The concrete without the universal becomes trivial. The universal without the concrete becomes irrelevant —Alfred N. Whitehead Within Vico’s historicism verum/factum, life/thought, form/content, subjective/objective are distinguishable but not separable. They are complementary to each other. Vico was acutely aware that to treat real concrete moments of Man’s history as mere moments of something higher is…
1. A friend of mine once sought a teaching position at a somewhat New Age spiritual college. He‘s a Buddhist and also a scholar with high standards. In a job interview with the dean he asked, “What’s your attitude about rigor?” “You mean rigor mortis?” the dean asked, conveying an assumption that rigor killed the…
We interact with the world on several planes and in different modes: the psychological, the spiritual, the emotional, the rational, and the sensual. These are not fully separable aspects of our being, and we all of us have a minimum of each of these potentials. During life’s experiences, depending on the context, one or more…
Section 1: Introduction More is demanded of myth than of science. A creation myth needs to provide an overall meaning and context for our lives, addressing our values and our hopes as much as our understanding. Physical cosmology, of course, does none of these things. And yet, physical cosmology is globally accepted by all modern…
1. Introduction The Problem The central theme of this conference “Transdisciplinarity and the Unity of Knowledge – beyond the Science and Religion debate” is a very important and relevant one for the world that we are facing and living in today. The quest for the ‘unity’ of our knowledge is being contemplated against a backdrop…
A friend who once lived in England told me that the word sorry is used differently there, that it is less an apology than an expression of sympathy. Over the years my friend and I have listed alternative meanings of the word sorry and assigned each a country of origin (without much regard to real…