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.

Pharaoh Akhenaten, the Aten, and the History of Ideas (II)

[Mail sent to a specialist in ancient astronomy on February 15, 2019. It is a response to a mail of the 28th January, 2019.]

[...]

I was a bit coy about Akhenaten - there are still things turning up. And some things need more thought. However, the 400 sacrificial tables at Akhenaten’s new city foundation at Akhetaten (the ‘horizon of the Aten’) isn’t new information, but often it is a detail which isn’t mentioned in discussions.

Unlike most Egyptian temple complexes, the temple is open to the sky. As you are probably aware, Akhenaten, at least towards the end, was in conflict with various priesthoods, possibly because his new religious dispensation made himself and his family the sole conduit to the bounty of the gods. Hence the hacking out of references to Amun by his followers, and the hacking out of representations of Akhenaten and the Aten by those whose hegemony was being threatened.

I think Akhenaten or his officials did a calculation about the number of sacrifices performed daily throughout Egypt across all the major priesthoods, and set out to perform the same number of daily sacrifices at Akhetaten. It could not be said therefore, that insufficient sacrifices were being made. This of course is a hypothesis, and is not so far supported by any texts. But to have so many sacrificial tables in one temple means that they served a real rather than a purely symbolic function.

I agree with everything you said about Hamlet’s Mill. And you are correct that academics have ways of disguising what they don’t know, or aren’t sure about, and there is plenty of that in the book. Having an academic career can often be like walking a tightrope over a bed of burning coals, if you are trying to open up uncharted territory. Most academics deliberately avoid risking their reputations with speculative work, and do more boring stuff instead. We should be grateful to Santillana and von Dechend for staying the course and producing a pioneering work, even if the result is difficult and a sometimes frustrating read.

Sometimes of course they know something, but can’t say it, because the insight is something beyond what can be supported by academic evidence, or is beyond what colleagues can accept as credible explanation. This happens more often than you might think. My most important Assyriological contact wrote a whole paper (72 pages) on a body of ideas shared by the scholars in the royal court in the 1st and 2nd millennia BCE, without overt mention of the most important implication of his discussion [...]. I wrote and told him what that implication was. He agreed in his reply, but is still coy about discussing the matter with his peers. It is not always possible for an academic scholar to say what he thinks in public. Sometimes reading academic papers is a bit like reading code.

The H A Rey book is probably as important as you say, but I have not yet read it. I will let you know when I have. It can be hard to know the forms of the constellations in the distant (and not so distant) past. Re-interpreting the shapes according to the details found in the related myths is probably the only way.

When I mentioned the image of an Egyptian god discussed at a lecture in Cambridge (after which I was nearly run down by Stephen Hawking – I had no idea his wheelchair could make around 15 miles per hour), I wasn’t referring to the question of whether an image of a god is a representation of it, or the god itself. What was strange about the image was that the statue was a representation of a representation of the divine, since it was mounted on a sled. I have no idea what significance that image was meant to have, but its existence is a mark of the sophistication of the Egyptian mind,
which saw the physical world in terms of representations (and sometimes representations of representations).

I take your point about the images of the divine in the constellations being representations of things which have a different (and transcendental) kind of existence – without physical form as we understand it. You refer to this as ‘the invisible realm’, which is fine. I generally refer to this realm as ‘the plenum’. I think we both mean the same thing, but we can discuss that as we go.

Representation is a serious business as you point out, and even now, in various places. I used to have difficulty with the humanist tradition in western scholarship, which encouraged the idea that if you wanted to have some of the qualities of Cicero (for example), then you should read the entirety of his extant work, and regularly. And learn to write text in his style. I never liked this at all, since my attitude was that you should read, interpret and understand an author. But I now understand this approach as stemming from the idea that to represent something is to be that something – to some degree at least.

I’ve taken on board your pointers to blog posts, and how to search for some of them. I’m now reading your stuff on a regular basis. And thanks for the chart, and clarification of the role of Ophiuchus. I’m sure you are right. I was struck by the coincidence of the image turning up when it did, and being such a great example.

