Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Category: Owen Barfield

  • What Barfield Thought Coleridge Thought

    I’m in the midst of another fantastic course this semester with Prof. Jake Sherman, this time on the creative imagination. We’re now reading Owen Barfield‘s masterful What Coleridge Thought (1971). It’s my second reading, though this time with a new copy (lacking my original marginalia in a more recent printing that I’ve since given away). The new…

  • Imagining the Future with Owen Barfield: Towards a Participatory Turn

    I’ve been reading Owen Barfield‘s recently republished philosophical novella Unancestral Voice (1967, 2010). Like many of his books, its aim is to make the esotericism of Rudolf Steiner more digestible to a 20th century audience. Barfield begins by setting the late industrial scene ~1967, situating us within the toxic detritus of a decaying civilization we…

  • Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Activity: Socrates, Jesus, and the Wisdom of Love

    I’ve been asked to think about thinking, and to write about it. I’ve gotten myself tangled up in the middle of this kind of mess before, and so I’ll admit right off the bat that I cannot be sure which comes first, the thinking or the writing. Maybe my writing is just the trace of…

  • Imagining the Cosmos: notes on my dissertation…

    In the past year or so, the blueprint of my dissertation topic has gone through multiple iterations. Last year, while applying for my PhD studies at CIIS, I wrote a goal statement that still reflects the general theme I am envisioning. Now that I’m entering the last term of course work, I wanted to take…

  • Documentary on Owen Barfield

  • Towards a Christological Realism: Thinking the Correlation with Teilhard and Barfield

    Preface Quentin Meillassoux‘s lucid text, After Finitude (2008), comes at a time when Continental philosophy finds itself engaging more closely with what might be called  “poetico-religious” modes of thought. Rationality of the Cartesian sort has been thoroughly deconstructed, and no longer seems capable of providing what it once promised: a clear and distinct picture of…

  • Owen Barfield on the inscape of the world.

    “When we speak… about consciousness, about the point at which consciousness arose and so forth, we are speaking not merely about human nature, as we call it, but also about nature itself. When we study consciousness historically, contrasting perhaps what men perceive and think now with what they perceived and thought at some period in…

  • Meister Eckhart, Philosophy, and Soul-Making

    The following is an essay written for a weekend course taught by philosopher Jacob Needleman on Meister Eckhart the 26th and 27th of February 2011. ————————– Meister Eckhart, Philosophy, and the Soul By Matthew Segall And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement…

  • Owen Barfield and Quentin Meillassoux

    Meillassoux and Barfield may at first seem like strange bedfellows, but by unmasking the pervasiveness of correlationism in post-Kantian philosophy, the former steps right into an issue that works its way into nearly all of Barfield’s published works. In perhaps the most complete and cogent explanation of his position, Saving the Appearances, Barfield writes: “…the…

  • A taste of what’s to come…

    Two abstracts for the papers I am writing for courses on Carl Jung and the Philosophy of Relgion, respectively. ————————————————— “Uncovering the Unconscious: Psychology and the Soul” William James credits W. H. Myers with the discovery of “subliminal consciousness” (i.e., the unconscious) in 1886, a discovery James’ suggests is psychology’s most important insight into human…

  • Goal Statement for my PhD Studies at CIIS

    As a result of the past two years of study toward a MA degree in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, my mind has been so stretched—both inward into the depths of my own soul and outward into the endless expanse of the cosmos—that distilling a specific dissertation topic for my PhD research will be extremely difficult.…

  • Intimations of an Integral God: A lecture at CIIS

    Slide 1: Prior to coming to CIIS, while studying philosophy as an undergraduate, I always had the sense of being somewhat smothered. As my studies continued, and my understanding matured, I realized why. I was being trained to think in the shadow of Immanuel Kant. [Show Crit. of Pure Reason- You’ve all read this, right?]…