Hyper-Weirdness
by World Wide Web
(mirrored from http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/formerly-hyper-weird/philosophy.html)
Philosophy
Table of Contents
See Also: Artificial
Intelligence and Cognitive Science, Divers
Strange Sects, Electronic
Books, The Fringes
of Reason, Language
and Literature, Minds and
Brains, Politics
and Activism, Religion and
Spirituality, Weird
Politics and Conspiracy
An alphabetically organized list, with
pictures (!), capsule biographies, and links to such Internet resources as are
available. Very nice, and rather more diplomatic than this.
i.e., a site which
accumulates bibliographies for philosophers who were (or are) women; anyone can
submit data. Links to on-line resources, where available; sometimes (e.g.
Aspasia) it just gives the dates of birth and death. [My suspicion is that
female philosophers have no more in common than, say, philosophers whose names
include the letter S; but there's no way to test that suspicion until this (or
something like it) is reasonably complete. CRS]
Usenet
Ancient and Medieval Philosophers
Which is to say, everyone up to
about 1600.
is often an excellent
resource on the philosophers of classical antiquity, as is the
which reviews books about classical antiquity and the study
thereof.
Confucius did not write fortune cookies. Few competent
scholars today think he wrote anything at all, at least nothing which has come
down to us. What we do have are the Analects, a collection of his
sayings and ancedotes about the Master, some tips on etiquette, and later
passages interpolated to give the support of Confucius to some fad, like the
I Ching; and some later works from the Confucian school, like the
Ta Hsueh, or ``Great Learning'', a little ``Discourse on Method''
(Hu Shih's phrase). Nonetheless, Confucius is probably the single most
influential political thinker ever.
Parts of the Analects are considered a Great Book by the
University of Chicago; where this leaves the rest, I am not competent to say.
[CRS]
This seems to be all the dialogues; certainly it's
all the major ones. Read the Timaeus, and tell
me that Plato does not belong in any catalog of weird things. He is, of course,
a University of Chicago-certified Great Author. [CRS]
Was the student of Plato; therefore he never
fails to split hairs and magnify trivial differences between them. Unlike Plato,
his surviving writings are massively, monumentally, unspeakably dull;
they are widely speculated to be his lecture notes. Still, he's been enormously
influential in the last 2,300 years... University of Chicago-certified Great
Books, down to the assertion that women have fewer teeth than men. [CRS]
Whether
the Taoists are listed under philosophy or religion
is a matter of ``four in the morning and three in the evening''; so Lao
Tzu and Chuang
Tzu share a section.
Stoicism was a strictly materialist and
determinist philosophy, and so naturally enough pantheistic and exceedingly
moral --- deathly cold fishes, to be frank. How a fatalistic philosophy of
indifference and self-control came to become the creed of the rulers of the
Roman Empire is not clear to me, but happen it did, as one may see in the works
of Marcus
Aurelius. (Seneca, being a hypocrite, is no puzzle.) The appeal to slaves,
like Epictetus,
is more obvious.
Prof. William
Connolly has written a brief introduction
to the school, discussing their logic, cosmology, and especially their
ethics. (Curiously, he does not mention the infamous belief that a virtuous man
would be happy, even while being tortured.) [CRS]
gets
his own section.
Last of the great Antonine
Emperors of Rome, who had the rather thankless task of holding the empire
together in the face of war, pestilence, incompetence and general mess, long
enough to hand it over to his worthless son, who ruined it. In the meanwhile he
wrote his Meditations for
philosophical comfort --- and damn cold comfort it is. A University of
Chicago-certified Great Book. [CRS]
Would the person with the translation of Aurelius to put on-line
please mail me again?
The disk with your address was accidentally annointed in hot coffee.
A Roman patrician and
(if memory serves) senator; the last of the classical philosophers, before the
dark ages closed, and the nearest resemblance to intellect in Europe would be
found in the Church.
