural anthropology has largely been missing. A recent and rapidly growing‘ethical turn’ within cultural anthropologynow explicitly and systematically studiesmorality. This research report aims to introduce to an audience in moral philosophyseveral notable works within the ethical turn. It does so by critically discussing theethical turn’s contributions to four topics: the definition of morality, the nature ofmoral change and progress, the truth (...) of moral relativism, and attempts to debunkmorality. The ethical turn uncovers a richer picture of moral phenomena on theintersubjective level, one akin to a virtue theoretic focus on moral character, withstriking similarities of moral phenomena across cultures. Perennial debates are notsettled but the ethical turn strengthens moral philosophy’s empirical turn and itrewards serious attention from philosophers. (shrink)

There is a widespread view that Buddhist philosophy embodies logical contradictions such that there would be 'true' contradictions, This article explains that this is not the case and that Buddhist philosophy, more generally the Perennial philosophy, denies all contradictions for the sake of a doctrine of Unity.

Continental philosophies of science tend to exemplify holistic themes connecting order and contingency, questions and answers, writers and readers, speakers and hearers. Such philosophies of science also tend to feature a fundamental emphasis on the historical and cultural situatedness of discourse as significant; relevance of mutual attunement of speaker and hearer; necessity of pre-linguistic cognition based in human engagement with a common socio-cultural historical world; role of narrative and metaphor as explanatory; sustained emphasis on understanding questioning; truth seen as horizonal, (...) aletheic, or perspectival; and a tolerance for paradoxical and complex forms of expression. Continental philosophy of science is thus more comprehensive than philosophy of science in the analytic tradition, including (and as analytic philosophy of science does not tend to include) perspectives on the history of science as well as the social and practical dimensions of scientific discovery. Where analytic philosophy is about reducing or, indeed, eliminating the perennial problems of philosophy, Continental philosophy is all about thinking and that will mean, as both Heidegger and Nietzsche emphasize, making such problems more not less problematic. (shrink)

A tongue-in-cheek marketing review of university philosophy prompted by a slow-down in sales and mounting criticism of the product. These problems are diagnosed as the consequence of an inward-looking culture that encourages a narrow and fixed focus on selling the traditional product while discouraging examination of its competitors.

