After reading the article on the sonnets, I stayed at your site and read several more articles. Nothing disappointed me. I like your wide breadth of knowledge. I like your balanced and calm presentation of arguments. I like your choice of subjects. I want to read every back issue of the newsletter.

Your book was an essential source of support and guidance as my instincts swiftly resumed a front-and-center role in my life and thoughts (after being relegated to the side for a year and a half). It also gave additional strength to my deepening objections to the academic approach and the prioritization of public reality over private reality. It stimulated my thinking by providing me with fresh insights.

Can I buy a copy of your book “book of aphorisms” from you after it is issued? Or can you tell me if the book will be issued in Australia?

Thanks in anticipation.

Cheers

Please don’t let any negative comments concerning what you write stop the newsletter. You are certainly more conservative in your view than I, but I look forward to each issue. As a college biology instructor at a junior college, you expand my horizons in philosophy and literature.

Once, you made mention of a subscription price for Phlit, but you did so kind of tongue-in-cheek. If you were serious I am willing to contribute. Phlit is well worth it to me.

Best wishes.

Also: have you ever checked out Colin Wilson’s stuff? He became famous in England for The Outsider which he published in his early 20s and came out in the 1950s. I’ve been reading his autobiography Dreaming To Some Purpose. He is also a big believer in “the occult”. He wrote of his book Beyond the Occult:

“I tried to put everything about mysticism and the paranormal I had learned in the past 20 years [into it]. I regard it as my best book” (Dreaming To Some Purpose, p. 347).

Your writing on “Roots” really enchanted me, although, “enchanted” is not the right word but I can’t think of something else :-) right now. I want to use it as it is in my newsletter. I have just started a newsletter for writers.... I have a feeling that your article could bring a sense of quality to my next issue, and it will give me immense satisfaction. So please don’t say No. I’ll give you full credit.

I would like to wholeheartedly congratulate you not just for their style and content, but also for the generosity that prompted you to put them on-line.

Last year, I stumbled on a couple of fascinating websites I think you’d enjoy. One is THE QUANTUM NIETZSCHE, maintained by Dr. William Plank. Unfortunately, the text of his book of the same name is no longer available for free on his website, but the book, I can promise you, is well worth reading by anyone and everyone with an interest in Nietzsche, and an interest in how quantum physics up-end old notions of “reality” and “truth”. I don’t think you’ll be shocked by anything Plank writes, but I do think he gives alternative means of tying together the various themes you keep revisiting in your essays. (You can also read portions of THE QUANTUM NIETZSCHE at Google Books, which excerpts various passages from the book.) Here’s a link to Plank’s homepage (make sure to check out his essay entitled “The Implications of Quantum Non-locality...”): http://www.msubillings.edu/CASFaculty/Plank/.

The other website I came across, completely by chance, is even more fascinating and thought-provoking. It’s called PERCEPTIONS, and the author, one Ray Dickenson, is a brilliant man, a true original. Read what Dickenson calls his UEF theory (unified energy field): if this theory is substantially correct, then there simply IS no valid objection to “the occult,” to “mysticism,” to mental telepathy or what you call “action at a distance” or “mutual arising”, etc., etc. Here’s the link (and make sure to check out his Index at the top of the page for links to all sorts of fascinating essays): http://www.perceptions.couk.com. Best wishes!

I said, well, what about this person, Jim Hammond? I described your work and newsletters to him and he speculated there was maybe just you, and that was it!

But I am really not trying to be kind although I do enjoy to be kind. Only sending you back the true spark that I found in your written thoughts and fascinations with the greatest thinkers, and creative minds in history, which to me you seem to understand better than most....

Your approach and attitude corresponds to how I think most of these people would do things themselves. Communicate fearlessly and clearly without the fuss of too much protocol and pretension.... Anyway, this is enough for now. But again: Thank you, first of all for your work, your page, and your fight for — and defending of ‘real’ philosophy, and creative thought in general. I love reading your deep, intelligent thoughts in your crystal clear English.

