12th Annual Smashwords 2020 Summer/Winter Sale!

July 1, 2020 - July 31, 2020

This promotion has now closed. Thanks for your interest and participation. 

Four of my books sold through Smashwords will be  discounted during the month of July, so this is a chance to pick up a bargain! The catalog for the sale goes live at one minute past midnight on July 1 Pacific time, and expires 11:59pm on July 31. Clicking on the image of each book's cover below will take you through to the Smashwords page for it. Clicking on the title will taken you to a blog page giving further details.

During the sale period the price at Smashwords is the discounted price. Prices at Itunes, Barnes & Noble, Blio, Walmart, Inktera, etc. are not discounted. My new book, 'Echoes of Eternity' will be available for sale on June the 30th 2020 at the full list price, during and after the sale.

The bargains:

The Sacred History of Being (2015), is available during the sale period at 50% off the full Smashwords price.

Formerly argued by classical scholars to have been first discussed by the ancient Greeks in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., the articulate concept of Being can now be traced as far back as the middle of the second millennium, and the state of Assyria. 

The Greeks themselves had several stories about the origins of philosophy, a discipline which essentially deals with abstractions, including that it originated elsewhere, but that is not the received narrative. The consequence of this, is that all historians of ideas, when constructing their accounts of the intellectual development of man before the arrival of Parmenides and Plato, have had to negotiate the Greek invention of philosophy, and the corollary, that articulate discussion of the abstract concept 'Being' didn’t happen before this.

This can now be shown to be a faulty understanding, resulting in many absurdities. The Old Testament has examples where God declares his identity with Being itself (‘I am that I am’, better translated into English as ‘I am that which is,’ and ‘I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God', for example), but these are not regarded by scholars as evidence of a sophisticated discourse around the idea of Being. Instead these statements indicate inchoate ‘notions’ about the nature of god, rather than anything more profound. The statement in Malachi, however, that 'I do not change', is an explicitly philosophical understanding of the nature of God.

Published by the Anshar Press.  

J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being (2016) Is available during the sale period at a 25% discount from Smashwords.

When he was only twenty-four years old, James Frazer won a Cambridge fellowship with an essay on the development of Plato's theory of the Forms or Ideas (eidos). In this essay he argued that there was no overarching theory of Being in Plato's mind before he embarked on the writing of his dialogues, and that consequently differences in approach and discussion apparent in his work are the result of the development of his thought. He also argued that the very idea of Being is a barren notion, in that nothing can be predicated of Being. As a result Plato made a mistake, effectively conflating an epistemology with an ontology. 

Though the essay was written in 1879, it was not published until 1930, after much of his later work was done. Frazer became famous for his monumental study The Golden Bough, which explored a vast range of ancient and primitive myth and ritual. Here too he found intellectual processes founded in error. What was Frazer's intention in re-interpreting Plato against what Plato himself said, and his wholesale restructuring of ancient thought by reducing much of it to a pattern of error?

In sixteen sections, with prefaratory material and a conclusion. Over 23 thousand words, a preface, select bibliography, and extensive notes. Published Spring 2016 by the Anshar Press.  

A couple of related blog posts explore J.G. Frazer's discussion of Plato, and the implications for the writing of The Golden Bough. The two articles are synthesised together in a third article: Frazer and the Association of Ideas.

Understanding Ancient Thought (2017), is available during the sale period at 50% off the full Smashwords price.

Understanding Ancient Thought is the third in a series of books which examines how we assess evidence from antiquity, and frame models to make sense of that evidence.  

The book consists of eighteen essays, which cover a number of subject areas which are in thrall to what Foucault described as an ‘episteme’. In other words, the way the subject areas are understood within the academy is in terms of what our cultural models, language and assumptions will allow us to understand. The actual evidence may suggest an alternative view, but it is not possible to see it, or to think it. At least until the paradigmatic frame shifts to another ‘episteme’.  

The main thrust of the book is that two hundred years of modern scholarship concerning the past has, for the most part, assembled a fictive and tendentious version of the ancient world. 51 thousand words. Published by the Anshar Press, 

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Man and the Divine: New light on Man's Ancient Engagement with God and the History of Thought, is also discounted by 50% during the Smashwords Summer/Winter sale. Published by the Anshar Press. ISBN 9780463665473. It is now available at Smashwords https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/872542. Published in August 2018.

Many of the essays deal with the question of esoteric knowledge in antiquity, often from slightly different angles. The book contains the following essays:

The Enlightenment of David Hume;  Richard Dawkins and Deism; Mathematics and Geometry;  Evading the Infinite;  The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World. Unwritten Doctrine, Ancient Silence; What is Sacred, and what is Profane?;  Intentionality, Conjecture, and What is Holy; Excellence and the Knowledge of Divine Things; Cultural Continuity in the Ancient World, and Bernal’s Black Athena. 

Do Western Academic Philosophy Departments Teach the History of Philosophy?

Greeks fighting in the service of the Assyrian Empire at the Siege of Lachish, 701 BCE

At first sight the title of this article may seem to be provocative, and even slightly daft. However if you study the history of philosophy, including those writers who wrote just before the close of the ancient world, if you are paying attention, you find that the detail of philosophy's course through history is not as it represented in post European Enlightenment writing. The way that history is discussed and understood, suits modern preconceptions. But those modern preconceptions make it almost impossible for us to understand thought in the ancient world, both in the classical period, and in more ancient times.