We undeniably live in an information age—as, indeed, did those who lived before us. After all, as the cultural historian Robert Darnton pointed out: ‘every age was an age of information, each in its own way’ (Darnton 2000: 1). Darnton was referring to the news media, but his insight surely also applies to the sciences. The practices of acquiring, storing, labeling, organizing, retrieving, mobilizing, and integrating data about the natural world has always been an enabling aspect of scientific work. Natural (...) history and its descendant discipline of biological taxonomy are prime examples of sciences dedicated to creating and managing systems of ordering data. In some sense, the idea of biological taxonomy as an information science is commonplace. Perhaps it is because of its self-evidence that the information science perspective on taxonomy has not been a major theme in the history and philosophy of science. The botanist Vernon Heywood once pointed out that historians of biology, in their ‘preoccupation with the development of the sciences of botany and zoology… [have] diverted attention from the role of taxonomy as an information science’ (Heywood 1985: 11). More specifically, he argued that historians had failed to appreciate how principles and practices that can be traced to Linnaeus constituted ‘a change in the nature of taxonomy from a local or limited folk communication system and later a codified folk taxonomy to a formal system of information science [that] marked a watershed in the history of biology’ (ibid.). A similar observation could be made about twentieth-century philosophy of biology, which mostly skipped over practical and epistemic questions about information management in taxonomy. The taxonomic themes that featured in the emerging philosophy of biology literature in the second half of the twentieth century were predominantly metaphysical in orientation. This is illustrated by what has become known as the ‘essentialism story’: an account about the essentialist nature of pre- Darwinian taxonomy that used to be accepted by many historians and philosophers, and which stimulated efforts to document and interpret shifts in the metaphysical understanding of species and (natural) classification (Richards 2010; Winsor 2003; Wilkins 2009). Although contemporary debates in the philosophy of taxonomy have moved on, much discussion continues to focus on conceptual and metaphysical issues surrounding the nature of species and the principles of classification. Discussions centring on whether species are individuals, classes, or kinds have sprung up as predictably as perennials. Raucous debates have arisen even with the aim of accommodating the diversity of views: is monism, pluralism, or eliminativism about the species category the best position to take? In addition to these, our disciplines continue to interrogate what is the nature of these different approaches to classification: are they representational or inferential roles of different approaches to classification (evolutionary taxonomy, phenetics, phylogenetic systematics)? While there is still much to learn from these discussions—in which we both actively participate—our aim with this topical collection has been to seek different entrypoints and address underexposed themes in the history and philosophy of taxonomy. We believe that approaching taxonomy as an information science prompts new questions and can open up new philosophical vistas worth exploring. A twenty-first century information science turn in the history and philosophy of taxonomy is already underway. In scientific practice and in daily life it is hard to escape the imaginaries of Big Data and the constant threats of being ‘flooded with data’. In the life sciences, these developments are often associated with the socalled bioinformatics crisis that can hopefully be contained by a new, interdisciplinary breed of bioinformaticians. These new concepts, narratives, and developments surrounding the centrality of data and information systems in the biological and biomedical sciences have raised important philosophical questions about their challenges and implications. But historical perspectives are just as necessary to judge what makes our information age different from those that preceded us. Indeed, as the British zoologist Charles Godfray has often pointed out, the piles of data that are being generated in contemporary systematic biology have led to a second bioinformatics crisis, the first being the one that confronted Linnaeus in the mid-18th century (Godfray 2007). Although our aim is to clear a path for new discussions of taxonomy from an information science-informed point of view, we continue where others in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science have already trod. We believe that an appreciation of biological taxonomy as an information science raises many questions about the philosophical, theoretical, material, and practical aspects of the use and revision of biological nomenclatures in different local and global communities of scientists and citizen scientists. In particular, conceiving of taxonomy as an information science directs attention to the temporalities of managing an accumulating data about classified entities that are themselves subject to revision, to the means by which revision is accomplished, and to the semantic, material, and collaborative contexts that mediate the execution of revisions. (shrink)

I urge philosophers of religion to investigate far more vigorously than they have until now the acceptability of varied components of the world religions and their epistemological underpinnings. By evaluating "acceptability" I mean evaluation of truth, morality, spiritual efficacy and human flourishing, in fact, any value religious devotees might think significant to their religious lives. Secondly, I urge that philosophers of religion give more attention to what scholars have called the "esoteric" level of world religions, including components of strong ineffability, (...) weak ineffability, and an alleged perennial philosophy. All this should involve a cooperative effort between analytic, comparative, and feminist philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This article provides an overview of the contributions to philosophy of Nigerian philosopher Sophie Bọ´sẹ`dé Olúwọlé. The first woman to earn a philosophy PhD in Nigeria, Olúwọlé headed the Department of Philosophy at the University of Lagos before retiring to found and run the Centre for African Culture and Development. She devoted her career to studying Yoruba philosophy, translating the ancient Yoruba Ifá canon, which embodies the teachings of Orunmila, a philosopher revered as an Óríṣá in (...) the Ifá pantheon. Seeing his works as examples of secular reasoning and argument, she compared Orunmila's and Socrates' philosophies and methods and explored similarities and differences between African and European philosophies. A champion of African oral traditions, Olúwọlé argued that songs, proverbs, liturgies, and stories are important sources of African responses to perennial philosophical questions as well as to contemporary issues, including feminism. She argued that the complementarity that ran throughout Yoruba philosophy guaranteed women's rights and status, and preserved an important role for women, youths, and foreigners in politics. (shrink)

