Reading Thomas Yaeger

Recently I removed a number of papers which were freely available on the website Academia.edu. I did this because the site has become less and less useful, as it transitions to something offering 'premium' services. I also took down the description and metadata for other papers, many of which are chapters in the books listed below.

I saved the descriptions of my first three books, however, and together with a description of the fourth (Man and the Divine) these form a concise overview of what I have written and published so far on historical and philosophical questions.

One thing I might suggest, is that J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being  should be read before the other two (if you are considering reading all of them). The argument is fairly technical, but shouldn't be off-putting to someone interested in philosophy. Though it was first published as an eBook in 2016, it was in fact written in London in 1993, the year after I finished my studies at UCL. It illustrates a  great deal about how and why I came to be interested in writing about the significance of the idea of Being in antiquity.


***


Commercially available books:

 The Sacred History of Being (2015) 

 The discipline of philosophy was not invented by the Greeks, but was in existence elsewhere, and as far back as the middle of the second millennium BCE. It has its origin in ancient divine cult. The detail of its presence can be traced in the civilizations around the ancient Near East, and particularly in Assyria and Babylonia. The Sacred History of Being collects the key evidence together, and examines the idea of the divine as a philosophical concept in Greece, Israel, and ancient Assyria. Published as an eBook by the Anshar Press,. Available from Barnes & Noble, Itunes, Kobo, Blio, Inktera, Smashwords, etc.

Published: Nov. 02, 2015. Available in ePub format. Words: 113,510. ISBN: 9781311760678
More information available at: https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-sacred-history-of-being-as-its.html


 J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being (2016)

 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? Over 23 thousand words, a preface, select bibliography, and extensive notes. Published by the Anshar Press. Available from Barnes & Noble, Itunes, Kobo, Blio, Inktera, Smashwords, etc.

Published: April 04, 2016. Available in ePub format. Words: 22,930 ISBN: 9781310105470
More information available at: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/p/j.html


 Understanding Ancient Thought (2017) 

 '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, August 20, 2017. Available via Smashwords, Itunes, Barnes and Noble, Blio, Kobo, etc.

Published: Aug. 20, 2017. Available in ePub format. Words: 51,070. ISBN: 9781370378012
More information available at: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/nineteen-meditations.html


Man and the Divine (2018)

This is my second collection of essays on philosophy and ancient history. Like my first collection, Understanding Ancient Thought, it expands further on the arguments of The Sacred History of Being, which appeared in November 2015.  Man and the Divine was published on August 12, 2018. 

Many of the essays deal with the question of esoteric knowledge in antiquity, often from slightly different angles. ‘The Death of Socrates’ is one of those, a solicited response to one of a series of dramatized readings of famous speeches from history, staged by the Almeida Theatre in London in 2017. This reading was performed by Sir Derek Jacobi. ‘Distinguishing Belief and Faith’ began as a meditation on some text by Alan Watts, but which expanded into a chapter about who believed what, and why, in ancient Mesopotamia. ‘Polytheism, Monotheism, and the Cult of the Aten’, explores Akhenaten’s religious innovations in the Egypt of the 14^th century B.C.E. 

Modern scholarship generally steers away from the idea that there may be an esoteric level to the nature of reality, but approaches questions surrounding esotericism in terms of a division between those who argue that there is such an esoteric level of reality, and those who maintain that just because they can think of such a thing and give it names and descriptions, does not mean that there is such a thing as genuine esoteric knowledge. The first group are sometimes described as ‘Essentialists’, and the second, as ‘Nominalists’. I first dealt with this question  (and related questions) in my book J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being. Frazer simply denied the idea that it was possible to say anything meaningful at all about a transcendent reality (Being), and consequently argued that Plato’s work was built on a fundamental error, through the conversion of an epistemology into an ontology.

Some of the essays discuss something of the background to the writing of The Sacred History of Being. It was important to produce a concise and focussed argument, and many interesting discussions had to be put to one side in order to achieve that. The Sacred History of Being represents the core argument. What I have written elsewhere is best understood in terms of a sequence of extended footnotes to that book.

The final essay, ’Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind’, is necessarily more speculative than the others, and deals with the British Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, when the building of megalithic structures was at its height. It makes comparisons with Greek and Mesopotamian notions of the importance of the sky in ancient religious thought. Published by the Anshar Press. Available from Barnes & Noble, Itunes, Kobo, Blio, Inktera, Smashwords, etc.

