Exploring thoughts about Philosophy, Spirituality, Religion and related topics….
My Business Is To Create (Blake’s Infinite Writing) by Eric G. Wilson (broadcast 10-17-2011) Based on and celebrating William Blake’s personification of creativity in action, Wilson provides an indispensable writer’s handbook that is a call to consider life itself as a creative act. A small book of just some 85 pages, not including notes, it manages to offer an exquisitely written distillation of Blake’s approach to imagining the world and the effect it has had on so many of those who followed him, from Yeats to Ginsberg, from Emily Dickinson to Phillip K. Dick. Included along the way are wise words for all who write or want to write. A book to excite the way the reader, and the writer, looks at life. Find out more at http://www.wfu.edu/~wilsoneg/
Paul reviews (broadcast 9-12-2011) Paul discusses the family resemblances between the ancient esoteric poem by Parmenides, a pre-Socratic philosopher as discussed by Vishwa Adluri in his recently released Parmenides, Plato and Mortal Philosophy (Continuum) (click on title for more information) and some of the ideas developed by Indian Tantric philosopher Abhinavagupta in his famous work the Paramarthasara [The Essence of Highest Reality] as revealed by the great Indian Pandit, Swami Lakshmanjoo. Click on Abhinavagupta’s Paramarthasara (The Essence of the Highest Reality) for more information.
The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry by Raymond Barfield (broadcast 5-30-2011) Beginning with the famous passage in Plato’s Republic in which Socrates exiles the poets from the city, concerned that their influence interfered with the search for true wisdom, the reader is invited to trace the history of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry. It is a story that travels through the works of thinkers in the Western tradition ranging from Plato to the contemporary thinker Mikhail Bakhtin. Engaging, thought provoking, finely written and easily read, Raymond Barfield writes with the “assumption that the human search for truth about the world, ourselves, and the divine is worthwhile.” To find out more go to Cambridge University Press.