Reviews for Psychology and Psychic Culture 1895

The average rating for Psychology and Psychic Culture 1895 based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-09-14 00:00:00 Michael Sysavath The author of this lecture does a really good job of explaining what the thinker meant, then quoting the thinker, and then restating what it means, a very effective way of presenting information. Avicenna, one of the great thinkers mentioned in this book, completely blew me away. I really like Hegel's "Phenomenology" available at audible, but it can be a difficult listen. Avicenna, who wrote 800 years before Hegel covers the same concepts but in a way that is more accessible. "Necessary existence is absolute being" a concept both thinkers develop fully and ultimately leading to spirit that becomes aware of itself through the understanding of the absolute notion. He explains Hegel better than Hegel, and he did it 800 years before Hegel wrote. I'd be hard press to come up with something that Hegel covered in for which Avicenna didn't have similar thoughts on the matter. Al-Ghazali predates Descartes with his quest for certainty over skepticism and reason over faith and it took a Western Enlightenment to understand what Al-Ghazali knew hundred of years earlier. Another thinker prominently featured was "The Commentator" as St. Thomas Aquinas refereed to Averroes. Aquinas, who did more to put the Medieval Church on firm logical and philosophical foundation then anyone within the Western tradition and thus opening a gateway for Western science to flourish clearly was influenced (and acknowledged such) by Averroes. I forever more will never let somebody say that "Western Philosophy" is redundant without challenging that statement by quoting from the thinkers covered in this book. Hegel might mark the end of metaphysics as Heidegger said, but Avicenna was there first. My only real complaint with this book is its short length. I think at one credit a slightly better deal than this short book would be the lectures by Dorsey Armstrong on "Great Minds of the Medieval World" available at audible. She covers almost all of the thinkers mentioned in this book and a whole lot more. But don't get me wrong, I think this book is wonderful and would recommend both lectures as incredibly good value.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-09-05 00:00:00 Gary Pavlovec An extremely competently produced, written, and executed audiobook. It felt like listening to a documentary, and could have very easily been made into one. The introduction was very well done, but I was surprised by how little Averroes was discussed (since his name is the most common one I've run across in terms of Islamic philosophy). The section on Avicenna was humbling (because of how much of a genius polymath he was) and in another way it was humbling to know that essentially all of the Modernist Christian Apologetic points (arguing starting from a first cause, etc.) seem to come from him. The next question is how influenced by Avicenna was Aquinas? It's curious that they have similar arguments and wrote around the same time. I loved the transition from the cerebral Avicenna to the nuanced fideist (sufi) Al-Ghazali. It was interesting to know that there's as wide a gap within Islam as there is within Catholicism, with Aquinas and St. Francis being rough Christian equivalents to Avicenna and Al-Ghazali respectively. I was surprised by the seeming universalism of Al-Farabi, by the "philosophy is the source of all truth" that Avicenna promulgated, and by the very premodern (or perhaps even postmodern) questioning of Al-Ghazali who rejected philosophy as a way to ultimate truth (not unlike Luther) and who as a result embraced mysticism and revelation as the only means of ultimate truth (and last but not least, the Erasmus-esq Averroes). I found interesting the point made by Al-Ghazali about both those who seek mysticism and those who seek pure reason as means of solidifying their faith/worldview as both being rejections of traditional authority (scripture, tradition, church fathers/hadith, etc.), specifically: "They have failed to see that a change from one kind of intellectual bondage to another is only a self-deception, a stupidity."