The article ‘The Horizon of the Aten’ is one I’m still brooding over, but my experience is that it is likely to be written over a couple of days when I least expect it. But you can ask questions in the meantime. It is a partner to the article ‘Polytheism, Monotheism, and the Cult of the Aten’. At: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2018/04/polytheism-monotheism-and-cult-of-aten.html


Best regards,

Thomas

Pharaoh Akhenaten, the Aten, and the History of Ideas (I)

[An extract from recent correspondence with a specialist in ancient astronomy. Akhenaten's reign is not often considered to have been one concerned with a technical understanding of astronomy (though through his veneration of the Divine Aten, his interest in the sky is clear). There are interesting reasons for this neglect]

January 24, 2019

[...]

I’ll respond to your mail in order. First the Egyptian paper.

I had the opportunity to look at pharaoh Akhenaten in some depth at university. His reign was covered in the general course on Egyptian history, largely from the point of view that most scholarly writing on Akhenaten doesn’t fit very well with the evidence. I liked this aspect of the teaching of ancient history in London: a highly critical approach to what could actually be known, which sometimes isn’t very much. Other things I disliked, but I’ll get on to that later.

The title of the upcoming paper is ‘The Horizon of the Aten’ – the Aten being the sun disk, which is most associated with Akhenaten, though not exclusively. Most writing on Akhenaten suggests that his religious reforms were actually innovations, which the priesthoods – particularly the priests of the cult of Amun, probably the most important divine cult in Egypt in the 14th cent B.C.E – regarded as heretical.

At the least, the religious changes instituted by Akhenaten, threatened the power of the cult. It does not follow however, that such changes represented innovation and heresy, whatever the priests of Amun said.

After a little digging last year, I came across a piece of information, never mentioned in college, and which did not appear in any of the books on the reading list. It surfaced first in a book published relatively recently. It is evidence which appears in contemporary texts. It wasn’t deemed worthy of a mention in any of the many studies of the 18th dynasty, because it didn’t appear to make any significant sense in that context.

For me, it was like a bolt from the blue. It made sense of half a dozen other pieces of information rattling around in my head, almost simultaneously. Akhenaten now looked like the adherent of one of the oldest cults in ancient Egypt. This ‘new’ information, made sense of what he understood himself to be doing (it is hard to understand any ruler who builds a temple with 400 sacrificial tables, as he did). A reformer, but not an innovator or heretic at all. The evidence ties his reforms, and the concept of the Horizon of the Aten, with the equinoxes and the precession. A reform which was intended to restore a pattern of thought which was contemporaneous with the earliest of Egyptian dynasties. Several features of the Giza plateau would not otherwise be present. They set things up so they could not possibly have missed the precession.

The new paper connects texts, architecture and cultic evidence to make the case.

Thanks for the information about the King Den tablet, which I had not seen before. I think you may be right about the astronomical aspect to the image. One of the problems in studying ancient history, particularly in the ancient Near East, is that real events are often presented in terms of mythical images, since what happens on earth echoes what is in the sky. The sky is the more real. So sometimes it is difficult to tell whether an image represents a myth, or whether it represents a physical event dressed up in mythical imagery.

A similar issue of what is being represented occurs with images of the gods – when are representations of the gods just that, and when are they the gods themselves? I remember attending a lecture in Cambridge more than twenty years ago where the speaker spent twenty minutes talking about this question, and why the Egyptians would create a statue of a god standing on a sled (they did), which indicated that it was a representation of a statue of the god, and not a representation of the god itself.

I first read Hamlet’s Mill sometime around 1978, which is a long time ago now. I accept the argument, but the book is in many ways poorly constructed, though there is a mass of useful information in there. The fugal aspect of the structure was not likely to be appreciated in academia, and the text is very dense, so I think they did not give a lot of thought to who was going to read it (sometimes writing a book for yourself is the only way). I have read academic books which are much more difficult to read, but which have credibility among academics – I’m thinking particularly of Lynn Thorndikes’ eight volume ‘A history of magic and experimental science’. No points for style or clarity.