Approximately 57,000 words. Available in ePub format. ISBN 9780463665473.
More information available at: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/p/man-and-divine-2018.html


The Origins of Transcendentalism in Ancient Religion (forthcoming, 2019)

Transcendentalism is present in a number of ancient religions, located to the west of India. 

It is assumed by scholars however, that there is very little in the way of transcendentalist thought associated with these ancient religions, and that the evidence we are looking at is mainly built out of concrete imagery, fanciful myth, poetry, irrational associations, all of which are in the service of religion and the state. In other words, religion serves a series of social and ideological functions, and it is to those functions that we should look for the explanation of the cultural remains, rather than the minds of the ancients themselves.

One of the arguments of this book is that we have been sold short by enlightenment presumptions and certainties, and that what we think we know and understand about ancient religion is so far from its real basis that, for the most part, it is nearly impossible for modern scholars to make intelligible sense of it. The cultural supremacy of ancient Greece in modern western thought depends on other civilisations not having an engagement with abstraction and the idea of Being before the middle of the 1st millennium B.C.E. 

This book is relatively short, not because the questions it addresses are simple, and have easy answers. It is short because I have written four other books before this one, and, to a significant extent, it references argument and discussion which can be found in those books. It was not possible to write a short and credible introduction to an understanding of the transcendentalism which can be found in ancient religions, without first covering an enormous amount of ground.

More details will follow in due course.  

***

The short bio at Academia.edu:

I'm an independent researcher and a specialist in scholarly communications, who studied the Ancient Near East and the Neo-Assyrian Empire at University College London. I'm particularly interested in the History of Ideas in the context of the ancient world, and in the importance of religion and art in understanding ancient cultures.

 My four ebooks are commercially available from Itunes, Barnes & Noble, Kobo Books, Blio, Smashwords, Inktera, etc. They are also available to read (on request) in each of the legal deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland. The Sacred History of Being is mostly available free to libraries around the globe, depending on the distributor the libraries use. Libraries respond to requests from users: if copies are free, they have little reason not to acquire one.

My blog at http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com contains essays related to my books, discussions with readers, book chapters and chapter extracts, an RSS feed, and other discussion on philosophical, archaeological and historical subjects. I'm active on Twitter.


TY, February 17 2018; updated September 02, 2018.

Pythagorean Triples and the Generation of Space

The traditional formulation of the theorem of Pythagoras is that the square on the hypotenuse of a right angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. This is the Greek formulation, but we know that some of the properties of Pythagorean triangles were known in earlier cultures, such as in Babylonia.

The triangles of most interest were those constructed using integral values, such as the 3,4,5 triangle. These values were commensurable, and not irrational.

If we consider this in terms of the construction of the version of the triangle constructed using the square values, we can see that it is not a geometrical figure in two dimensions at all, but a line, built out of the three squared values (9, 16, and 25), exactly 25 integral units in length, with the three sides subsumed into one dimension.

This understanding of the geometrical arrangement perhaps tells us something about the ancient perception of space, and why it exists.

There are several possible Pythagorean triangles which exist, all of which exhibit the same properties, but with different combinations of integral values.

There are 16 primitive Pythagorean triples with c ≤ 100:

(3, 4, 5)  (5, 12, 13)  (8, 15, 17)  (7, 24, 25)

(20, 21, 29)  (12, 35, 37)  (9, 40, 41)  (28, 45, 53)

(11, 60, 61)  (16, 63, 65)  (33, 56, 65)  (48, 55, 73)

(13, 84, 85)  (36, 77, 85) (39, 80, 89) (65, 72, 97)

Additionally these are the 29 primitive Pythagorean triples with 100 < c ≤ 300:

(20, 99, 101) (60, 91, 109) (15, 112, 113) (44, 117, 125)

(88, 105, 137) (17, 144, 145) (24, 143, 145) (51, 140, 149)

(85, 132, 157) (119, 120, 169) (52, 165, 173) (19, 180, 181)

(57, 176, 185) (104, 153, 185) (95, 168, 193) (28, 195, 197)

(84, 187, 205) (133, 156, 205) (21, 220, 221) (140, 171, 221)

(60, 221, 229) (105, 208, 233) (120, 209, 241) (32, 255, 257)

(23, 264, 265) (96, 247, 265) (69, 260, 269) (115, 252, 277)

(160, 231, 281)

All of these Pythagorean triples when squared, represent mathematical and geometrical constructions which do not exist in Euclidean space as geometries: they are lines existing in one dimension.

