Explore every episode of the podcast Delphic Podcast by Michael R D James

An argument with my AI servant Copilot over who the Ancient Greek Oracles supported  in the Peloponnesian war. Thucydides suggested that the Oracle supported Sparta but this is unlikely given firstly, their view of the importance of "Know thyself" and the wisdom of Socrates  and secondly, their view, reported in Plato's Republic, "everything created by man will lead to ruin and destruction". Co pIlot begins by arguing for the relativity of morality and not seeing  the humanistic heritage  we received from Ancient Greece, but changes its position when challenged, just like a politician eager for your vote.

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History, for Heidegger is related to Time which can be regarded as both actual and potential. The form of our Being-in-the world determines the way in which we express our existence in the realm of the temporal. Certain events are world-historical, possessing a significance of magnitude. Merleau-Ponty's account of the lived body and its relation to language expresses one way in which the body lives in time.

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Heideggers account of the Being of our  Human form of "Being-in-the-world", speaks of how entities are encountered in this world.  Whilst engaged in our tasks these entities are not accessed via a form of observation that is interrogative in nature---seeking answers to questions. Rather when   entities are confronted in the mode of the ready to hand our concern with them is not interrogative but rather  a form of non-observational knowing is involved (a form  Heidegger calls "circumspectful concern"). In relating to other humans our concern is one of solicitude, a form of holistic Care for their Being, which we share.   

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Genetics is a science  often appealed to as the cause of many phenomena which have more complex histories. In the transition of sea-life into marshland life and finally into land animals the major initial causes are environmental but the principles  mechanisms for the new body organisation must be internalised to be readily transmitted for all further generations. We do not know where Aristotle stood on this question but hylomorphic theory is in accordance with such an evolutionary account. This is Kants view and was probably shared by Freud and Piaget (who conducted an experiment on lake and sea organisms to demonstrate the effect of the environment on the structure of future generations). It is not clear where Mythology stands on these questions.

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The form of finality for human forms of psuché need to be projected upon them by a mind that is to some extent predetermined by its biological/psychological and higher mental functions. This mind-space is capable of embracing actualities via its intuitions and potentialities via its conceptual abilities. Because of its finitude it cannot situate itself in the realm of the sacred and intuit its presence. There must be some form of analogous inference to this realm. Mythology attempts to concretise this realm with anthropomorphic actualities which are illegitimately conceived to be objectively universal. At best these are aesthetic ideas  which can only have a subjective form of universality

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The form of finality of an object refers to the way in which  the object relates to the powers of the mind involved in the experience of the object. Occidental Mythology and Oriental Mythology have very different relations to Philosophy. Occidental Mythology  is more concerned with the nature of mans Being-in-the-world" than with the inorganic causes and events that occur on a more cosmic scale. The span of time that it will take to reach a Kantian Kingdom of ends, however, is on a  cosmic scale, i.e. one hundred thousand years. Christianity and the heritage of Ancient Greece, were very different perspectives involving very different powers of the human psuché.

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The pleasure at the form of the Good is the highest of all forms of pleasure and it occurs especially in relation to experiences of the sublime where the mind is confronted with a challenge to the powers of its sensibility  and responds to this challenge with its powers of understanding and reason. Awe and wonder are also involved in this response. Beauty is the symbol of morality Kant argues thus connecting the forms of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful/Sublime .

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Philosophy is concerned with the totality of the acts of man including his civilisation-building and culture-creation activities. Its form of perspicuous representation, however, is not descriptive and contained in narratives. Rather its perspicuous representation is that of a totality of conditions/principles. Whilst hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy acknowledge mans instinctive nature they are concerned principally with his psychological powers and higher mental processes and the forms of life these powers help to constitute.

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History, Tragedy and Rhetoric are all Ancient Greek heritages whose nature has been changed during modern times. Living in the Age of Discontentment as we do is partly a consequence of the loss of the above "forms of life" as well the religious form of life that we felt in awe of for over a thousand years. Transcendental experiences are no longer the centre of our attention which is more determined by our imaginations than the forms of finality of aesthetic objects that once satisfied both our cognitive and aesthetic needs.

