Thomas Yaeger's Blog, page 21

The Edithorial: Aristotle's email to Erdoğan

The Edithorial: Aristotle's email to Erdoğan: Dear Recep cc   MustafaKemal@ atürk   Assos with view over to Lesbos I recently came back from the Great Lyceum in the Sky for a...

The Irrationality of Atheism

The word atheism is constructed from the Greek word for God, ‘theos.’ God was spoken of by Plato as ‘ho theos,’ meaning ‘the god’. With the addition of the Greek privative particle, we have ‘atheos’, meaning ‘no god,’ or ‘godless.’

So, one might imagine that the derived term ‘atheism’ is a legitimate pair with ‘theism,’ the one indicated the idea of no god, and the other the idea of God. You can be inclined to one or the other according to your disposition, your culture, or your education. Bo...

How to Purchase 'The Sacred History of Being'

I've been asked many times about the options for purchasing the book, so I've decided to digest my responses into one blogpost. The text contains active links to the relevant pages. This is all you need to know, in just a few paragraphs. 
Currently the book is available for sale in eBook format from a number of large retailers, including Itunes, Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo (preview available), Inktera, and other retailers around the world. So, if you are already signed up to an ac...

Popular posts on Mind, Knowledge and Perception

What has been most accessed over the fourteen months since this blog began?

1. 'Physics and the Origins of the Universe' has been accessed 5113 times since it was published on the 4th of February this year. It concerns the limitations of modern physics, which cannot provide a theoretical explanation of how the visible universe came to be. It cannot do this because the discipline of physics recognises only one cause: Aristotle's efficient cause. Aristotle had however four principal modes of cau...

Creation, Religion, and the Nature of Reality

The post on 'Sameness and Difference in Plato' has clocked up nearly 1400 page views in its first month. It is one in a series of blog posts which look at how creation was discussed and understood in antiquity.

Some of the others in the series are also in this list, including 'Physics and the Origins of the Universe', which discusses the limitations of modern western notions of 'cause' (the first of three articles with that title);

 'Cultural Parallels, and False Narratives', which co...

Papers and Books by Thomas Yaeger listed at Academia.edu

Brief summaries of documents and books published and in progress. Three of the papers at Academia.edu are available for download in PDF format.


PAPERS

The Babylon Mis Pi Ritual

One of three chapters in 'The Sacred History of Being' which discuss Mesopotamian
ritual for the installation of Divine images. The Babylon ritual dates from the 6th century B.C.E.
The chapter is based on the critical edition of the texts from Nineveh and Babylon,
'The Induction of the Cult Image in ancient Mesopotamia', pu...

Sameness and Difference in Plato

Part of The Sacred History of Being is devoted to a substantial discussion of the Ontological Argument. This may seem to be a rather odd inclusion in a book which is essentially about the idea of the plenum, and the presence of that idea in ancient history, at least as far back as the 14th century before the common era. The reason the discussion is there is because philosophical writing about the divine in the west departed from the consideration of reality as something intricately bound up w...

Beyond the Efficient Cause (keeping the Enlightenment agenda alive)

The following text was written in 2005 as a short promotional introduction to the draft of The Sacred History of Being, which was written in 2003-4. That draft remained incomplete. The text which became the published version in 2015 is significantly different in detail, though the essential argument is the same. I have reworded a couple of sentences in this document, but the import of the text is essentially unchanged. 
***
"Not many writers would consider writing a book such as The Sacred...

Beyond the Efficient Cause

The following text was written in 2005 as a short promotional introduction to the draft of The Sacred History of Being, which was written in 2003-4. That draft remained incomplete. The text which became the published version in 2015 is significantly different in detail, though the essential argument is the same. I have reworded a couple of sentences in this document, but the import of the text is essentially unchanged. 
***
"Not many writers would consider writing a book such as The Sacred...

Preface to 'The Sacred History of Being'

Arthur Lovejoy explored the long history of the idea of Being (particularly the associated idea of plenitude) in the cultural history of the West, from Plato to modern times, in The Great Chain of Being. In the process he created the discipline of the History of Ideas, which stands to some degree in opposition to the History of Philosophy. The latter is in thrall to the intellectual frame which was established by the Greeks and the scholars and compilers of the Hellenistic world, which has be...