Conflicts and social tensions have become perennial in global discourse. These conflicts and tensions were fostered through violence and non-violence. They also appear in different dimensions which include political, social, economic, and religious. They occur as a result of conflicts, values, needs, opinions, and other related instances. The aftermath of resolved conflict is peace and tranquility which yields a positive result of development and fosters unity. In this paper, we x-ray Jesus Christ’s philosophy of non-violence from the perspective (...) of the resolution of conflicts and social tensions. We also expose that most philosophers of peace and non-violence in conflict resolution rely on and make enormous, resolutions rely on and make references to Christ’s philosophy of nonviolence. Advocates of non-violence examined in this paper are Leo-Tolstoy Gandhi, King Jr, and others who had variously refer to Christ as the bastion of nonviolence philosophy. These philosophers had articulated and remedied oppression, racial discrimination, man’s inhumanity to man, bigotry, tribalism, and related social tensions. From the strings of this paper, we hold firm to the submission that, Christ’s philosophy of non-violence serves as the foundation of resolution of conflicts and social tensions across the globe. (shrink)

This dissertation provides a careful reading of the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics centered around three major themes: reality, determination, and infinity. The reading offered gives pride of place to Wittgenstein’s therapeutic conception of philosophy. This conception views questions often taken as fundamental in the philosophy of mathematics with suspicion and attempts to diagnose the confusions which lead to them. In the first essay, I explain Wittgenstein’s approach to perennial issues regarding the alleged reality to which (...) mathematical truths or propositions correspond. Wittgenstein diagnoses exotic pictures of mathematical reality as stemming from misleading analogies formed across empirical and mathematical propositions. The second essay explains Wittgenstein’s treatment of perplexity regarding the ability of a mathematical rule to determine its applications in advance. This too is found to depend on a misleading analogy, in this case across behavioral and mathematical senses of ‘determine’. The third and final essay discusses Wittgenstein’s general critical approach to “the infinite”. Philosophical perplexity about infinity is shown to depend on the verbal imagery regularly associated with proofs and their power to take hold of one’s imagination. Wittgenstein dampens the imaginative excesses often associated with “the infinite” by offering a sober redescription of Cantor’s famous method of diagonalization. (shrink)

مقدمة للموضوعات الأساسية في فلسفة العقل. فتراه يعالج طبيعة العقل ومشكلة العقل والجسم، والذكاء الاصطناعي، والإرادة الحرة، وطبيعة الوعي، والقصدية، والهوية الشخصية والذات. وهو في معالجة هذه الموضوعات يتتبع أصولها التاريخية ويناقش النظريات المعاصرة المفسرة لها. وأخص ما يمتاز به هو الوضوح والبساطة والشمول والدقة. وهو بهذه السمات لن يكون مفيدًا لدارسي الفلسفة فحسب، وإنما سيكون ممتعًا لكثير من المثقفين أيضًا. وأرى من الخير أن يظهر القارئ العربي على عملٍ نافعٍ ورائعٍ مثل هذا. Discover fascinating and illuminating contributions to historical (...) and contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind In This Is Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction, accomplished philosopher Pete Mandik delivers an accessible primer on the core issues animating contemporary and historical discussions in the philosophy of mind. The book is part of the This is Philosophy series that introduces undergraduate students to key concepts and methods in the study of philosophy. This edition walks readers through perennial issues like the mind-body problem, artificial intelligence, free will, and the nature of consciousness. This is Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction also provides complimentary access to valuable supplemental online resources. (shrink)

Although Whitehead’s particular style of philosophizing--looking at traditional philosophical problems in light of recent scientific advances--was part of a trend that began with the scientific revolutions in the early 20th century and continues today, he was marginalized in 20th century philosophy because of his outspoken defense of what he was doing as “metaphysics.” Metaphysics, for Whitehead, is a cross-disciplinary hermeneutic responsible for coherently integrating the perspectives of the special sciences with one another and with everyday experience. The program of (...) such a meta-discipline is challenging to philosophical orthodoxy because it enlarges, rather than narrows, the range of empirical evidence that philosophy must acknowledge. This places Whitehead’s philosophy in a perennial tradition that seeks to resolve fundamental antinomies through synthesis and reconciliation rather than reduction or elimination. (shrink)