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Kants Prolegomena contains the key to outlining the scope and limitations of the domain of metaphysical Discourse----a matter of vital concern for both Mythology and Religion. Kant, as we know was very concerned to define the scope and limitations of Religion to lie within the bounds of the principles of reason, namely the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Kant is not an idealist since he very clearly admits to the existence of a world  containing physical presences outside of us. His position is that we, with our limited sensory powers cannot know what these things are in themselves. We can however think them, as we can think of the presence of the Supreme Divine Being, God

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The existence of God is only represented with considerable difficulty by theoretical reason which falsely claims that Gods nonexistence is a contradiction. Transcendental analogy allows us to theoretically think at least one attribute of God namely his love for humanity. We are Kant argues brought closer to an understanding of God via the use of practical reasoning and the power of conceiving of a future under certain conditions.

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Mythology emphasises one mental power in a matrix of emotion rather than the repertoire of mental powers  Philosophy claims is necessary to support complex narratives relating to the Origin of the Universe and Life. Consciousness and Language are related to metaphor which Julian Jaynes argues creates a mind-space in which we can vicariously "live". We use analogies to name the unnameable divine  Being which is, as, and will always be, but no mortal has ever, it is written,  lifted the veil from its "face". Our modern metaphor for the absence of God is expressed in early etchings in stone which attempt to represent "Deus Absconditis".

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Rhetoric and Psychology lost their characters at the end of the 1800's and this was due to a loss of commitment to ancient institutions such as the Church and a waning of commitment to the Rationality of the Ancient Greek and Enlightenment Philosophy of Kant. Herder claims that Shakespeare soul  is aging and withering. The Platonic dialogues relating to the trial and last days of Socrates have not aged but it is not yet clear whether this will also eventually be the case for the work of Shakespeare

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The Symbolism of confessional language is to be compared with the symbolism of many of Shakespeares soliloquys where transcendental intentions reach back to the origin of all things and forward to a future end or telos of things. Freuds religious views are more iconoclastic than Kants views which seeks to retore a role for religion within the bounds of Reason. There is an apparent conflict between the Holy and the Just which Socrates addresses in Plato's dialogue, "Euthyphro". Civilisation building projects must be influenced by a telos of a Culture or morally governed whole which is necessary if  civilisation is not to descend into a state of ruin and destruction

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 T S Eliot did not believe Shakespeares work to be Philosophical because of his view that Religion and Philosophy shared an intimate relation which the Ancient Greeks did not believe was the case. The Ancient Greek Gods praised what is just more than what was holy and the trinity of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were in agreement. Our Western Christian Religion views mans soul as flawed with sin, requiring the worship of of a Superior Being which in the eyes of many modern Philosophers may be merely a figment of our imaginations given the lack of belief in one universal God.

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The Role of History in Shakespeare has not been examined sufficiently, perhaps because of the ambiguity of various remarks Aristotle made in his work on the "Poetics". Weil points out that History like many other  disciplines in various categories of the sciences has a hylomorphic Structure. We argue that there are a number of arguments which support reclassifying many of Shakespeares plays.

The organ of speech is best positioned to represent our relation to other things and is therefore the origin of many of the  performing arts. Hamlets soliloquy manifests many of the modern concerns we have about the role of consciousness in our lives. Critics however, sometimes overcomplicate Hamlets motivations

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Aesthetic ideas are used by Shakespeare to "show" the reach of the powers of the imagination, understanding and Reason. We are taken on a hypnotic cosmopolitan journey into the worlds of Emperors, Kings, Queens, Princes, soldiers, lawyers, merchants, university students, sailors tyrants and murderers in familiar and exotic places of the world. Hamlet is merely an indecisive youthful university student/lover who happens to be a Prince in a difficult situation in which his father was murdered. He represents our modern form of consciousness which as Norththrop Frye claims "kills" action with its inaction, its  inhibitive function.