I've spent much of the past thirty years unpicking questions relating to what that history actually is, beyond the received view in the academy and beyond. The Greeks did not in fact pioneer philosophical thought, and were very far from doing this. Almost everything about the history of philosophy since the Enlightenment is based on the idea that the Greeks did pioneer philosophical thought. This is wrong, and demonstrably wrong.

That is the basis of my project. My intention is not however to just pull these false constructs down, but to also attempt an evidence-based reconstruction. This is skeletal in places, but there is a great deal which can be substantially reconstructed once modern preconceptions are shown to be inconsistent with the ancient evidence.

I've been attacking this idea from a number of different angles, mostly (but not entirely) focussing on the unwarrantable assumptions which are made by scholars about ancient evidence.There are many instances of this, which I've written about extensively. I've also attacked this idea from the point of view of what ancient writers actually said. These remarks are often disregarded, because they do not fit with the generally received view of the history of philosophy.  When read closely, it is often the case that a different picture of our intellectual past emerges.

This is the most recent overview of my project: An Appetite for Knowledge, which points to various articles on my blog, and chapters in my books.  A good place to start for those unfamiliar with my work.

In addition to this approach, I've been contrasting the cultural outputs of both Greece and Ancient Assyria for the purpose of showing that the Greeks borrowed much of their philosophical invention from Assyria and Babylonia, as well as Egypt. Clement of Alexandria listed ancient nations and cultural groups who practised philosophy, and attached the Greeks to the list explicitly as the last of the cultures who embraced philosophy. I sometimes create gazeteers on the basis of articles and chapters, and this is one of those: Transcendental Thought in Ancient Assyria Very few Assyriologists so far argue for the existence of a transcendentalist perspective in Assyria. But...

Between the late ninth and late seventh centuries BCE,  the State of Assyria is the best documented culture in antiquity. The records are voluminous, and many still wait for publication and close study. From what has been published however, the evidence is clear that the Assyrians embraced a transcendental understanding of the nature of the world. For those unfamiliar with the details of the cultural parallels between Greece and Assyria, this gazeteer is a good place to start.

I came to much of this work by studying writers from the third and fourth centuries CE, who are still poorly regarded, and generally ignored in the academic teaching of philosophy. That's our problem, not theirs.

Why did I undertake this project? Sometimes people take on strange tasks. The composer Arnold Schoenberg, once he emigrated to the USA, was asked by a journalist why he took up the unpopular cause of serialist composition. He answered along the lines of: 'someone had to do it. I thought it might as well be me'. My attitude is pretty much the same. I didn't need to do this, and could have chosen to do something else.  But the job needed to be done.

Thomas Yaeger, March 28, 2020.

VenusPeter's review of 'The Sacred History of Being'

A review of The Sacred History of Being at WorldCat:
The Sacred History of Being.
by Yaeger, Thomas
eBook : Document

Sometimes scholars do not see what is before their eyes, or they see what they are trained to see. The Sacred History of Being begins with an account of the author becoming aware - over many years - of the limitations of modern scholarship concerning the ancient past. There are so many unexamined assumptions in the relevant disciplines which make it nearly impossible to make sense of some of the evidence. The assumptions are a form of noise, which is hard to see through, and the understanding of most scholars is circumscribed by the din of that noise.

This is a book which discusses both the ancient past, and the modern post-Enlightenment world. The modern world comes off badly in comparison, since we now generally frame questions in terms which produce answers which make sense to us. What an ancient priest made of a question, for example, is often of no concern to us. We aren't dealing with rational thought in antiquity.

Yaeger's book is a sustained assault on this idea. It attempts to show that, long before the Greeks, the Mesopotamians explicitly understood themselves to be rational beings living in a rational universe. Their account of the creation of the world in which we live makes that very clear. That world is framed in their creation story as a descent into generated matter from an undifferentiated plenum. As a consequence, the Mesopotamians saw a connection between the plenum and knowledge far beyond human understanding. Yaeger argues that one of the functions of religion in Mesopotamia was to make connections possible between the transcendent world of the plenum (Being itself) and the secular world, and for man to gain access to knowledge of divine things.

Sound familiar? This is very similar to what Plato was discussing in the Republic in connection with the ascent of the philosopher to 'the Good' via the forms, and a return to the sensible world with beneficial knowledge. Yaeger does not rest on this simple comparison however, and digs deep into Mesopotamian ritual for the creation of divine images. The result of close study of these rare texts shows how thoroughly the parallels run between Greek and Mesopotamian thought. The Mesopotamian texts however date from a period before the rise of classical Greece...

The fifth century enlightenment in Greece therefore begins to look like a form of noise - a difficulty largely created during the European Enlightenment.

There are many good things about this book, not least of which is the quality of the writing and discussion. Once you have read the book, it is hard to look at the ancient world in the same way as we used to do. Much that looked like the result of a primitive stupidity (the practice of divination, sacrifice, etc), can now be approached in a different way, which presumes so much less about the nature of the ancient evidence.