It is a truism that Aristotle distinguishes theoretical, practical, and productive sciences; but Aristotle’s Metaphysics begins with a discussion of the nature of the free person and his Nicomachean Ethics concludes with one of his clearest statement of the nature of theoria, so perhaps the boundaries between those sci-ences in existing works are more porous. Curtis Johnson, author of Aristotle’s Theory of the State (New York: Macmillan, 1990), in his current volume seeks to clarify the boundary between theoretical science (the (...) ‘Philosophy’ of his title) and practical science (the ‘Politics’) in Aristotle’s Politics in order to identify the theoretical philosophy that he believes undergirds the work and to engage some of the perennial practical problems in the text (such as the identity of what Aris-totle calls ‘the best constitution’). (shrink)

The contention raised in this research is to showcase that indigenous African languages are imperative tools in advancing African philosophy and thought. By extension the genuiness and originality of African philosophical thought is best advanced when it is vocalized and transliterated in the mother tongue of the philosopher. When African philosophical thought is done and articulated in language foreign to the philosopher, then that philosophical thought is weakened within the conceptual expression and foundation. It is also contended that, indigenous (...) languages would address perennial problem of inadequacies of languages especially where there are no direct replacement of concept and terms to explain reality and other state of affairs. (shrink)

Prof. Devinder Singh Chahal, an international microbiologist, having worked at various prestigious universities in India and the USA, migrated to Canada in 1975. In Canada, firstly, he worked at the University of Waterloo, Ontario and later on at Institut Armand‐Frappier, Université du Québec, Laval, Québec. He retired as a Professor of Industrial Microbiology in 1996. In his long career as a microbiologist, he is credited with the discovery of two new species of fungi, three scientific books, numerous research articles and (...) five patents. He has published 6 books and several articles on the scientific and logical interpretation of Gurbani. He played an instrumental role in establishing the Institute of Understanding Sikhism, Laval, Quebec. Presently, he is working as honorary Editor‐in‐Chief of "Understanding Sikhism: The Research Journal." Besides, he is a member of the Advisory Committee of SGGS Study Centre, G.N.D. University, Amritsar since 2011. He has been honoured for his services to Sikhism by several Sikh organizations e.g., SGPC, Amritsar; DSGMC, New Delhi and SGGS World University, Fatehgarh, Punjab. A renowned microbiologist and a noted Sikh theologian, Prof. Chahal, is a founder member of the School of Scientific and Logical Interpretation of Gurbani. He is committed to bringing out the truth of Gurbani, logically, rationally and scientifically. With his scientific training and devotion to Gurbani, he is eminently qualified to do so. Prof Chahal adheres that Nanakian Philosophy is perennial and universal in its approach to understand Cosmology, Nature, life and human behaviour in the present era. In his works, he portrays intellectually courageous and authentic attempts to interpret Guru Nanak's verses logically and scientifically, to create an accurate understanding of the Guru's messages. His scientific background and professional life as a scientist have undoubtedly influenced his choice of paradigm and perspective. Prof Chahal asserts that Guru Nanak, his philosophy, his bani, his Sikhi, and the Guru Granth Sahib delineate the basics befitting the 21st century. His views on various aspects of Nanakian Philosophy are presented here for the benefit of readers:. (shrink)

