Philosophical Speculations

Ashvin: I can understand the motivation to look for reasons behind the dominance of physicalist thinking. Physicalism is truly a disease and could lead to devastating consequences in not too distant future. However, I cannot agree with your analysis. Human consciousness has undergone significant ev...

This is really a subtle dynamic which occurs with the intellect. I only came to understand it recently myself. The intellect projects itself onto the entire world, and then, only after that, it concludes its own way of thinking cannot capture the richness of Reality itself. But our soul inherently ...

Hi all, In reading and re-reading Ashvin and Cleric's essays and posts, I've come across an issue for me. I've been trying out some of the exercises and something is definitely happening, though I'm not sure I have the words to explain "something" at this stage. I want to continue and dee...

When you say Mind "falsely assumes that it 'recreates internally the total perceptual content which exists externally'", are you then implying this is why Mind cannot, in principle, know itself? In other words, Mind tries to recreate the total content within its dissociated boundaries, an...

Hello AshvinP, I must apologise, that was a terrible response and I’m now having to extract myself from the mess I’ve made. I’m specifically referring to having said: ‘From an idealist perspective we may say that consciousness is, but no more than that. If it’s the foundational thing we can’t get u...

... Great! It seems we've been exploring very similar domains of the invisible landscape :) What I'm writing is much on the same axis as yours, so I hope they'll complement each other nicely. And I keep marveling about how do you manage pulling off all these quotes. Do you really have them all in y...

Have you looked into John David Ebert with his work on Rudolf Steiner? He is an experienced Steiner scholar with a large body of work covering Steiner's work. This lecture series is a decent place to start. Herger, I have watched some of JDE's videos. I did really like his analysis at first, but th...

https://static.wixstatic.com/media/563929_9a688b3213c84969bcb3087445290282~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_571,h_778,al_c,q_90/563929_9a688b3213c84969bcb3087445290282~mv2.webp "Socrates in Plato shows, that an ignorant slave may be brought to understand and of himself to solve the most difficult geometrical...

It should be noted that this holds true even for simple qualities as, say, 'red'. Even if we imagine that our human consciousness was filled entirely with pure perception of red, when we fill the void with our intellectual concept of 'red', this wouldn't make the redness disappear. The reason is th...

Is Steiner saying percepts in and of themselves are pure givens, and it is only with the attendant thinking that we can infer their nature? In other words, one doesn't import any presuppositions about their nature. If that is so, how does Steiner understand percepts after the operation of thinking?...