I’m not a mathematician, but I’m comfortable with numbers. I worked out pretty early on that the rate of precessional movement means that the intersection of the celestial equator and the ecliptic moves a degree in about 70 years. That is about two diameters of the moon as seen from the Earth. How blind do you have to be in order not to see that? Especially if those observing the sky belong to long-established professional priesthoods, with a background in astronomical observation and lore, and in possession of a temple library?

Why was Hamlet’s Mill shunned by academics? Because as far as the scholarly consensus goes, the argument of the book is faulty in conception, as well as execution. The book was not simply ahead of its time, but it argued outside the paradigmatic frame in which scholars were willing to consider evidence. That’s an important thing in academia: the field in which scholars operate has to have its limits defined. They study and write within a frame in which it is possible to make a case for this or that. It is a mistake to think that academics engage with what the whole range of evidence might have to tell us. It is not about understanding, but about developing an understanding of the subject under study.

This is not altogether a bad thing. Sometimes it is necessary to narrow a focus of interest in order to understand what is being considered. I’ve often engaged in this kind of process myself. It becomes problematic where the artificially constricted parameters ossify into the definition of an academic discipline or sub-discipline. When people talk about the value of interdisciplinary research, they actually mean that the nature of much contemporary research is too narrow to keep students supplied with interesting or useful Ph.D proposals…

Which is why I am working outside academia, and self-publishing my work.

Yes there is a reluctance to see the prevailing paradigm as untenable. But you are right that established paradigms are always difficult to overturn, just because they are established, and a lot of scholars have an investment in preserving the status quo. Is there another agenda? Yes there is. In fact, there are several. For the moment I’ll just pick out a couple of them here (we’ll get through all of them in the course of our conversation I’m sure!).

1} Not everybody who writes about human intellectual history has a practical grasp of astronomy. Or philosophy. Or theology. And sometimes their heads are filled with nonsense ideas, many of which first saw the light of day as late as the European Enlightenment. One of these nonsense ideas is that our distant ancestors were subject to a primitive stupidity, for which the Germans have an appropriately ugly word: ‘Urdummheit’. It is the myth of progress over time. If that notion is firmly
planted in a scholar’s head, then it is clearly straining the bounds of possibility to credit ancient peoples with any kind of understanding of precession. It is just common sense that they wouldn’t notice such a thing. Primitive stupidity is a scholarly presumption which is powerful enough to override the need to engage with facts and observation. There is less of this presumption in academia than there used to be, but it is still there, and not always hiding in the corners.

2) Historians in academia generally work within a paradigm which owes its character to the writings of Karl Marx, as mediated through the writings of Max Weber and other sociologists. This way of looking at things got its foothold in Britain through the London School of Economics in the early years of the twentieth century. What it means is that society is studied in material and economic terms. Ideas are deprecated as fundamentally irrelevant to the forces which have shaped history and human cultural development. This appreciation of the forces which underpin our society is assumed to be universally true, and so is equally applicable to the study of ancient societies. If ancient scholars did not know this to be the case, it was because they were victims of what Marx and Engels called ‘false consciousness’. In other words, history was to be explained in terms of power and propaganda, and ideological struggle between competing groups. All my teachers at university shared this point of view, to some extent at least, but some did allow that it might be too narrow a perspective.

From this point of view, if you are talking about priestly ideas, which you are if you are talking about ancient astronomy, you are talking about a subject which is irrelevant to our understanding of antiquity. The real history of humanity is to be teased out of a knowledge of priestly power and the propaganda developed to support that power. Religious ideas and iconography serve that priestly power, and are to be interpreted in such terms. So the detail of a concern with astronomy, and a knowledge of precession, is, for some historians, beside the point.

I describe myself as a historian of ideas. It is a scholarly discipline, working outside the Marxist-inspired model, which came into existence in the mid 1930s, specifically to deal with the materials and questions other historians were ignoring. The book which kicked-started the discipline was authored by Arthur Lovejoy. It was called ‘The Great Chain of Being’. It considered the concept of ‘plenitude’ from the Greeks up to the European Renaissance. My first book can be understood as an extension of the argument into more remote times.

Best, Thomas

Did the Greeks Invent Philosophy?