A CONSTRUCTIVE CRITIQUE OF THE FOUNDATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY: Abstract of the Ph.D. Dissertation By Ramesh N. Patel June, 1970 -/- Philosophy pursues a rational explication of our understanding, experiences, and values in terms of objective truth and reality. Conspicuously, its view of rationality has been rigid and preconceived. Application of the preconceived reason in the explication of the essential features of our world fails and issues in a network of dialectical tangles. These artificially created tangles pose a unique (...) intellectual challenge, but the perennial failure to resolve them limits the intellectual response of philosophers to remaining caught in the tangles, or to taking intuitively favorable sides, or to simply denouncing the tangles as meaningless. Each is understandable. -/- Superficially, traditional philosophical reason looks like a correct tool for the explication of our world of common sense, but its applications to the world result in logical tangles showing its inadequacy. The philosopher’s faith in such reason ends up in one of two positions: abandoning our world in the interests of such reason, or embodying itself in the world through a special form of reason. Plato took the first and Aristotle took the second position. My analysis shows that Plato failed to explicate the relation between his world of Forms and our world of particulars, and, more importantly, between the Forms and the intuitive reason which grasps them. Aristotle, in my analysis, cannot conceal that the law of noncontradiction is a mere exhortation and has no descriptive necessity with respect to thought, things, or meaning. We also find such dialectical difficulties in Augustine, Hume and Strawson. -/- “Microphilosophical feasibilism” is our proposal for the best treatment, if not the definitive solution, of these problems. Instead of separating philosophical method into logic, epistemology, axiology, and metaphysics on the one side, and partitioning the projected results of philosophizing into validity, truth, valuation, and reality on the other, we need to start philosophizing with a general distinction between “method employed” and “intended result.” This distinction is not pre-colored by claims to ultimate verities. It is a direct aid to understanding. I consider the basic inevitable paradox that a philosopher should explain not only our understanding of experience but also his philosophizing itself. The circularity between “method employed” and “intended result” needs to be admitted as an initial fact about reason rather than circumvented by an implausibly claimed capacity of philosophical reason to formally transcend everything including this circularity. -/- Presuppositions are reduced to a minimum inevitable number. Being our primary microphilosophical criteria, they are reason, experience, and value in their minimal sense. They cannot be plausibly substituted or further reduced. They cannot be preferred one or more to others arbitrarily. We show how, in microphilosophy they coincide or synchronize. Jointly and basically, they form the minimum method employed. The initial, basic, intended result is called minimum feasibility. The fundamental circularity between method and result leaves no way out but to ground self-reference in such a manner that method and result “logico-genetically” coincide. Two extreme situations are avoided: “the logical zero-situation” where nothing is true or real, and “the credulous open situation” where everything is true or real. Finding a mean manifests a basic value. If the meaning of truth and reality is to be preserved, the basic value must have a clear impact and express descriptive rather than revisionary reason. -/- Several other stringent demands are raised as conditions which microphilosophy should fulfil to achieve feasibility. The final, joint, outcome of both “method” and “result,” in the thesis of microphilosophical feasibilism, is formulated thus: Self refers freely and symbolically to itself, own person, own body, material bodies, other persons’ bodies, other persons, and other selves. -/- Ramesh N. Patel Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy conferred in June, 1970 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, N.M. (shrink)

This article proposes that oral performance could be a philosophical activity in early China. The focus is on the Huainanzi, a densely rhymed philosophical treatise compiled by Liu An in the second century b.c.e. I show that the tome contains various sound-correlated poetic forms that are intended not only to enable textual performance but also, by means of aural mimesis, to encourage the intuitive understanding of its philosophical messages. Thus scholars of ancient poetry, philosophy, or intellectual history, despite being (...) habituated to reading silently and observing disciplinary boundaries, should be attentive to these sonic patterns in order to do justice to the poetic-cum-philosophical richness and originality of this text. More importantly, I argue that these poetic forms enable readers and audiences to experience, embody, and, above all, enact the Way through textual performance. Thanks to the sound patterns of the Huainanzi, the somatic processes of aural reading and philosophical praxis can occur simultaneously. Vocalization becomes an actionable and repeatable spiritual exercise, which facilitates the intuitive understanding and internalization of philosophical values. In other words, the perennial knowing–doing gap is heroically closed by the Huainanzi. / 淮南子的文本聲景：早期中國的詩歌、表演、哲學與實踐 / 王棕琦 / 本文論證早期中國的文本表演可以是一種具創造性的哲學活動，而非只是以聲音演繹書寫文本的朗讀活動。文中首先指出《淮南子》裏跟聲音有關的詩歌形式不但有助朗誦表演，更能讓讀者直觀感悟書中哲學思想而不落言筌。而 且，這些詩歌形式更讓讀者通過朗讀而實踐、內化書中所述之大道。可以說，《淮南子》對中國哲學的一大貢獻在於它將「知道」、「傳道」和「行道」三者合而為一。. (shrink)

