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Noframes
Because of the way images work with this text, a frameless view is the most enjoyable way to explore it.
Whenever you have had enough of a framed view, just select noframes from the menu bar at the top or bottom of each section. You may even select frameless navigation by using the contents, or references, or comment text links at the bottom of each section. Next resize the window to about half screen width. Selections made from the links on these pages control a second browser window.
Frames
Frame oriented views of the text are invoked when contents, or references, or comment is selected from the menu bar at the top and bottom of each section. These framed views make it possible to navigate within the main text in different ways, and also to access information supplementing the main text (as described below).
Javascript
Javascript is used to establish and synchronize framesets, and to handle comment forms and statistics. Javascript, because it runs on the client rather than the server, should also make it possible for you to easily download, set up, and use a local copy of this site on your own hard disk if you wish. Please turn your Javascript on if it is now off.
Response and Commentary Links
Each section has its own page for comments and supplementary information submitted by readers of this text. Readers may also have their comment linked to specific text or may introduce relevant links to external sites.
It would be wonderful to see the site evolve on this basis.
Linked Index of Names
The references page combines an 'index of names' with a bibliography (see below). Each indexed name has links to its first use in each section in which it appears. Indexed names which appear more than once in any section have their first letter colored as a link to their next use in that section. Annotated Bibliography
In the references page, the work and works of selected authors are further characterized. It is my belief that the books recommended in these notes constitute superior access to many of contemporary philosophy's central issues. Book and author names in green link to pages at Amazon.com, where most may be purchased at significant discounts.
Enlarged Images
Most of the images which have roles in the text function as links to substantially larger versions of themselves. Downloading art must surely be one of the finest uses of bandwidth on the net, a pause that refreshes. Moving your mouse over any image will yield some identifying information. As this site develops I will try to enrich the content of the pages carrying the larger images with links and supplementary text. Links to larger images load the image in a second window, which you should allow to remain open.
Resource Links
Since its inception in March 1998, the biggest change to this site has been enlargement of the links page up to about two dozen reciprocally linked sites. I guess you could say these sites are this one's virtual neighbors, and you might want to go to the links page to get a better sense of the neighborhood, as well as to access some very substantial resources.
This site developed with Navigator 4.03 and Arachnophilia 2.4, and adjusted for IE 4.0. Because of W3c standards compliance issues it looks best in Netscape. It also needs at least 800 by 600 screen resolution, and more than 256 colors. For easy adjustment of your display if you are using a Windows system I recommend installing the free Microsoft utility Quickres on your desktop. Also if you do not have the excellent free Microsoft 'Internet fonts' such as Georgia and Comic Sans on your Windows or Mac system, get them here. After you see how Georgia works on this site you may want to set it as your browser's default.
Please Note: frames may not function in a few older browsers. If you encounter difficulties with the frames, use the 'two window' reference system activated from the text links above each section's notes.
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The challenge to reconnect with seminal and transformative elements concealed within the Judeo-Greek tradition.
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Thinking crosses from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth century, but its cultural centering does not hold.
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The roles of ideas change for thinking as the centrality of process and temporality gain recognition. Is thinking more like science or art?
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Earlier ways thinking had shifted in its relations with ideas; Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy, G. W. F. Hegel's dialectics, the emergence of ideology.
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In a quest to cure itself of ideology and find its proper heir, philosophy contemplates ending itself or turning itself inside-out.
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Hinges of revolutions in thinking. Roles of ideas in cognition versus 'transformative practice' at the threshold of the Twentieth century.
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New foundations for subjectivity: Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and Wilhelm Diltheys' hermeneutics show how immersion in presence opens thinking beyond ideas.
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New foundations for objectivity: concepts as forms of potential for experience in Alfred North Whitehead and Friedrich Nietzsche. The reach and synthesis of concepts as forms of potential exhibits thinking's openness toward the future.
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New foundations for meaning: In Ernst Cassirer and Rudolf Steiner myth uncovers metaphor as meaning's deepest roots and as the basis of thinking's openness to the past. Religion's way of conjoining presence, future and past as opennesses.
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Martin Heidegger's revolutionary attempt to integrate thinking's openness to future, past, and present. His need to reshape Truth's meaning.