In his time (+480--524) Italy was no longer part of the Empire, but ruled by
independent Ostrogoth Kings. The Goths were actually quite civilized, as
barbarians went, and sensibly employed the Italian ruling class to do their
ruling for them. Boethius rose to be consul under King Theodoric, before falling
out of favor and into prison; after languishing a while he was executed. The
Dark Ages claimed him as a Christian, acquired much of what little intellectual
culture they had from his books, seem to have canonized him as St. Severinus,
and attributed a number of theological books to him: all of which is disputed by
scholars.
In addition to the questionable ones on theology, his books included
translations of Aristotle,
a text on geometry, and the work for which he is most famous, The
Consolations of Philosophy, an imaginary conversation, in mixed
poetry and prose, with a personified Philosophy, written while he was in jail
awaiting execution. (That this book, written under such circumstances, has no
specifically Christian content at all is a good reason to think Boethius was not
deeply Christian.) This is, and deserves to be, a Great Book: but the
Webbing leaves much to be desired. [CRS]
I know businessmen and at least one Army officier who read
The Prince religiously. I would too, if I ever wanted to seize
absolute power in a Renassiance city-state. (I didn't say they were very
good businessmen.) Still, it's probably the second
best-written book on politics ever. [CRS]
One of the brighter
lights of the Renaissance, by all accounts, and something of an enfant
terrible when, 1486, at the age of twenty-three, he proposed to defend 900
theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy and magic against all comers,
and wrote the famous Oration on the Dignity of
Man in defense of this audacious project. (Thirteen of the theses
were found heretical, and he was forced to flee to France.) He wrote other works
of philosophy in a Platonist vein, and a refutation of astrology, which is
supposed to be cogent (I haven't read it). Alas, he fell into extreme piety at
the end of his life, under the influence of Savonarola, and died in 1494 as he
was preparing to set out on a penitential pilgrimage --- of malaria, if memory
serves. (He is also important as a proof of the superiority of education over
inheritance: despite being an aristocrat, he was intelligent, cultured,
enlightened, and a genuine scholar, if somewhat given to twisting quotations.)
The Oration is
certified a Great Book, though I can imagine what Adler would think of my
footnotes. [CRS]
Is everything since
circa 1600. Schools and systems since around 1900 are in the next
sections, either in the academic
mainstream or strange
eddies and stagnant pools.
A skeptical and delightful writer of the French Renaissance,
inventor of the modern essay. The philosophers no longer number him among their
tribe, and no wonder: he's too clear, too pleasant and above all, too sensible.
[CRS. Exception: Stephen Toulmin in Cosmopolis (no relation) does
take Montaigne seriously as a philosopher; but I'm not sure how seriously to
take Cosmopolis.]
Rolling log gathers no dross dep't.: The on-line translation of the
Essays have been HTMLified by my
friend Emily Gladstone.
The Praise of
Folly.
Perhaps the only lawyer to ever become
a saint. His Utopia
introduced the word, but not the idea. His own attitude towards it may be gauged
from the fact that the word means ``No-where''.
His Discourse
on Method.
a.k.a. Benedict. There is a mailing
list for ``slow reading'' of his works, spinoza@world.std.com (subscriptions, mod. Lance Fletcher), and Part I of the
Ethics has
been scanned in by Prof. Edward Beach. [Which means I can give up typing Part I
and skip ahead to Part II. CRS]
The Essays are graceful,
formerly classic and still deserve to be read. I cannot fathom why his
deathly-dull Utopia, The New
Atlantis, is on-line, but his rather more interesting writings on
what we now call the philosophy of science are not.
Was another one of those great
seventeenth century cranks who spent their days running around Europe, starting
the scientific revolution. He wrote an Apology for Galileo, ``though
for that and other heresies, religious, and political, he seven times underwent
torture.'' He also wrote a Utopia, the City of
the Sun.
There's also an HTML copy of The
Monadology.
While reading A
Treatise Concering The Principles of Human Knowledge, keep your stone
handy.
Candide is
currently the only work available on-line, from The Voltaire Foundation
(plaintext copy at the ERIS project). The Foundation is working on a
French edition of the Dictionnaire
philosophique.
It's appalling that I can't find any
of his general writings (e.g. Rameau's Nephew) on-line, though
whether the flaw is with my searching skills or the literary quality of the Web
is debatable. You can, however, search part of the
Encyclopédie (in French, of course).
