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.