Thomas Yaeger's Blog, page 5

The most popular articles and chapters by Thomas Yaeger since 2015

Questions and Answers22 Sep 2015, 3 comments15183Physics and the Origins of the Universe (I)4 Feb 20168551Sameness and Difference in Plato14 Jun 2016, 2 comments4887Cultural Parallels, and False Narratives21 Sep 2015, 2 comments3497The Idea of Being in Israel26 Apr 2015, 2 comments2613Distinguishing Belief and Faith2 May 20151998The Divine and the Limit18 May 20151539How to Purchase 'The Sacred History of Being'24 Jul 20161358Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree25 Nov 20151257Remarks...

Do Western Academic Philosophy Departments Teach the History of Philosophy?

Greeks fighting in the service of the Assyrian Empire at the Siege of Lachish, 701 BCE

At first sight the title of this article may seem to be provocative, and even slightly daft. However if you study the history of philosophy, including those writers who wrote just before the close of the ancient world, if you are paying attention, you find that the detail of philosophy's course through history,  is not as it represented in post European Enlightenment writing. The way that...

Transcendental Reality in the Ancient World (Writing to Marie aux Bois)

Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2020 16:24:58 
To: Marie aux Bois
From Thomas Yaeger

Marie,

Re: the paper on the mathematics of the megalithic yard - there's been a lot of movement since I wrote it in the middle of February, and I will write several other articles on the back of it. One of the objections to the argument will be that arriving at Euler's number would have been impossibly complicated for them to do (quite apart from the general case I'm making as to the sense it made for them to want do...

Meaning and Function in the British Neolithic (Writing to Paul Devereux)

Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2020 20:23
To: PAUL DEVEREUX 
From: Thomas Yaeger 
Subject: The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard


Dear Paul,

Hi. You might be interested in the following blogpost, which looks at why the supposed 'megalithic yard' has the dimensions it has. It takes an entirely different approach to both Thom's surveys and Ruggles later efforts (not statistical analysis, which doesn't do much except expose the general parameters of something which might exist), and which...

Answers to Questions (Writing to Euan MacKie)

(Photo by Simon Ledingham, May 2005)

Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2020 20:35To: Euan.MacKie
From: Thomas Yaeger
Subject: The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard


Euan,

Hi. You might be interested in looking at this article, 'The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard'  http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-mathematical-origins-of-megalithic.html  

Which I think may be the definitive answer to a number of questions about the construction and purpose of megalithic circles....

Before the Ontological Argument (Writing to Alvin Plantinga)

Date: Thu, 05 Mar 2020 23:44:33 +0000
To: Alvin Plantinga 
From: Thomas Yaeger 
Subject: Before the Ontological Argument



Dear Professor Plantinga,

Things have moved along a great deal since I last wrote to you. You might like to read the following article, which argues that the idea of the One, and its transcendent nature, was known in the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age in Britain. Which, if this argument is correct, means we are talking about more than five thousand years ago, and...

Discounted books by Thomas Yaeger, available 1-7 March 2020!

Smashwords 11th AnnualRead an Ebook Week Sale!March 1, 2020 - March 7, 2020

Two of my books are available for only two US Dollars each, for one week. The sale prices become live at 12:01 am Pacific on Sunday, March 1 and expire 11:59pm on Saturday, March 7, 2020.




(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...

The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard

Did Alexander Thom discover interesting stuff about the British Neolithic, or was he deluded in what he thought he saw? The modern consensus among the archaeological community is that he discovered nothing of importance which was actually present in the evidence. This was supposedly shown by a large scale resurvey of the stone circles conducted by Clive Ruggles in the eighties. This resurvey was conducted with a great sensitiveness to the possibility of selection bias. This sensitivity was...

Heidegger and Barbarism (Writing to @SemprePhi)

This passage is from Heidegger’s lecture series on Parmenides, section 4. I was taught that the use of the term barbaroi by the Greeks originally designated those who were not speakers of Greek, and that the term did not necessarily have negative connotations. It referred to how other languages sounded to Greek ears. I don’t mean to suggest that the Greeks did not have an exceptionalist sense of themselves (they clearly did), but barbaroi was not initially conceived of as some kind of...

Heidegger and Being: (Writing to @SemprePhi)

Hi. I read some of Heidegger’s Being and Time when I was around twenty, not realising that it was only the first third of a much larger projected volume. His essentially existential approach to gaining a theoretical grasp of ‘Being’ left me cold. This is because even then I didn’t think there was an existential approach possible, since, by definition ‘Being’ by itself is beyond actual existence.

Or at least by my definition, which was fuelled (at the time) by the sort of thing Plato said...