We tend to look at the phenomenon of Pythagorean triangles as just that: something which has practical usage, but no further implications for the nature of the world in which we live, or our understanding of it. This is not likely to have been the case in the ancient world, in which number was venerated as something belonging to the divine and knowledge of the divine. The triples meant something profound.

What might be the meaning of the existence of these triangles and their properties?

In antiquity, it was obvious to anyone interested in number, mathematics and geometry, that there were several aspects of the physical world that involved irrationality, long before it was possible to provide logical proof of such irrationality. One of these irrationalities was the relationship between the diameter and the circumference of the circle. We know that irrationality (understood as an absence of commensuration) was a major concern in antiquity, since the existence of it seemed to undermine the idea that the world was rational, and constructed by the divine on rational principles. In other words, the existence of irrational things served to undermine the idea that the world made sense, and that it was good.

What we understand as Pythagoreanism is actually a way of approaching the world and reality on the basis of number, mathematics and geometry. We have lost a grasp of this, particularly since the close of the ancient world. Pythagorean ideas are not the creation of Pythagoras in the sixth century B.C.E., but a range of ideas about the world, focussing particularly on numbers and geometry, and the puzzles which the study of these throws up (the Greek name for these puzzles is ‘aporia’). As such, these ideas and puzzles belong to any culture which chooses to address the divine in terms of how the universe is constructed. As already suggested, the Babylonians had a sense of this, though they were also interested in the practical applications. It is also the case that the inhabitants of Britain in the late Neolithic and the early Bronze Age had such a sense.

The engineer Alexander Thom surveyed many of the megalithic circles across Britain from the 1930s into the 1970s, and established that the circles were constructed on the basis of a number of different Pythagorean triangles, and that these circles were not in fact circular.  The circumferences of these circles were modified in order to make their lengths commensurate with the length of the sides of the underlying triangles.  These modifications testify to the contemporary idea in ancient times that the incommensurate nature of diameter and circumference shouldn’t be the case.

I’ve written elsewhere that Pythagoreanism, whether in the sixth century or long before, was a transcendentalist view of the world. Meaning that the world of physics and appearance in which we live, is not reality itself, but simply a presentation of it. And the presentation of it is, in a number of ways, crooked. So some aspects of physical reality are not rational. 

This does not mean that the ancient Pythagoreans were pitching themselves against the workings of the divine, but rather that they were trying to understand why what they saw, experienced and understood, was not rational. The answer was that their place of refuge was not reality itself, but a false representation of it.

In the physical world, they could therefore not expect rationality to be woven all through it. Thom identified the obsessive concern of the ancient Britons with whole numbers, and as a consequence (though this was not understood at the time he was studying the megaliths), we know that they were looking to a world beyond the puzzles and paradoxes, in which the relationships of one thing to another were rational in nature.

The theorem of Pythagoras, however it was articulated in the late Neolithic and the early Bronze Age, provided the answer to this. The relationship between the sides of a 3, 4, 5 triangle is irrational in nature, but by squaring the sides, the result is rational and commensurate. This would have been understood to point to a world which transcended space, in that it indicated a one-dimensional reality.

 In that world, some things which are incommensurate here,  were commensurate. Which they might have taken to indicate that, beyond that limited form of reality, there was another reality with no dimensions at all, in which all irrational values existed as commensurate with one another.

Plato echoed a range of Pythagorean ideas in his work, including that reality itself exists in no particular place, has no form or shape or colour. He also suggested that forms existed beyond geometrical figures existing in space, and that these were to be accessed in the mind alone.

The Pythagoreans may have understood physical reality to have been generated as the square root of mathematical values in a higher reality. The resulting incommensuration would necessarily generate space. We could not possibly live in a reality which embraced only one dimension, or even none at all. In which case physical reality might have been understood by the ancient Pythagoreans as a compromise of sorts, which made it possible for mankind to live.

Free access to 'The Sacred History of Being' in your Local Library

The Sacred History of Being is now available  free to libraries, and library distributors (as of February 6, 2018)

What this means is that libraries can make as many copies as they like available to library users.

For the past few months copies have been accessible free of charge in the six legal deposit libraries in Britain and Ireland (British Library, London, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, etc). These copies can only be accessed singly, and in the library reading room. This change means that copies of The Sacred History of Being will be available for loan from any library that wishes to hold the book. Anywhere.

