In almost all myths all over the world the same theme reoccurs. The twelve knights, twelve tribes, twelve heroes etc. In his last and longest dialogue (Laws), Plato teaches: There are twelve feasts to the twelve Gods who give their names to the twelve tribes. Also in early christianity, the image of twelve disciples with the Godman figure at their center echoes the twelve constellations which revolve in the heavens around the pole star. Are...
The problem of consciousness, alternatively put, is the problem of finding out how mental phenomena, such as thoughts and feelings, are related to physical occurrences in brains. This way of stating the problem assumes that some such relation exists, an assumption not always made in the history of philosophy. Since Descartes the debate has become more sophisticated, and in our own time the use of scanning devices to monitor living brain activity has enormously advanced...
When following Otto Maier’s path one will meet somewhere on his/her road, Böhme. Like the contemporary student of the inner world, alchemists were concerned about differentiating imagination from fantasy. They were aware that true imagination possesses a power and depth that fantasy does not possess. Jakob Boehme was one of those who warned against the delusions of fantasy. Struggle for redemption Böhme was a mystic. Although not a practicing alchemist, he used the terminology and symbols...
Oswald Sprengler
The Decline of the West (German: Der Untergang des Abendlandes), or The Downfall of the Occident, is a two-volume work by Oswald Spengler, the first volume of which was published in the summer of 1918. Spengler revised this volume in 1922 and published the second volume, subtitled Perspectives of World History, in 1923.  Spengler urges a new understanding of the world. In this work of historical philosophy, which was written mostly before World War I,...
this is not fair
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. So began...
heresy
Heretic Middle English: from Old French heretique, via ecclesiastical Latin from Greek hairetikos ‘able to choose’ (in ecclesiastical Greek, ‘heretical’), from haireomai ‘choose’. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica one can read:“The word heresy is derived from the Greek hairesis which originally meant an act of choosing, and so came to signify a set of philosophical opinions or the school professing them. As so used the term was neutral, but once appropriated by Christianity it began to...
Contradictions and paradox
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...
von Goethe
Socrates sometimes spoke of his daemon, meaning a good spirit who guided him through life. This might seem an alien concept for most of us today. But one can not deny as a matter of historical fact that folks who believed in idealism as a philosophy of life have always tended to trust in spirits, gods and angels. When it comes to the great-weaving cosmic thoughts, the active principles behind the appearances of things, many...
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