The ERIS project has a rather
extensive collection of texts, including the Meiklejohn translation of both
Critiques of Reason. These are however plain text files, and huge
--- the Critique of Pure Reason is about one meg. Fortunately the
Chinese University of Hong Kong hosts
a copy of the Norman Kemp Smith translation Critique of Pure
Reason, which gives me a chance to be prissy about different
editions. With its right hand, that from CUHK gives us files broken down to a
reasonable length, and a search
engine by Tze-wan Kwan, so we can
find what we're looking for, freeing us from the tyranny and obtuseness of
indexers; with its left hand, it takes away (among other niceties of format)
obvious distinctions between footnotes and the body of the text. (They say this
will be fixed.)
Last in the way of texts, we have that curious paean to intellectual
emancipation and Ferderick the Great, ``What
is Enlightenment?''
There is also KANT-L. Subscriptions to
LISTSERV@CORAL.BUCKNELL.EDU.The Co-Managers of the List are
- Frank Wilson
- Department of Philosophy, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
17837; (717) 524-3461 and
- Ted Chappen
- P. O. Box 442, New Berlin, Pennsylvania 17855; (717) 966-1778
Has been summarized
for the edification of the net. Hegel being a walking intellectual plague, I
doubt even the summary was strictly necessary. [CRS]
Despite some effort in
looking, I have been unable to locate anything by Schopenhauer, or even about
him, on the net. There is however a handsome portrait,
and I am pleased to present the following physiognomic interpretation of the
painting, specially written for Hyper-Weirdness:
See that brow? That's a deterministic brow.
Those eyes?
Strained by expressing covert mystical agendas in a manner consistent with
empiricism.
That mouth? Clenched by prudery.
---mbird
[CRS]
See also his Subjection
of Women. Mill was not your father's straight dead white
European male.
In an earlier version
I wrote that everything besides the Communist Manifesto
was too long, boring and badly written to make it on-line. I underestimated the
faith and diligence of Uncle Karl's followers, which was silly, since half my
family is or was Marxist. I am happy to say the Opera Omnia (or
very nearly Omnia --- where is The German Ideology?)
can be had by gopher in English translation. This includes Karl's love
poems to Jenny. [CRS]
There's a Web paga from
USC, with links to the mailing list, the North American Nietzsche Society, etc.
Only the Zarathustra to date, and in the notorious first
translation at that, and an assortment of ``Mixed Opinions and
Maxims''. [CRS]
Peirce was a respected experimental physicists and one of the
pioneers of mathematical logic and semiotics (the so-called ``science of
signs''), a man of tremendous originality and subtlety, who seems to have taken
no pains whatsoever to make his thought comprehensible to lesser mortals. Thus,
while William
James called him the founder of pragmatism, and considered ``How to Make Our Ideas
Clear'' the first pragmatist work (itself debtable; see Marx's ``Theses on
Feuerbach''), Peirce professed himself very upset with the pragmatists, and
took to calling his own position ``pragmaticism,'' on the grounds that that name
was so ugly no one would be tempted to steal it. My personal recommendation is
to read Feibleman's An Introduction to the Philosophy of Charles S.
Peirce, Interpreted as a System, and his shorter, more popular, on-line
articles. [CRS]
was an American physiologist,
psychologist, philosopher and all-around genius. His magnum opus, The
Principles of Psychology, is public domain, and the sort of thing which
ought to be on the net, since 107 years after publication it is still better
than most psychology texts. For a long time, the only book by him on the net was
Essays
in Radical Empiricism, (far less technical than it sounds, but
transcribed in a rather ugly way --- I'd give a lot for a scanner). Recently,
however, The Varities of
Religious Experience has been put on-line as a plaintext (cf. this set of notes to it).
There is also the complete text of ``Great Men and
their Environment'', a paper anticipating the idea of memes
by the better part of a century.
The pages of Jamesian links
by Frank Pajares seems to catch everything.
The Principles is a University of Chicago certified Great Book.