Epictetus, a former slave who lived in Rome during Nero’s reign but was exiled (along with all those who practiced philosophy in Rome) to Greece by Domitian’s decree in 93 CE, espoused an austere ethical philosophy which aimed at happiness (eudaimonia), or tranquility (ataraxia), through the delimitation of valuation to things within one’s control. Although Epictetus never set to writing his beliefs, his disciple Arrian recorded eight books of his sayings (entitled Discourses [ διατριβαί ] of which only (...) four books survive) and edited a compendium entitled the Handbook ( Ἐγχειρίδιον). In his preface to the volume under review, editor Theodore Scaltsas writes that “there is no message that would be of greater value in the face of today’s threats to society than Epictetus’ ‘bear and forbear.'” (1) Although Epictetus’ “forbearance” is not exactly the philosophy of hope much in vogue in contemporary politics, there is no doubt that Epictetus offers a perennial source of strength and self-reliance. (shrink)

Law is ‘sovereign’, it has been said. Since the poet Pindar expressed this fulminating thought in the 6th century B.C., the whole western tradition, from Aristotle to Cicero, from Heidegger to Schmitt, hasn’t stopped raising questions about the ambivalent relationship connecting law, strength and violence...

Art plays a significant role in Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy, a major part of which may be interpreted as a proposal for the revision of religious belief. In this paper, I identify within Murdoch’s philosophical writings five distinct but related ways in which great art can assist moral/religious belief and practice: art can reveal to us “the world as we were never able so clearly to see it before”; this revelatory capacity provides us with evidence for the existence of (...) the Good, a metaphor for a transcendent reality of which God was also a symbol; art is a “hall of reflection” in which “everything under the sun can be examined and considered”; art provides us with an analogue for the way in which we should try to perceive our world; and art enables us to transcend our selfish concerns. I consider three possible objections: that Murdoch’s theory is not applicable to all forms of art; that the meaning of works of art is often ambiguous; and that there is disagreement about what constitutes a great work of art. I argue that none of these objections are decisive, and that all forms of art have at least the potential to furnish us with important tools for developing the insight required to live a moral/religious life. (shrink)

In this article the heritage of Hryhorij Skovoroda is considered from the metaphilosophical point of view. This point of view is useful because it allows seeing some syncretism as unity of philosophy, theology, religion, myth, and poetry in the heritage of Hryhorij Skovoroda. Therefore, the author stresses that when we analyze the Hryhorij Skovoroda’s heritage it is wrong to divide it into such parts as philosophy, theology, religion, myth, and poetry. This division doesn’t lead to the whole understanding (...) of Hryhorij Skovoroda’s personality and works. The author argues that Hryhorij Skovoroda is the follower of Philosophia Perennis’ tradition, which is characterized by syncretism. Such syncretism of the Skovoroda’s heritage is neither bad nor good. We see the unique unity of philosophy, poetry, religion and mythology in the Skovoroda’s life and in his works. The author argues that such unity is useful for the deeper understanding of the world and a human being. Syncretic unity of Skovoroda’s worldview helps to overcome the different oppositions of classical philosophy (subject-object, inner-external, immortal-mortal, natural-supernatural, human-divine, relative-absolute etc.). We live in the times of analysis and fragmented world. Therefore syncretism is very hard to understand. In order to understand syncretism we should return to synthetic thinking, we should rediscover the synthetic function of our consciousness. The life and the works of Skovoroda show us how a human being can think synthetically and regain the whole worldview. The whole worldview helps live in the harmony with others and nature. This harmony is very needed in our times of “moral blindness” (Zygmunt Bauman), decay of traditions, which were oriented us towards common values. Keywords:, metaphilosophical approach, unity of opposites, mythopoesis, syncretism, synthesis of philosophy and religion, vocation. (shrink)

