Last Edited:
Thursday, April 05, 2007 03:45 PM -0500
/ Last Updated:
Thursday, April 05, 2007 03:45 PM -0500
[This
'guest-room' was launched on 9th Jan 2004 to provide an autonomous space for Joe
to make available not only his own rapidly growing collection of essays but also
his sustained dialogues (suitably edited for this homepage) with interlocutors
at various other forums devoted to Western Philosophy. Wherever relevant,
background notes on the featured interlocutors and on the specific article have also been provided.
You may find additional personal details, where relevant, in the provided links
to the svAbhinava Friends
homepage. Joe may have also added his own, hopefully measured, comments on the main
argument. The first personal pronoun 'I' refers henceforth to Joseph Martin -
Sunthar]
[Catherine was 'transferred' here from the
Friends of the
Visuvalingams page on 09 Jan 04]
[Christian was 'transferred' here from the
Friends of the
Visuvalingams page on 18 Jan 04]
With a French 'aggregation'
(competitive exam qualifying him to teach in the university), Dr. Christian M.
Bouchet has been working for the last 20 years on the lucid dream to which had
devoted his state thesis (1994), which he completed under the direction of Prof.
Michel Hulin, who taught Indian and Comparative Philosophy at the Sorbonne. To
complete this research, he devised in the 1980s methods of inducing oneiric
lucidity that have allowed him to train, in a sustained manner, a hundred or so
individuals in the practice of lucid dreaming. Nietzsche's 3 deadly truths - the sovereignty of becoming;
the fluidity of all concepts, types, and kinds; and
the lack of any cardinal difference between man and animal
- has fostered the notion of an 'esotericism' predicated on an underlying
'nihilism' that would have been knowingly disguised and suppressed by the
ancient (pre-Enlightenment) philosophers beginning with Plato. Such a
'transgressive' understanding of (not just social) order in Eastern religious
thought was however typically orientated towards a supra-human 'transcendence'.
By attempting to restitute the claims of an underlying autonomous consciousness
within (post-Enlightenment) Western psychology, Christian's researches into and
theorization of the 'lucid' dream holds the promise of a middle ground for a
fruitful encounter between the seemingly opposing perspectives.
Edward studied philosophy at New York
University and (orthodox) theology at Columbia University before beginning his doctoral
program at St. Elias School of
Orthodox Theology. He is a scholar of Late
Hellenistic Philosophy, and has published and lectured widely on topics and
figures such as Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Origen of Alexandria, Plotinus, and
St. Maximus Confessor. Edward also serves as Area Editor of Late Hellenistic
Philosophy for the
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
and is an active member of the International
Society for Neoplatonic Studies. In mid-August 2004, he
successfully defended his
dissertation, "Origen of Alexandria and St. Maximus Confessor: A Critical
Comparison of their Eschatological Doctrines,"
upon which he was invited to accept the position of
Dean of Faculty at the Philosophy Department of
the Seminary, which has since been published in 2005.
Edward Moore and I met on the �ontologicalethics�
Yahoo group (where I also
met Sunthar and Gary Moore).
The discussions here were, for the most part, a cut (perhaps 2 cuts and a
half!) above the discussions on almost all other
Yahoo philosophy lists. What attracted me to Edward, besides his obvious intelligence, was his interest in the metaphysical esoteric (esoteric
Christianity and Neo-Platonism) and his seeming
attempt to understand the Christian God as a �god that dances� as Nietzsche
would have said. This �dancing god� of Edwards, of
course, may only be a hallucination on my part and he may well disown it.
[Joseph Martin]
[Jonathan was 'transferred' here from the
Friends of the
Visuvalingams page on 09 Jan 04]
My interest in philosophy has always swirled around
the questions: what does philosophy do? What are its
effects on its readers, on the culture in which those
readers live? To get to the bottom of this, I
did a close reading of Beyond Good and
Evil on my Nietzsche Yahoo! list. I am very
interested in Plato, Machiavelli and Nietzsche. I am
also interested in all of the philosophers from
Parmenides to Leo Strauss. It is just that, whoever I
read, I always find myself returning to those three. I
am also very interested in the crisis of modernity,
the crisis of nihilism. The way out of this nihilism
is not initially belief, all belief will be gobbled up
by the ever-spreading nihilism, but rather the way out
is to make nihilism devour itself. In a sense this is
what I understand Nietzsche to be doing. There is no going back, there is no going around, we can only go through it. On the other side of nihilism, there and only there, we will find another belief.