[CRS]
was, during the course of a long
(1872-1970) life, the grandson of the Prime Minister of England, Lord John
Russell, the godson of John
Stuart Mill, a profound mathematician whose Principia
Mathematica, written with Alfred North Whitehead is still at the center
of modern debate about the basis of mathematics, an agnostic bordering on
atheism, something of a mystic, a friendly philosophical antagonist of William
James, an expert on the philosophy of Leibniz
, a libertarian socialist, jailed for opposing the First World War, the
friend and mentor of Ludwig
Wittgenstein, a profoundly repulsed visitor to the Soviet Union in 1920,
lecturer in Japan and China, the premier philosopher in the English-speaking
part of the world, perhaps the whole world, judicially declared unfit to teach
at the City College of New York, after a campgain of villification by the press
and the Catholic Church, on the grounds that his mere presence on campus would
corrupt the students and that, in any case, he ``was not a philosopher in any
normally accepted meaning of the word,'' a supporter of the Second World War, a
Cold War hawk while only America had the Bomb and a dove afterwards, winner of
the Nobel Prize for Literature (1950), jailed for disarmament protests, and
frankly a bit dotty towards the end.
They don't make them like that any more.
His archives were
obtained by McMaster University in Canada.
There is an associated mailing list for discussion
of Russell's life and works, which is itself archived. The Bertrand Russell Society has an
annual essay competition, announcements of which are posted to the philosophy
newsgroups.
A number of works by Russell are on-line: ``Why I Am Not a Christian,''
(self-explanatory); an article for the Encyclopædia Britannica on
``Philosophical Consequences
of Relativity'' (i.e. Einstein's relativity); ``Knowledge and Wisdom''; a
portion of the transcript of a television interview, under the title ``What is an Agnostic'', where
he explains his (ir)religious views; ``What
Is the Soul,'' a sort of witty ten-minute summary of his metaphysics as of
1928; ``On
Denoting''; and the short book Icarus, or the
Future of Science. The complete text of The
Problems of Philosophy (1912) is on-line, courtesy of Dr. Pseudocryptonym's Book
Knowledge. (Two warnings are in order: the entire book is a single
HTML file 258k in length; and, according to the transcriber, the only country
where he knows it is public domain is the United States.) Other texts
are gradually appearing here and at the Watchful Eye Bertrand Russell
Page. [CRS]
There is a Wittgenstein
Homepage, but none of his works is, as such, on the net. The Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus was on-line, but has been removed at
the request of the publishers. You can however get a random proposition from the
Tractatus
of the Day server.
Part of the Tractatus has been set
to music, in the original German. [CRS]
Or rather, his Revolt of the Masses.
Until recently, the most influential living
philosopher of science; since December 1994, the most influential recently
deceased philosopher of science. (Even scientists read and agreed with him,
which is almost unheard-of.) Juan C.
Garelli is the owner of POPPER, a moderated mailing list
meant for scholars engaged in any kind of scientific or
philosophical endeavour deeply concerned with, and committed to, the defence
and fostering of the Scientific Method, Rationalism and Humanitarianism.
Discussion on this list is intended to reflect Sir Karl R. Popper's main
concerns: his attachment to Critical Rationalism, and his commitment to
Democratic Humanitarianism, both inextricably imbricated to the extent that
the feeling of Reason above individualism implies the ethical decision to
believe in the Unity of Mankind and the radical rejection of any kind of
authoritarianism.
To subscribe, send SUBSCRIBE POPPER
yourfirstname yourlastname to Listserv@sjuvm.stjohns.edu.
Is the late 20th century's answer to
William
James. Alright, so that's an exaggeration, but they both focus on the mind,
both are devout Darwinians, both abandoned careers in art, both write very well
and reach (comparatively) large popular audiences, and both teach in the Boston
area. Coincidence? Send SUB DENNETT <your first name> <your last
name> to LISTSERV@THINK.NET and
see for yourself.
The ``abstracts and
annotations of Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained''
consists of the table of contents, and a summary and mild critique of the first
section of the first chapter.
[CRS, who recently finished Darwin's Dangerous Idea after firmly
telling himself he couldn't afford it for all of, oh, five or six minutes.]