A very interesting piece. I am an undergraduate philosophy student, and my professors have always divided American philosophy into analytic vs. continental, where analytic relies on logic and reason, and continental, while not discussed much, is generally described as postmodern fluff. I have always felt that this was a false dichotomy. I am an admirer of both Thoreau and Emerson, but I also enjoy discussing the logic underlying the Frege vs. Mill theories of names.

What do you think of Herbert Marcuse and his polymorphous perversity?....

p.s. Learned a lot from your two descriptions of life in China.

Jaeger not only knew the totality of the Greek literature and philosophy but he wrote as you mention, profound interpretations of the Greek masterpieces. His comments at times are touched by lyricism. I invite you to read the chapter “The Tragic Man of Sophocles.” I have read Paideia so many times and always with great profit.

I would love to show my edition of Paideia in Spanish. It has accompanied me for many years.

The first time I ever heard about Wittgenstein was from a backwoods philosopher up in northern Minnesota. He showed me some sheets of paper with aphorisms written down that boggled my mind.

“To pray is to think about the meaning of life.” (Wittgenstein) I thought this was a strange but wonderful revelation from an old Norwegian Lutheran. To pray is doing philosophy! That was so much better to me than doing the church prayer thing. I asked him to leave the sheets with me a day so I could copy them down by hand into my notebook of maxims. Later I discovered that these sayings came from Wittgenstein’s “Notebooks 1914-1916” — the stuff he wrote during the war when he was a soldier in the trenches, thinking about mathematics and death. These notebooks are a good place to start Wittgenstein. Even better, I suppose is his “On Certainty” — Wittgenstein’s most accessible book, some say, it is a series of answers to arguments by G.E. Moore. To me it is still the TRACTATUS though. Another ton of bricks on my way of thinking and writing. “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”

To me it is not so much what Wittgenstein thought. Rather, it is his example of HOW to think with clarity. It is a method that rubs off, so to speak. You do not come away from Wittgenstein without his sentences lingering as a way to continue your thinking.

I’ve read every biography and memoir on Wittgenstein that I could find. He was able to whistle the canon of the Schubert songs well enough to perform with piano accompaniment! His brother was the famous pianist, Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in WWI and for whom Ravel composed his great Piano Concerto for left hand. I’m a big fan of Wittgenstein as you can see.

P.S. Did you read the Jung in Africa book by Blake Burleson? Good stuff.

I did find your article on education interesting. I live in Reading, England and education here is ultimately controlled by central government, both system seem to me to have inherent Pros and cons (’twas ever thus).

Many thanks

I’ve come to some of the same conclusions as you regarding reason vs. intuition and the subconscious. I think that the conception of reason prevalent in the West, and so heavily influenced by science, is sterile. (I found your discussion of Joseph Ratzinger’s speech and Lee Harris’s Weekly Standard article, which I read, interesting on this score).

I didn’t always feel that way as I got interested in ideas by reading Ayn Rand as a Freshman in college (in 1996). When I read Walden in May of 2003 it really crystallized for me a lot of the discontents I had with Objectivism (Ayn Rand’s philosophy, which I had already moved away from) — which is, I think, the absolute best (and influential) contemporary embodiment of the philosophy of secular reason, of the Enlightenment.

I discovered Schopenhauer early in graduate school and that led me to William Barrett’s wonderful Irrational Man — have you read it? I highly recommend that book given your interests.

We will be looking forward to hear the “rest of the story”.

I came across your site after doing a search for any discussions or writings comparing the esthetic theories of Oscar Wilde to Nietzsche.

I immediately lost myself in your website.... I have been spending the last month reading an old high school textbook I had on world history.... It’s only very recently that I became interested in ancient Greek and Roman culture. I think it began when I picked up a book on Sparta a few months ago, and from then on it expanded to reading selections from Plutarch. I am currently attempting to read Sophocles.

I am interested in Greek philosophy and literature, the lives of military leaders throughout history, anything relating to Nietzschean philosophy and perspective, and modern literature as well. Your site has provided an astonishing synthesis of the things I’ve been introduced to and contemplating for these past months and years.

I look forward to reading your newsletter.

feedback
back to home page
make a donation via PayPal