Forgotten Truth is primarily a presentation of the traditional esoteric view that reality consists of a hierarchy of Being. Within the hierarchy there are an indefinite number of worlds, but they can be classified into four levels: the terrestrial, psychic, and celestial planes, and the Infinite. The corresponding levels within the human microcosm are body, mind, soul, and spirit. “From the multiple heavens of Judaism to the storied structure of the Hindu temple and the angelologies of innumerable traditions, the view (...) was reached convergently and independently, as if by innate tropism, by virtually all known societies…” (18). The important exception is our current society, whose fundamental flaw is its inclination to reduce all reality to the terrestrial plane alone. Modernity is “captive of an outlook presumed to be scientific but in fact scientistic” (17); it goes beyond the actual findings of science to deny that other approaches to knowledge are valid and other truths true” (16). (shrink)

This paper introduces the Analects of Kongzi (better known to English-speakers as 'Confucius') to non-specialist readers, and discusses two major lines of interpretation. According to one group of interpretations, the key to understanding the Analects is passage 4.15, in which a disciple says that 'loyalty' and 'reciprocity' together make up the 'one thread' of the Master's teachings. More recently, some interpreters have emphasised passage 13.3, which discusses 'correcting names': bringing words and things into proper alignment. This paper argues that both (...) approaches are mistaken, based on interpolated and unrepresentative passages. The paper closes with a brief suggestion that the Analects reveals a thinker who emphasises cultivating virtues that allow for the appreciation of complex individual contexts, rather than one who seeks systematic generalisations. An afterword to the paper suggests that we should avoid both 'methodological dualism' (which posits a radical incommensurability between Western and Eastern philosophies) and 'the perennial philosophy' (which ignores differences in favour of similarities). (shrink)

The philosophies of education serve as the guide of the teachers in handling the teaching-learning process. However, a belief will remain as a belief unless it is practiced. This study aimed to find the relationship between the philosophical beliefs and practices of the 30 teachers of the schools in San Roque, Mabini, Bohol - San Roque Elementary School and San Roque National High School, S.Y. 2019-2020. The study utilized a quantitative method descriptive survey research design. The research instrument used was (...) a self-constructed questionnaire in which the reliability was tested by a Cronbach’s Alpha using Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS) software. Simple percentage and weighted mean were some of the statistical treatments used. Kendall’s tau_b, a non-parametric test, was used to determine the correlation between philosophical beliefs and their equivalent pedagogical practices. All of the statistical treatments were also run using the SPSS software. Further, the researcher assured the proper observation of the research ethics protocol. Based on the results, the philosophies of Progressivism (3.63) and Perennialism (3.31) were the most and least prevailing philosophical beliefs, respectively. On the other hand, the most and least prevailing philosophies practiced are Progressivism (3.69) and Essentialism (3.19), respectively. Moreover, research findings revealed that there was a significant relationship between the philosophical beliefs of teachers and their pedagogical practices. In conclusion, this study claims that teachers’ pedagogical practices are dependent to their philosophical beliefs; and as the teachers believed on a particular philosophy of education, they practice it accordingly to the extent of their adherence to the belief. (shrink)

Following the traces of Margaret Mead’s statement that emphasized that the first photographic images of the Earth from space presented notions of fragility, the article contextualizes the recent critique of the dominant representation of the Earth as a globe that emerged in conjunction with the discourse on the Anthropocene. It analyses the globe as an image and the sentiments that accompanied it since the first photographs of our planet from space were published in 1968. The article outlines how the cultural (...) meaning of the whole Earth representation changed in parallel with the appropriation of the image by the large technological enterprises that emerged from America’s counterculture. It returns to the possibility of a coexistence of ‘views from within’ and ‘views from without’ following a detour with Gregory Bateson via Bali and proposes a Cybernetics of Grace as a practice of resistance against pure exteriority. The article concludes by linking the Cybernetics of Grace with the second-order conversations of Gordon Pask. (shrink)