No Dogs or Philosophers Allowed
A North American call-in philosophy TV
show, whose host asked that they be listed. (Mr. Knisely wasn't sure this was
weird enough to be included, but I am.) Owing to my scruples about suckling at
the glass teat, I haven't seen it, but Responsible Persons think well of it, and
the Web
page is good. [CRS]
has a gopher with oodles of files and links, such as Philosophical Images
(pictures of philosophers) and Make
Tenure Fast.
and its collection of paradoxes.
is a ``guide to Philosophy-Related Resources on the
Internet'', by Dey Alexander.
which ``seeks to provide a forum for
electronically mediated scholarly discussion of philosophical works.'' The
current list of topics (e.g., theories
of pictorial representation) seems both very heavy and very analytical.
[CRS]
by David Chalmers, whose
Toward a Theory of Consciousness I ought to finish soon.
In their own words:
``Brown Electronic Article Review Service (BEARS) in Moral and
Political Philosophy publishes very short refereed reviews of recent articles
in moral and political philsophy.''
analytic is a mailing list for discussing analytic
philosophy, open to anyone with some familiarity to it. In its own words,
Analytic Philosophy is commonly considered to be a methodology for
pursuing answers to traditional philosophical questions which focuses on the
analysis of language. Its roots are in the writings of Gottlob Frege, G. E.
Moore, and Bertrand
Russell and it is often remarked that it is the dominant philosophical
tradition of the English-speaking world in this century.
Nicely Webbed but very technical. A few of the
articles do repay reading by Mere Mortals. [CRS]
Mailing Lists --- Mostly Continental Incomprehensibles
``...a number of philosophy lists [are] available through Kent Palmer (palmer@think.net), including:
autopoesis and its spinoffs, deleuze,
baudrillard, lyotard, adorno,
nietzsche, husserl, heidegger,
emptiness (buddhist philosophy),myth, etc.
etc.
See the homepage of DialogNet, or send
"HELP" to listserv@think.net.
[After reading that list, I cannot resist the temptation to quote William
James, Principles of Psychology:
``Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary [as
opposed to mixing those of different languages], and if the grammatical
structure is correct, sentences with absolutely no meaning may be uttered in
good faith and pass unchallenged. Discourses at prayer-meetings, reshuffling
the same collection of cant phrases, and the whole genus of penny-a-line-isms
and newspaper-reporter's flourishes give illustrations of this. `The birds
filled the tree-tops with their morning song, making the air moist, cool and
pleasant,' is a sentence I remember reading once in a report of some athletic
exercise in Jerome Park. It was probably written unconsciously by the hurried
reporter, and read uncritically by many readers. An entire volume of 784 pages
lately published in Boston is composed of stuff like this passage picked out
at random:
`` `The flow of the efferent fluids of all these vessels from their outlets
at the terminal loop of each culminate link on the surface of the nuclear
organism is continous as their respective atmospheric fruitage up to the
altitudinal limit of their expansibility whence, when atmosphered by like but
coalescing essences from higher altitudes --- those sensibly expressed as the
essential qualities of external forms, --- they descend, and become
assimilated by the afferents of the nuclear organisms.'
``There are every year works published whose contents show them to be by
real lunatics. To the reader, the book quoted from seems pure nonsense from
beginning to end. It is impossible to divine, in such a case, just what sort
of feeling of rational relation between the words may have appeared to the
author's mind. The border line between objective sense and nonsense is hard to
draw; that between subjective sense and nonsense, impossible. Subjectively,
any collocation of words may make sense --- even the wildest words in a dream
--- if one only does not doubt their belonging together. Take the obscurer
passages in Hegel: it is a fair question whether the rationality included in
them be anything more than the fact that the words all belong to a common
vocabulary, and are strung together on a scheme of predication and relation
--- immediacy, self-relation, and what not, --- which has habitually recurred.
Yet there seems no reason to doubt that the subjective feeling of rationality
of these sentences was strong in the writer as he penned them, or even that
some readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves.''
CRS]
Heidegger and Cyberspace
One Mr. Antony Dugdale is forming a
mailing list to discuss them. [Or was, some months ago. CRS]
Not seen by us.