[Mohammad was
'transferred' here from the
Friends of the
Visuvalingams page on 12 Jan 04]
"Born in
1945 in Tehran, the son of an editor and autodidact theologian, whose faith
was more important than his own son, I was brought up amidst Koranic verses
that I learnt by heart and the theological discourses of my father who
translated, prefaced and published the works of great Shiite thinkers
(masters) such as Sadough, Hilli and Fayz K�ch�ni. The year 1960 was a
decisive year in my life. Kennedy was elected President of the United States
and the silence that reigned in Iran since the coup d'�tat of 1953 was broken
and liberal opposition parties began their semi-clandestine activity. It was
from this epoch that I was confronted with the first philosophical,
sociological and political questions: What is power? What is the Scientific
Revolution? Why are there triumphant and vanquished peoples? What is liberty?
Why is the third world plunged in intellectual and economic misery, etc. Some
years later, I discovered new horizons: Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau, Comte,
Darwin, Marx, Freud, Spencer, Einstein, Lenin, Russell, Sartre, whereas I had
settled my accounts with neither Zarathustra nor with Avicenna. In me,
intellectual and political militantism were confounded. In 1968, at the
initiative of Al-e Ahmad and B�h�zine, the 'Association of Iranian Writers'
was created. It was considered a subversive and illegal organization by the
courtesans of the monarch. If I'm not mistaken, I was one of the youngest, if
not the youngest of the founder-members of this association. But I was always
in search of answers to the philosophical questions posed. I published
everywhere. In the liberal weekly Ferdoussi, in the liberal magazine
N�guine, in the leftist magazines like
Tch�p�r and
Sahar, the editor of which was the young poet
Gol�sorkhi and finally in the magazine Djongu� Esf�h�n published by the partisans of
Sartre. Another important point: despite my attachment to philosophy, I could
not rid myself of literature and sociology. In me, the poetical, the
philosophical and the sociological were one: from Sophocles to Stendhal,
Melville, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Blake, Yeats, through Marx, Nietzsche, Unamuno,
Bergson, Gurvitch and Althusser, not forgetting contemporary thinkers of the
third world." [pp.12-13] [p.14>] "While I
searched for satisfactory answers across philosophical, literary and
sociological works to fundamental philosophical questions
[p.15>] such as being, liberty, the meaning of
history, progress, knowledge, etc., I progressively had the feeling that the
Koranic revelation and Greek reason were incompatible, finding themselves on
opposite poles. On the other hand, I had the feeling that there ought to be a
direct relation between the defeat of philosophy in the East, philosophy in
the Greek sense, and Eastern theocracy (theocratic despotism in China,
theocratic aristocracy in India, theocratic monarchy in Persia and the
theocracy of the Semitic peoples). This feeling appeared in me at the
beginning of 70's, developed and gradually became a certitude. But the proofs
that would demonstrate this idea could be brought together only through a
comparative study of Western and Eastern, and in particular Islamic, thought.
In other words, to understand Avicenna and Averroes was impossible without
understanding Aristotle, Plato and Thomas Aquinas. The Songs of Zarathustra
were not only the starting point for my researches in philosophy, but also the
title of the first chapter of my first published work: Intellectual and
social development in Iran. I was aware of the importance of the Avesta
regarding the passage from the nomadic to the urban mode of life, that is to
say, the passage from an archaic conception of the world to the discovery of
the 'supreme principle' as Hegel said. My aim was to try and bring to light
the weaknesses and strengths of this heritage." Aristotle of Baghdad: from
Greek Reason to Koranic Revelation (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1995; ISBN:
2-7384-3738-9), translated by Sunthar V.
SUMI (Sunthar's niece) left Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) to resettle in
Australia. She completed her doctorate in the classics on Plotinus in June
2004 and obtained her degree in October of the same year. She has taught
Sanskrit and enjoys playing the sitar. The following 2 articles were published
in Dirk Baltzly, Douglas Blyth and Harold Tarrant, eds., Power and
Pleasure, Virtues and Vices (Prudentia, Supplement 2001, ISBN:
0-9582211-5-4).
Sunthar settled in in Benares in 1972 with the
intention of studying Indian philosophy and religion, particularly Ved�nta,
from a traditional perspective. However, he has always retained his interest in
Western philosophy that he also took for his BA at the Banaras Hindu University.
His interests expanded to psychology, aesthetics, anthropology and semiotics,
and these investigations converged on his doctorate on
Abhinavagupta's Conception of
Humor (1983). His primary motivation in 'philosophizing' since has been
to rethink Indian traditions in the context of contemporary knowledge and
civilizational impasse through the prism of
Abhinava's legacy in the domains
of religion, philosophy and the performing arts.