In addition to many non-specialist readers here who (I think) find the heretical line of argument in my posts interesting, there are also readers of this blog who are specialists in relevant fields, including classicists, archaeologists, historians, philosophers, theologians, etc. I’m grateful for their interest, and the often well-informed comments and exchanges, both here and via email. But sometimes specialists are more interested in defending academic turf, than in the elucidation of their subject. I’ve recently had such an experience.

I chose to publish first in ebook format, via my own imprint, the Anshar Press. Partly because I anticipated a grim slog trying to find a publisher or an agent willing to take on a project which rejects several scholarly constructs which we use to make sense of our intellectual history. The most important of these constructs is the notion that the Greeks invented philosophy. The corollary of this is that there is no intellectual history worthy of the name before the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.

This construct is a notion, and not a fact. It is not a fact because the evidence does not support it. If it is not supported by the evidence, why do people believe it?

Such a long tale to tell! So many interlocking reasons! I unpicked much of this construct in The Sacred History of Being (2015). A close reading of both Plato and Aristotle shows that the Greeks had a quite different understanding of what knowledge is from ourselves. They also had a quite different notion of how knowledge is acquired from ourselves, and Plato and Aristotle broadly agree about how it is done. It has nothing to do with the human senses, and physical experience. All knowledge was understood to exist in a supersensible and wholly transcendent realm. The soul was thought to mirror that transcendent realm, and therefore to offer connection with it. The upshot of this way of looking at things is that knowledge is accessed directly by the mind rather than the senses.

In the modern world we have turned this upside down entirely. We assume (and that is all that it is, an assumption) that all knowledge is necessarily mediated through sensory experience. It is understood through the categories of thought employed by the human reason, which (we imagine) reflect (in some way) the structure of the objectively real physical reality which exists outside our minds. This is a scholarly construct (one might even describe it as a scholarly compact) which has become a given since the European Enlightenment.

So we read Plato and Aristotle upside down, and effectively reject those parts of their writings which do not fit with our own way of understanding things. Our understanding of the main components of classical philosophy is therefore quite different from the understanding of philosophy in the Athenian Academy, and so scholars study classical philosophy outside its proper context. Worse, scholars have no idea what the proper context is, or why it might be important. As a result, many aspects of classics and the history of philosophy are necessarily problematic.

Something happened in addition to the development of a post Enlightenment over-reliance on common sense ideas about how we know things, and make sense of them. We lost a key ancient idea. That idea is the idea of the plenum. The plenum is that state of reality, conceived to exist beyond space and time, which stands behind the generation of space and time. Though it embraces the reality of space and time, it has no existence in space and time. It has no size, no location, and no properties other than being the wholly transcendental reality in which physical reality can exist. It does not move, it is not subject to change, it does not think in any way we could properly comprehend. It is what it is.

This is the idea behind Plato’s discussion of the form of the Good, and of a transcendental reality. It is an idea which has been understood (by some) for much of European history, and since classical times. But it has been much less understood since the Enlightenment. This is because it is an idea which runs counter to common sense, and which cannot make sense to us in terms of the realities of the world of things which have physical existence. Even if such a thing did exist, and was conceived to exist, it has been imagined that it would have no impact on the world of the senses and physical existence. As a consequence, it is, for the most part, treated as a matter of no importance.

This view is a mark of the poverty of the modern mind, even among the intellectually able. As I said, the plenum is that state of reality, which was once conceived to exist beyond space and time, which stands behind the generation of space and time, in which we have our existence. We may not be able to measure it, weigh it, discuss its form, etc., but if such a thing is responsible for the generation of the physical world, the concept deserves our attention. It was Plato’s principal concern. He was always looking to the ‘one thing’. And that one thing could be apprehended by the mind.

The Plenum can spoken of in different ways. It can be called transcendental reality, reality itself, Being, The One, Totality, etc. When I came to write The Sacred History of Being, I chose to use the term ‘Being’ through much of the text, because that was one of the terms Plato used. But I explored the different ways in which Being can be referenced. So a major purpose of writing the book was to explore the scope of a key idea in classical philosophy in something like its original context, and to restore its understanding. It remains a difficult concept to master, but we do ourselves no favours in not knowing what it means, and why it was such an important concept.