In their own words,
``This list is for the discussion of personal idealogies [sic] and
beliefs. Recent topics have included astrology, astral travel, and past
lives.''
Moderator: David B. O'Donnell. Subscriptions (send the message
Subscribe belief-l <your name>.
This listserv may also offer, under the name DOUBTS.NAPOLEON, an 1819 article
explaining why Napoleon might not have existed. [If you're really desperate to
find this, I suggest asking sci.skeptic. --- MP]
[I saw saw this in a bookstore recently, but can't for the life of me
recall the author. CRS]
Is it an on-line archive of cutting-edge
post-structuralist discourse? Or text pseudorandomly generated by a computer? Is
there a difference? Would it make a difference if I told you that professors of
communication have thought it was the former, even after accessing it more than
ten times? [CRS]
a brief guide to Derrida & co by RU Sirius. [MP] [Suitable for
cocktail parties or undemanding graduate seminars. CRS]
DERRIDA list
(%cfrvm.bitnet@uga.cc.uga.edu) Standard listserv commands
is a pukka academic journal which just happens to be fully
Webbed. Covers, among other things, ``poetry, postmodern ecology, `stemmatics',
James Joyce, mail art, Gulf War, concepts of time, everyday aesthetics,'' etc.
Frankly these are all
fairly tame; lunatic, but tame. If you want really strange beliefs, go
visit the Kooks
Museum.
Is a philosopher (or poet or essayist or
borderline lunatic) in whose writings some find every sign of genius, and other
incomprehensible murk. Your humble narrator, alas, falls into the second
category: but in an effort to overcome his prejudice, gives you the Hakim Bey home-page. [CRS]
Celia Green
The complete text of her remarkable short book The
Human Evasion. [``Remarkable'' is Mitchell's word; I too found it
remarkable --- remarkably bad. Ms. Green appears to believe that (for instance)
nothing is impossible except self-contradiction (I don't see why she makes this
exception), and that therefore we can do anything. There is a hideous passage
denouncing concentration-camp survivors for wanting restitution or forgetfulness
or revenge; instead, she thinks, they should call for making humans
``infinite''. And so on. I find her repulsive, and reading her book ruined a
perfectly good evening for me; in the words of the poet, ``your mileage may
vary.'' CRS]
Discoursing on ``new maps of hyperspace.'' [Yes, I know there's
a lot of other McKenna stuff on the net. Patience, and I'll try to organize it
into something coherent --- no help from his fans. CRS]
Aleph
This is the best place I can think of to mention the ALEPH mailing
list: mail majordomo@pyramid.com, "subscribe aleph your_name"
in the message body. The Aleph
archives live here. This list has a rather erratic history, having covered
esoterica, memetics, collaborative fiction-writing (spawning the FIXION list),
ecofeminist revolution through the Internet, you name it. [MP]
fnord-l@UBVM.bitnet
New Ways of Thinking List - created as forum to
discuss the ideas of Wilson, Leary, Alli and the like - "the lunatic asylum of
the Internet.'' [MP]
Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP)
To join send the command JOIN NLP to
server@momad.li.ny.us
... if you have an interest in NLP, please use the mailing list,
rather than wasting bandwidth on Alt.Hypnosis (which is *NOT* for NLP)
and from a sci.math .sig:
An archive of NLP articles, primarily by me, can be obtained by
anonymous ftp from the server ftp://ftp.hawaii.edu/outgoing/lady/,
in the directory outgoing/lady. The file README in this directory
contains a listing of the contents. lady@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu
pkd-list
Contact: pkd-list-request@wang.com
Purpose: The discussion of the works and life of Philip K. Dick - this list
is frequently inert. [MP]
Objectivism
Is a philosophical system founded by the late novelist Ayn
Rand. Doubtless many of its devotees will be offended by my listing it here,
with what they will regard as some most dubious life-forms. To which I can only
reply, ``Too bad. Objectivism is a contemporary philosophy, and by any
objective standard, not part of the academic mainstream. It belongs
here.'' I think my comments above make it clear that I do not hold academic
approval per se in very high regard.