If you want to access the book from a local library, you can request that they obtain a copy. When you make your request, you can point out that copies are available free of charge, with the exception of the library distributor Overdrive, which does not distribute books at zero cost (purchase from them will cost $1.99). If there is a demand for the book, there is very little reason for your local library not to get hold of a copy for you.

eBook loans are usually issued with some kind of DRM (Digital Rights Management) software attached to the book. What this means is that the copy you have borrowed will cease to function after the standard loan period, usually around two weeks, depending on where you are. But you can re-order the book from your library as many times as you like. And for free.

If you want a permanent copy of the book, without any DRM associated with it, the book is available commercially from the principal distributor Smashwords, or from Barnes & Noble, Itunes, Blio, and a host of other eBook suppliers, with the exception of Amazon. The cost is usually around $7.99, but the price varies a little from bookseller to bookseller.

The Sacred History of Being has been in the Smashwords bestseller lists for History and Philosophy a number of times in the past two years. The book is published by the Anshar Press. The main distributor is Smashwords. ISBN: 9781311760678

Chapter List for The Sacred History of Being

This is the full chapter list for the edition of The Sacred History of Being, published on November 2, 2015. There is also a set of Reviewer Notes, which provides details about the narrative of the book. 

Preface.

Part One.

A Sense of the Past.
How old is Philosophy?
The Arrival of the Idea of Being.
The West and the Other.
The Golem.
Change and what is Permanent.
The Ontological Argument.
The Ontological Argument in Anselm.
The Ontological Argument in Descartes.
The Nature of Reality in Berkeley.
Hume and Kant on Reality.
The End of the Ontological Argument.

Part Two.

The Sweet Song of Swans.
The Academy.
The Platonic Theory of Being.
Plato’s Theory of Vision.
The Paradox of Knowledge.
Eleven attributes of Being.
Pythagoras and Totality.
Solon in the court of Croesus.
The Complexion of the Dead.
Being in Homer.

Part Three.

Ocean and the Limit of Existence.
Creation.
The Fifty names of Marduk.
The Idea of Being in Israel.
Understanding Creation as a Sacred Tree.
Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree.
The Making and the Renewal of the Gods.
The Ritual sequence and its purpose.
The Nineveh ritual.
The Babylonian ritual.
Finding the Name of the Sacred Tree.
Postscript.

Appendices.

Thomas Taylor on the Ineffable principle.
Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind.
Ashurbanipal on the exercise of Kingship.
Select Bibliography.
Abbreviations

Available Full Chapters

The first five chapters of the book, plus the preface, are available to read in full, by following the links below. A further chapter from part one, which discusses George Berkeley's understanding of the Nature of Reality, and two chapters from part three, 'Ocean and the Limit of Existence', and  'The Idea of Being in Israel', are also available to read in full. Plus one of the appendices, which discusses the Babylonian account of the first sages, and man's acquisition of knowledge. 

Preface

Part One

A sense of the past
How old is Philosophy?
The Arrival of the idea of Being
The West and the Other
The Golem
Change and what is permanent
Recurring Questions
The Ontological Argument
The Ontological Argument in Anselm
The Ontological Argument in Descartes
The Nature of Reality in Berkeley
Hume and Kant on Reality

....

Part Three

Ocean and the Limit of Existence
The Idea of Being in Israel

....

 Appendices

Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind

[Page updated, January 10, 2019]

Our Lady Underground: Aporia and Religious Thought

This is a short notice of a forthcoming article.

The article argues that the outcome of philosophical debate in classical Athens was often thought to have implications for our knowledge of the nature of the reality which we inhabit, and consequently, for the meaning of religion. Apparent failure to reach a satisfactory conclusion to an argument, was sometimes a conclusion which provided insight into the complex nature of reality.

Looked at in this way, philosophical argument about difficult and sometimes intractable problems is about developing an understanding of the nature of the reality in which the argument is intelligible, and which has implications for the meaning of religious thought and practice.

Not all philosophical questions have this kind of importance of course, but the practice of precise and forensic discussion of philosophical questions of any sort prepares the student for those questions which do. This was the main business of the Academy.

'Our Lady Underground: Aporia and Religious Thought' is a companion paper to 'Patterns of thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain', which is expected to be published in the Spring. The paper is discussed here. https://t.co/Nh0xxtvAeT

TY January 12, 2018.