Author Description

Ionian and Cartesian Consciousness, a work in philosophical anthropology, is the second part of a history of religion from prehistory to the dawn of the Medieval period with specific regard to the origin and development of Christianity. It commences with a description of the revolution in cognition that took place in Greek Ionia c. 600 BCE, when Western ideation became bounded by a false dichotomy between appearance and reality that lead to an Either/Or. The central concerns are with the metaphysical and ethical issue of immortality, and with the spiritual illness of the West. The bounded cognition of modernity that was established in the Greek and Roman period is subjected to scrutiny from the vantage of a higher stage of consciousness, designated Kantian, subjective consciousness. The philosophy and theology of Plato is a central concern of the work. It examines afresh such issues as the conception of sin as desire of the Flesh, the doctrine of the Fall of Man, the typography of Hell, Orphism, human identity, proofs of the immortality of the soul from within Ionian consciousness and the transcendental deduction. There is a penetrating and fresh analysis of the human experience of remorse and despair that builds on the phenomenology of Kierkegaard. On the basis of the study of the history of ideas and associated religious consciousness, Ionian and Cartesian Consciousness advances radical new insights into Greek and Roman history: the relationship in the exchange of ideas between Greece, Persia and India, the religious history of classical Athens, the roots of Roman religion in Etruscan culture, and the reformation of Roman religion in Roman pre-history. Building on the history of archetypes began in the first volume, it traces the emergence of the Christ archetype though the mediation of the Prometheus and Hercules archetypes, the decay of Pagan belief, and the rise of Stoicism. Ionian and Cartesian Consciousness is the second of a three-part series: Immortality, T