That restoration by itself makes the book potentially a valuable contribution to making sense of classical philosophy, and its actual origins. Provided of course that I have done the job properly, and not littered the text with misunderstandings and errors. Altogether, I spent nearly twelve years on constructing the text. I took the task seriously.

My background is unusual, in that in addition to my interest in Greece, philosophy and the history of ideas, I also studied Mesopotamian languages, history and culture. I was struck very early on in my studies by the range of evidence which suggested strongly that the Assyrians and Babylonians had a clear conception of the Plenum, and the idea of Being, and that there was a connection with their religion. One king even included the title ‘King of Totality’ in the string of epithets which described his importance. I realised that there was a level of cultural continuity between Greece and Assyria in particular in terms of ideas of the nature of reality, and also in terms of an understanding of moral action.

So, not only was The Sacred History of Being restoring clarity to our picture of classical philosophy, it provided something of a comparative cultural context for the emergence of philosophy in Greece. A comparative context which could be followed in Assyria back to the 14^th century B.C.E.

Occasionally I send off letters to publishers offering to submit work which they might be interested in publishing. Sometimes they say yes, and ask to see the manuscript. That’s fine, whether they accept the manuscript for publication or not - they bothered to look at the work. You might think that a book such as The Sacred History of Being would generate a lot of interest among academic publishing houses which focus on philosophy, classics, religion, ancient history, etc. I noticed in April that a major academic publishing house had on their list a book which covered some of the later territory of The Sacred History of Being.  I drafted a letter describing my book and its scope, and included a commendation of the work from an eminent scholar (I’ve edited that out). I sent this mail to the appropriate editor at the publishing house on the afternoon of the 2^nd of May this year, and offered to send the manuscript to them in PDF.

What happened? I got an email the very next afternoon, declining to look at the book, after consultation with other list managers. My work ­– possibly the most interesting manuscript they could receive in a month of Sundays – was rejected, sight unseen, by three people (specialists in classics, religion and philosophy). What was the reason given? The book did not fit the list. Which is standard code for ‘we don’t want your book’. What the real reasons were for the rejection I am afraid to imagine.

The point of posting the exchange is not to embarrass anyone, so I’ve blurred names and other information which would identify the publishing house. The point is that it is extremely difficult to get a hearing for radical scholarship from major publishing houses. And that manuscripts can be (and sometimes are) rejected without being looked at at all. Rejecting books with radical arguments without even a cursory review suggests that defending existing scholarly turf is a major part of the game. That’s not what it is supposed to be about. 

[click to expand the images].

I did expand on what some of the difficulties facing my project might be as far back as 2005. I drafted, slightly facetiously, a publishers internal memo outlining why such a book should not be published. You might want to take a look at that, since not much has changed since then. Keeping the Enlightenment Agenda Alive.

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.

A Mesopotamian Perspective on the Origins of Philosophy

(An extract from correspondence with the philosopher Adrian W. Moore, concerning The History of the Infinite).

From: Thomas Yaeger

Sent: 16 April 2017 18:46

To: Adrian W. Moore

Cc: Thomas Yaeger 

Subject: A History of the Infinite, and The Sacred History of Being

Dear Adrian,

I still haven't got round to writing a compact review of your radio series on 'The History of the Infinite', but I will get around to it eventually. In the meantime the ten episode summaries have been accessed 1266 times as of this afternoon, which is not bad for a blog page on such a specialised subject.

When we were corresponding last autumn about the series, I didn't say much about myself. I have a background in philosophy, classics, and also ancient Near Eastern History. I studied mainly at UCL and SOAS. I was particularly interested in your series in order to understand how the question of the infinite in history is currently being handled by academia. The series gave me an excellent overview of that, for which thanks.

However, there are real problems with the current and conventional view of how the infinite was understood by ancient civilizations, the cultural function it served, its geographic spread, and who adopted it first. It doesn't look problematic from the point of view of those academics who specialise in ancient Greece and classical civilization, because they have grown up with the idea that the business of dealing with abstractions in a philosophical way is firmly established as a Greek phenomenon, and an incontrovertible fact.