Very broadly, Objectivism is rationalist (instead of intuitist or mystic),
realist (as opposed to solipsist or idealist), morally absolutist, extremely
individualistic (not even altruism is allowed), scientistic, and attaches a
peculiar ethical value to unfettered capitalism. Objectivism on the
Web is run by a devotee. This is a
critical history and overview, by Mr. Michael Shermer.
There is a general Objectivism list called "objectivism" (see Paul Vixie for details),
a more technically philosophical list, "objectivism-philosophy" (mail T. William Wells) and a
newsgroup, alt.philosophy.objectivism. To the
best of my knowledge, none of Ms. Rand's writings are available on the net.
[CRS]
Nexialism
is a word stolen from science-fiction writer A.E. van Vogt,
used in his "Null-A" books (which were in turn inspired by Korzybski's General
Semantics), by DSchnei@aol.com to denote his philosophy. You can probably find
out what it is by mailing him. [MP]
As
explicated by Onar Aam,
is
``about effortlessly wandering from one perspective to another
depending on what the situation requires. The grand contention of
perspectivism is that a gestalt emerges from this restless wandering, namely
the meaning of a greater whole. Meaning is seen as a fragmented
unity.''
and seems to be a sort of Nietzsche Lite. [CRS]
R.B.Fuller fans? Painfully obscure in
places. Their listing of key words is probably the most useful interface. [MP]
WHOLESYS-L@netcom.com
The WHOLESYS-L Whole Systems list is for the discussion of:
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This might be a list for you if you would consider reading books
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"Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" by Buckminster Fuller
"Earth Ascending" by Jose Arguelles
"Paradigms" by Joel Arthur Barker
"The Age of the Network" by Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps
"The Holographic Universe" by Michael Talbot
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The list is for the exploration of whole system principles,
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This is an unmoderated public list. No flaming will be allowed, but
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are able to tolerate diverse viewpoints.
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Owner: Flemming Funch ffunch@netcom.com
http://www.protree.com/worldtrans/
[Mitchell just sent that. CRS]
Is the
author of an 80k book called, modestly, The Truth, which he and his
publisher, something called ``Advanced Research Concepts'', have put on-line.
Progessive evolutionism reminiscent of Herbert Spencer, plus pantheism and
evolving towards God, not unlike Teilhard
de Chardin. (Actually, some of it, e.g., ``A hormone is a learning,'' is not
that far from some more-or-less respectable biologists; cf. Henry Plotkin,
Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge.) Each sentence gets a
line to itself, in large type.
Today we are still only semi-consciously designing Humankind.
We are participants in the transition from nurturing an individual
consciousness to produce a sovereign, to the rapid development of an organism
of humans in which individual consciousness contributes according to its
capability but is subject to control by a newly developing collective
consciousness.
Our present lack of awareness of the total consequences of our collective
decisions sometimes creates oppressive environments.
Seeking to become more, we act....
The universe has always been the means to the creation of a God.
Existence was the means to life.
Life was the means to consciousness.
Consciousness is the means to Godliness.
Our story is the history of a growing God.
The universe is a God growing up.
We are living the life of a growing God.
Our reality is a developing organism that is only becoming a God.
[CRS]
[Follow that link!]
To Do: separate the sheep from the goats, i.e. the analytic and Continental
parts of contemporary academic philosophy. Observe that archetypal analytic
school, Logical Postivism, was in fact at the very center of the Continent: but
no one ever said philosophy was logical. [Mitchell suggests ``speculative'' is a
better name than ``Continental.'']
To Do: Cross-link to theologians; write-up McKenna; write-up Thompson;
properly organize contemporary bizarre philosophy.
Keep looking for: Seneca, Indian
philosophy, Pre-Socratics, Erasmus,
Keirkegaard, Scholastics, Islamic
philosophy, Husserl, Bergson
Believe it or not, pointcom.com thinks
that this page is ``among the top 5% of all sites on the Internet''. We find
this incredible, but it produces a warm glow within nonetheless. (``Badges? We
don' need no estinkin' badges!'')
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