Thomas Yaeger's Blog, page 15

The Sacred History of Being

(New Cover, issued March 12 2017. The image links to the book page at Smashwords)
Nick Zacharewicz @NickSCZach

"All about how history is built by inclusion and omission. Even written histories have to hang together like a good story."

The Subject 
The Sacred History of Being has as its radical thesis that knowledge rather than belief was at the heart of ancient religion, both in Greece and the ancient Near East. And that the source of all knowledge was understood to be Being itself.&nbs...

J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being

 
When he was only twenty-four years old, James Frazer won a Cambridge fellowship with an essay on the development of Plato's theory of the Forms or Ideas (eidos). In this essay he argued that there was no overarching theory of Being in Plato's mind before he embarked on the writing of his dialogues, and that consequently differences in approach and discussion apparent in his work are the result of the development of his thought. He also argued that the very idea of Being is a barren noti...

Obscured by Clouds: a critical review of Adrian Moore’s ‘A History of the Infinite’

The Oxford philosopher Adrian Moore wrote a book on the philosophical and mathematical aspects of the infinite in 1990, which was a volume in the series ‘Problems of Philosophy’. In 2016 Moore developed a series of ten radio programmes for the BBC, broadcast in the autumn, with the title ‘A History of the Infinite’, which gave its arguments much more exposure than they ever had before.
I have spent many years studying Greek philosophy, and as a result I found both Moore’s arguments and his nar...

Eleven articles on Plato and Socrates

I've gathered these 11 items together, since they are scattered through the blog. The chapter extract concerning 'The Platonic Theory of Being' is from The Sacred History of Being, published in 2015. The text  of 'Logical Modality in Classical Athens', along with some others, forms a chapter in Understanding Ancient Thought published by the Anshar Press in August 2017.  There are three extracts here also from J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being , published in 2016.&nbsp...

Letter to a Student

[A response to an email from a student in New York which commented on matters discussed in an article I wrote for the Ritman Library Newsletter in December 2015, shortly after my first book was published. He has been studying the Italian renaissance, and is interested in the history of esoteric ideas, ancient and modern, and the connections between them. He is also interested in why college courses are set up in the way they are, so that they don't always address the kind of questions which a...

Frazer and the Association of Ideas

[There are two articles about J. G. Frazer's work already on this site. This article combines the argument of both of these, and illustrates an approach to ancient and primitive thought which must inevitably miss the target.  Thomas Yaeger, October 3, 2017].

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In the 1980s, I read the two-volume version of The Golden Bough, miraculously reduced from thirteen volumes by the expedient of removing all the footnotes, and was struck by the absence of any discussion of a relationship between m...

I Go To Die (The Death of Socrates)

Written in response to Socrates speech to his accusers, on being found guilty of the charges of moral corruption and impiety to the gods. Performed by Derek Jacobi. [Almeida Theatre, ‘Figures of Speech’ series, published September 25, 2017].

The text of the speech (the edit used) is available here. Bettany Hughes' populist take on Socrates, 'A Man For Our Time', is here. 

Thanks to Stephanie Papadopoulos.





This is one of the most famous speeches in the world. But is also one of th...

Writing to Alvin Plantinga

I wrote to Alvin Plantinga on Sunday, 2nd of July 2017, concerning the ontological argument, which he has done so much to promote.

I imagine ... that you would be interested to see alternative arguments for the reality of the divine, were these to exist.

And they do exist. I spent many years assembling the arguments for the understanding of the divine in the ancient world. These are quite different arguments from those offered from St. Anselm onwards.

You are under no obligation at all to read...

Babylon the Great (fourteen articles)

I've written much about Babylon and Mesopotamia over the years, and some of the essays appear on my blog, either as extracts or as full text. I thought it would be useful to pull most of these together for convenience in a single post. Collected here are fourteen articles, which amounts to a small book of material, even if some of the articles are just extracts. All of the full text can be found either in The Sacred History of Being, or Understanding Ancient Thought.

I've been using Babyl...

Library Access!

My current ebooks Understanding Ancient Thought, The Sacred History of Being, and J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being, have been uploaded to the British Library via their portal for electronic legal deposit.

This means that, in the near future, these books will appear in the various electronic catalogues of legal deposit libraries in the British Isles  - The British Library, The National Library of Wales, The National Library of Scotland, Trinity College Dublin,  Cambridge U...