Most of the evidence to the contrary never passes before the eyes of classicists and specialists in ancient philosophy, precisely because they are specialists in their subject. The evidence is elsewhere. In addition, we select the evidence which is available, in order to provide support for the current model of how the practice of philosophy started, how ideas of infinity and Being came to be discussed, and not to undermine that view. This process has been going on since the Enlightenment.

Since I studied Mesopotamian history, culture and thought, I have a different perspective. I spent quite a few years in careful study, and came to the conclusion that the origin of philosophy is not down to some autocthonous burst of intellectual genius in ancient Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries, B.C.E, but is the result of the development of patterns of though associated with divine cult around the Mediterranean during the 1st and 2nd millennia B.C.E.

So you have looked at the history of the infinite from the point of view of the established history of philosophy. I have looked at the history of the infinite from the point of view of other cultures around the Mediterranean, principally the Assyrian and Babylonian oikumene, and Israel. As a consequence, our pictures of the cultural history of the idea of infinity are radically different.

It is true that we have no formal discussion of philosophy from Mesopotamia as we find in the pages of Plato and Aristotle, but we know that the ideas of infinity and Being were present because so much information survives about Mesopotamian culture in the form of historical records, ritual texts, liturgies for their festivals, their art, iconography, sculpture, etc. And their extensive literature. These things give us many clues as to the meaning and purpose of divine cult in Mesopotamia. The questions and conjectures that underpin divine cult are philosophical ones about the nature of the infinite, the nature of reality itself, and of Being. 

In fact, it is philosophy in Greece which seems oddly isolated, as not being closely associated with Greek religious practice, and with the other phenomena which form part of their extensive cultural life – divination, augury, magic, sacrifice, the worship of divine images and statues, and the rituals of everyday life.

This isolation of philosophy in Greece from Greek cultic life is more apparent than real however. For 150 years in the 1st Millennium B.C.E. (7th and 8th centuries), Assyria is the best documented civilization in antiquity. Many things survive from there which do not survive elsewhere, such as rituals for the inauguration of divine images. We have none from Greece. Close comparison of these ritual texts with Plato’s discussion of the Forms, spread across several of his dialogues, shows that he is talking about a widely-spread philosophical rationale for divine cult, and in fact the theory and practice of idolatry. The parallels are very striking. 

I’ve written a book on the subject – The Sacred History of Being (2015). This looks at why we frame our intellectual history the way we do, and sketches out an alternative construction of that history.  I would be happy to send this to you, if you would be interested in an alternative view of the history of the infinite, which explores the idea in its original cultural context.

Currently it is available as an eBook, and can be read using Adobe Digital Editions (freely downloadable from Adobe’s website) which is available for a wide range of hardware platforms. It is around 3.5 mb in size, and travels well as an email attachment.

Best regards,

Thomas Yaeger

At 10:52 17/04/2017, you wrote:

Dear Thomas,

Many thanks for your message.  Yes, I would be very interested in receiving a copy of your book, and I thank you in anticipation.

Best wishes,

Adrian Moore

Episodes of my BBC Radio 4 series A History of the Infinite can be heard at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07wr1lz

Dear Adrian,

Ok then. The ePub format file is attached.

I would recommend reading the chapters in sequence on the first reading, since many of the chapters supply information which is useful for understanding subsequent chapters. As you will see from the chapter list, much of the Mesopotamian discussion is in part three.

The main purpose of the book is to bring to the attention of specialists in western philosophy, classics, and ancient history, the presence of  ideas in Assyria and Babylon which show strong parallels with those present in Greece. So the reader is at no point hit with a wall of cuneiform script. Or indeed, any at all. The quality of the writing has already been commended - I worked hard to make the text readable.

Take your time - you have other things to do, and I can wait until you are ready to respond. Thanks for your interest.

Best regards,

Thomas Yaeger.

***

[Evading the Infinite, the chapter published in 'Man and the Divine',  a critical review of both Moore's BBC series on Radio 4, and his argument,  is available at: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2017/10/obscured-by-clouds-critical-review-of.html]

Page updated October 5, 2018.