More, Henry (1614-1687), an English philosopher, theologian and poet. The most important member of the Cambridge Platonists, a group of seventeenth century thinkers associated with the University of Cambridge. Accepting of the developments of Galilean science, Cartesianism and atomism, they sought an alternative to the faltering philosophical foundation of Aristotelianism by looking to the Platonic tradition, viewed through the framework of Renaissance perennial philosophy. More’s Christian apologetics argued for the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and (...) the veracity of Christian ethics in light of the atheistic, mechanistic, and fatalistic conclusions drawn from the thought of Spinoza and Hobbes. (shrink)

The perennial nature of some of philosophy’s deepest problems is a puzzle. Here, one problem, the realism–anti-realism debate, and one type of explanation for its longevity, are examined. It is argued that realism and anti-realism form a dialetheic pair: While they are in fact each other’s logical opposite, nevertheless, both are true (and both false). First, several reasons why one might think such a thing are presented. These reasons are merely the beginning, however. In the following sections, the (...) dialetheic conclusion is directly argued for by showing how realism and anti-realism satisfy Priest’s “inclosure schema”. In the last section and the conclusion, the conscious mind’s role in creating realism and anti-realism is discussed. This role further supports the conclusion that realism and anti-realism form a dialetheic pair. (shrink)

In Jylkkä’s (2022) Mary on Acid: Experiences of unity and the epistemic gap the author contends that psychedelic experience, by inducing unitary—nondual—experiences of subject-object dissolution, brings to light the epistemic gap between unitary knowledge, constituted by experience, and relational knowledge, distinct from the experience. Jylkkä draws a connection between the nondual experience as occasioned through psychedelic usage, and Buddhist contemplative practices. Whilst Jylkkä's ambition to establish an epistemic dialogue between analytic philosophy, Buddhism and the science of psychedelics is laudable, (...) more rigorous attention is required to characterizing the forms of unitary, nondual, experience occasioned by psychedelic use. Whilst such parallelism may speak to a deeper unification, such a claim requires substantiation to avoid indulging a naïve perennialism which elides the varied and rich engagement with nonduality across contemplative traditions. This article highlights the: internal tensions that exist surrounding the nature of the nondual elucidated across Indo-Tibetan traditions; dangers of decontextualizing states induced through culturally embedded contemplative practices; under recognized epistemic function of ceremonial ethnomedicine usage in generating Indigenous metaphysics; under acknowledged potential of psychedelic substances for attenuating introspective bias in first-person phenomenological inquiry. (shrink)

This extensive review explores the nature of human individuality through a broad spectrum of themes which all relate in an unwavering manner back to the fundamental question of “Who Am I?” The paradox of being fully human is that it depends on transcending the human condition itself. Integral individuality exists at the intersection between the horizontal and the vertical or the human and the Divine. Modern psychology, especially humanistic and transpersonal psychology has, much to its credit, done a great deal (...) to facilitate the rightful place of the human within the spiritual dimension; yet, to date, it has been unable to situate what human individuality is. In fact, modern psychology has grossly overlooked that each of the spiritual traditions of the world has its own corresponding and complete psychology or rather pneumatology (“science of the Spirit”). It is by turning to the integral psychology of the perennial philosophy that human identity can be recovered. (shrink)

Recent research has begun treating the perennial philosophical question, “what makes a person the same over time?” as an empirical question. A long tradition in philosophy holds that psychological continuity and connectedness of memories are at the heart of personal identity. More recent experimental work, following Strohminger & Nichols (2014), has suggested that persistence of moral character, more than memories, is perceived as essential for personal identity. While there is a growing body of evidence supporting these findings, a (...) critique by Starmans & Bloom (2018) suggests that this research program conflates personal identity with mere similarity. To address this criticism, we explore how loss of someone’s morality or memories influence perceptions of identity change, and perceptions of moral duties towards the target of the change. We present participants with a classic ‘body switch’ thought experiment and after assessing perceptions of identity persistence, we present a moral dilemma, asking participants to imagine that one of the patients must die (Study 1) or be left alone in a care home for the rest of their life (Study 2). Our results highlight the importance of the continuity of moral character, suggesting lay intuitions are tracking (something like) personal identity, not just mere similarity. (shrink)