Philosophy Archives - Page 3 of 10 - Maier Files Series Tidbits and Articles-

The Glass Bead Game

Gelegentlich ergreifen wir die Feder and schreiben Zeichen auf ein weisses Blatt, Die sagen dies and das, es kennt sie jeder, Es ist ein Spiel, das seine Regeln hat. —Hermann Hesse. Das Glasperlenspiel From time to time we take our pen in hand and scribble symbols on a blank white sheet. Their meaning is at everyone’s command; It is a game whose rules are nice and neat. —Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, When Hermann...

Mystical Anthropology

Mystical Anthropology, edited by John Arblaster and Rob Faesen, offers an in-depth exploration of the unique perspectives on the human soul as articulated by medieval mystics from the Low Countries, such as John of Ruusbroec. These thinkers sought to answer profound questions about the soul’s structure, its relationship with God, and how the human person can attain divine union. By contrasting these medieval views with modern thought, the book challenges readers to reconsider how spirituality...

Imagination and phantasy

Now Can You See the Strings?

The house goes dark. A single spotlight finds him center stage, arms outstretched, and he rises — slowly, unmistakably — three feet off the boards. He does not claim a machine did it. He does not claim a trick. He tells the audience, in a low and certain voice, that he alone has been given this, that he knows what they do not, and that what they are watching is not craft but revelation. Nobody...

What connections do you see?

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus had said: “A hidden connection is stronger than one we can see.” Otto Maier was always fascinated with Time. Things occupy space—but how many of them there are (or could be) belonging to time? If you take off the face of a clock you won’t find time there, only human fabrication. Those numbers, circling round, make time almost credible—as if they aroused a sixth sense attuned to its presence, since it...

The God Who Pledged His Hand — On Honor as the Weapon Used Against the Honorable

Can truth be a liar?

When it is exclaimed that contradictions may very well be true, numerous analytic philosophers will screw up their face into an appearance of discomfort, and say ‘But I just don’t see what it could be for a contradiction to be true’. They could mean numerous things by this. ‘See’ might just mean ‘understand’, by which case they might be complaining that traditional two-valued semantics leaves no room, as it were, for something to be both...

The Evolution of Civilizations

The Evolution of Civilizations expresses two dimensions of its author, Carroll Quigley, that most extraordinary historian, philosopher, and teacher. In the first place, its scope is wide-ranging, covering the whole of man’s activities throughout time. Second, it is analytic, not merely descriptive. It attempts a categorization of man’s activities in sequential fashion so as to provide a causal explanation of the stages of civilization. Quigley coupled enormous capacity for work with a peculiarly “scientific” approach....

Who or what composes a series of dream images?

The Man Who Read 2026 in 1849

On January 4th, 1849, a Spanish diplomat stood up in the Cortes — the parliament in Madrid — and delivered a speech. Outside, Europe was still smouldering from the revolutions of 1848. Thrones had fallen. Streets had run with blood. The old order was cracking in every direction simultaneously. His name was Juan Donoso Cortés, Marqués de Valdegamas. He was forty years old. He would be dead in four years. And in that speech —...

Gerardus van der Leeuw, The Dutch Mystic Who Dared to Transcend

There exists in the shadowed corridors of twentieth-century thought a figure whose work remains curiously unexamined by those who chase after the fashionable philosophies of our declining age. Gerardus van der Leeuw, a Dutch theologian and phenomenologist who lived from 1890 to 1950, developed a method of understanding religion that stands as a quiet rebuke to the entire modern project—that grand enterprise of separation, reduction, and the cold dissection of living mysteries into dead facts....