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Factors missing from Heidegger's kind of temporal thinking; Nietzsche's values on play and life; Paul Ricoeur's exploration of metaphor and narrative temporality; Susanne Langer's organic approach to symbolic form.
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Modeling the integration of factors required for a comprehensively temporal thinking. Gregory Bateson's perspective. Meaning's situation between objectivity and subjectivity. Henri Bergson and William James show up again. Is Plurality more basic than Unity?
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Gilles Deleuze's 'polyrhythmic' approach to objectivity and its impact on the status of concepts as given in VI(b), above.
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Emmanuel Levinas grounds subjectivity in exposure and expression; the significance for Husserl's objectives as described in VI
(a), above.
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Temporal thinking is pluralistc. Proximity. Understandings of Mind and Life can guide each other by their common ground of individualization and integration. The dimensions of temporal openness isolated in the three parts of section VI, above, meet in lived experience as sense, concept, and meaning. The challenge for thinking of a 'wisdom of love'.
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An appendix to the main text, Tracing the Notion of Difference considers, with the additional help of David Bohm's, Ludwig Wittgenstein's, and Jacques Derrida's ideas: (a) aspects of difference which are contemporary for both science and philosophy, (b) problems with formalizing the notion and its variant meanings, (c) difference's concealments in the history of ideas, (d) its relation to temporality and plurality for thinking, and (e) how difference complements proximity for outflanking the tradition's principle of identity.
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Last updated July 7, 1999. Site changes since inception have involved further streamlining the site's load times, adding more bibliographic and music links to Amazon.com, enhancements of browser compatibilites through cascading style sheets, and several additional notes. I have lately also made aesthetically significant layout and font changes. If you downloaded a local copy of this site before July 7, 1999, I suggest you download the current version of think1.zip, particularly if you plan to install the upcoming and amazing Netscape 5.
Meanwhile, temptations arise to supplement this text from ongoing explorations. The chimera of 'cognitive science' shows instances of genuine hybrid vigor. Despite its murky genealogy, equivocal objectives, compromised vocabulary, and factional hair-splittings, we need to be clear that when cognitive science brings the issue of mind's quantum connection into proximity with thermodynamically framed complexity theory and with new varieties of phenomenology, we are offered entire re-envisionings of what should count as real for experience.
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Cognitive science's quantum connection relies mainly on radical 'first principles' deriving from either
David Bohm
or Alfred North Whitehead (the latter often through Roger Penrose's work). If one allows a door toward temporally rooted non-locality to be held open in either of these directions, what then enters from thermodynamics, biology, and phenomenology, can make a giant step for experience seem tantalizingly close. Hence a future for this site could involve some wrapping of its content by threads bringing to bear elements of Tor Norretrander's transcendent popularization of thermodynamic complexity theory, elements of Lynn Margulis' understanding of the role of endosymbiosis in cell evolution, and elements of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's revolutionary phenomenological reframings of the origins of language and the symbolic functions of communication in the light of sensory/corporeal appropriations of the 'facts of life' : sex and death.
The ubiquitous Neo-Darwinian picture of evolutionary dynamics these days goes something like this: random variations produce the capacity to throw spears and then succeed in leveraging that capacity into the ability to program computers. Margulis and Sheets-Johnstone are broadly relevant for correcting such absurd accounts toward what should be obvious: symbiogenesis and sexual selection far overshadow randomness and survival selection as primary engines of evolutionary innovation. Such an appreciation, besides implying cultural imperatives which deviate from accepted norms, combines with the mathematical evidence of Godel's theorem, and the work of our bolder physicists, to support a key notion of this exposition: the complementary and temporalizing principles of proximity and difference are more fit to characterize the foundations of Mind's experience than are accounts which ground Mind's experience in logic, utility, computation, or a principle of identity (the latest of which is Richard Dawkins' "me-me's").
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Tor Norretranders
The User Illusion :
Cutting Consciousness Down to Size
Lynn Margulis
Symbiotic Planet :
A New Look at Evolution
Microcosmos : Four Billion Years of
Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors
Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia,
Symbiosis, and Evolution
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
The Roots of Thinking
The Roots of Power :
Animate Form and Gendered Bodies
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