Transformations in Consciousness: The Metaphysics and Epistemology. Franklin Merrell-Wolff Containing His Introceptualism

by Franklin Merrell-Wolff

Overview

This book presents a philosophy that includes the enlightenment experience—that embraces the wider ranges opened by the door of realization—while not excluding the contents of the more common experience. A realization in consciousness that finds no place or adequate recognition in philosophical systems proves the inadequacy of those systems. The author first briefly surveys the principal schools of modern Western philosophy in order to show how they fall short. He then presents his philosophy grounded on the authority of direct realization resulting from a transformation in consciousness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791426760
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	07/06/1995
Series:	Philosophy
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	346
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

After graduate work in philosophy at Harvard, Franklin Merrell-Wolff accepted a position as professor of mathematics at Stanford. A few months later, he abandoned a promising academic career in order to facilitate his quest for a third way of knowing—a way apart from sense perception and conceptual cognition. "I found myself in sight of the limits to which our present egoistic consciousness has reached, and also had found adumbrations of another kind of consciousness where alone, it seemed, solution of the subject-object consciousness could be found." He was the author of Franklin Merrell-Wolff's Experience and Philosophy: A Personal Record of Transformation and a Discussion of Transcendental Consciousness: Containing His Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object and His Pathways Through to Space, also published by SUNY Press.

Table of Contents

FOREWORD BY RON LEONARD

INTRODUCTION

PART I: FOUR SCHOOLS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY

1 Toward a Synthetic Philosophy

2 Naturalism

General Naturalism

Materialism

Positivism

3 The New Realism

4 Pragmatism

Vitalism

Empiric Voluntarism

Percept and Concept

Pragmatic Science

Gnostic Realization

Idealistic Pragmatism

Test by Consequences

5 Idealism

Ideas: Plato to Kant

The Primordial Image: Jung

Reason as Nous and Logos

6 Introceptual Idealism

Freedom and Necessity

Introception and Introspection

Self and Divine Otherness

Ideas: Hegel and Schopenhauer

The Self

Unidentified Introception

The Problem of Formulation

Conception, Perception and Introception

PART II: INTROCEPTUALISM

7 Introception

The Flow of Consciousness

Introceptual Process: St. John of the Cross

Conception and the Mystic Thought

8 Transcendentalism

Conception and Introception

Innate Ideas

The Subject Transcends the Object

9 Reality and Appearance

Conceptual Presentation

Substantiality Is Inversely Proportional to Ponderability

Knowledge through Identity

10 The Meaning of Divinity

PART III: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF MYSTICISM

11 Judgments of Meaning and Existence

12 Three Mystical Paradigms

Mysticism

The Christ

The Buddha

Shankara

Self (Atman) or No-Self (Anatman)

A Mathematical Model of Ego Metaphysics

13 Mystical Knowledge

Critique of Leuba's Methodology

The Mystic Thought

Knowledge as Negation

Shift in the Base of Reference

Leuba's Antinoetic Argument

14 Significance of Immediate Qualities of Mystical States

EPILOGUE

INDEX