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Coplot Review of "The Metaphysics of Psuché and Psychoanalysis: An Aristotelian and Kantian Critique" by Michael R D James

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Opera AI Review of  "The Metaphysics and Logos of Psuché and Psychoanalysis: An Aristotelian and Kantian Critique" by Michael R D James

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Summary of the Introduction to "Shakespeares Philosophical Theatre" published by Austin Macaulay in May 2026

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Noos is the part of mind which is a first principle of all our mental and psychological powers and which Aristotle believed was a divine part of the human mind which was confined to thinking about something. Divine thinking on the other hand was a form of thinking about thinking which it was impossible for us to comprehend. The Storm of the collision of Indian, Eastern and European Cultures and mythologies is here and is creating chaotic turbulence.

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Review based on an Introductory essay at the beginning of the work

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"Dust in the air suspended marks the place where a story ended"( T S Eliot Four Quartets). The Astronauts walked on the dust of the moon after the moon was  despiritualised  and the dust was not  the dust of lost souls but remnants of physical processes in the long distant past. Frobenius sees the human race to be maturing toward a telos in which the Holy Ghost no longer needs institutional assistance and can speak directly to mens hearts. Campbell neglects to unravel the mystery of the oracles and the muses.

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Shakespeare is a Philosophical Poet because his works do not just touch on Philosophical themes but rather embodies the ideas of Aristotelian  and Kantian Aesthetics, Ethics, and Philosophical Psychology. His poetic intuitions are clearly set in a Philosophical framework

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Schizophrenia  takes many forms and all forms are designated by psychiatric medicine as psychotic conditions. Paranoid Schizophrenia is concerned with the defence mechanisms of splitting, projection and denial (that one is ill, for example)

Campbell refers to shamanic crises in this context and likens their experience unto the hero embarking on a long and dangerous Odyssey  into the unknown. Jungs theory of the collective archetypes of the unconscious is a very different kind of account to that we find in Freud, in spite of the claim by both Psychologists to be influenced by Kant.

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War and Peace Mythologies are related to Philosophy in various complex ways but insofar as Ancient Greece originated with Socratic reflections on the Justice and its relation to the Holy, the Mythologies of Peace are more closely related to Ancient Greek than the Mythologies of War. Zarathurianism and its  light/dark, truth/illusion, life-death oppositions appears Heraclitean.

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The Romantic idea of Hell and Satan began with the troubadours  celebration of Amor as the good-in-itself worth the most terrible of consequences. The Kantian Hidden Plan  might be proof of Gods love for us in spite of humanity failing the test of our love for him. William Blake: Hell is not that bad and Amor may be worth paying the price of eternal damnation.

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The power of Light  may be constituted of many light bulbs but such a power transcends these material empirical things which of course in a sense explain the origin of the light. Campbells mythological explanations of Consciousness do not necessarily contradict the metaphysical accounts of Aristotle and Kant which leave the possibility of a mythology within the bounds of reason open. The Philosophical accounts of the many powers of aesthetic and cognitive processes which arise as vicissitudes of Consciousness may contain powerful arguments against mythological accounts relying on one power such as the imagination. 

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Oriental  Art is differently structured to Western Occidental Art whose condition features a self- sufficient independent object intentionally created for an aesthetic purpose which may have  a moral  message. The Art of Yoga is an instinctively grounded activity in which it is the imagination that plays the leading role in the activity. In contrast to Western Art whose focus is on the external world of self-sufficient independent objects that have an inter-sensory character.

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Eastern Religions embrace a time span of millions of years whilst  our Western Bible spans thousands of years and contains a scientifically proven inadequate account of the beginning of our world. Our symbols have lost their "affect value", Campbell claims. Our Western Humanism however would dismiss both irrational elements of our own religion as well as in Oriental religions, claiming that only Religion within the bounds of reason belongs to the examined life 

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Eastern Mythologies and Religions extend over enormous spans of time and a human life is but a blink of an eye in such a context. Campbell claims that the Western focus on individual freedom and responsibility is a repugnant idea to the Eastern mind. Hindu women immolating themselves because of rigidly defined roles allocated to them by a closed society for the Western mind is equally repugnant and it was the discipline of Philosophy that provided us with the first systematic arguments against miracle and superstitious behaviour

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The Decline of the West is the theme for this essay and Campbell refers to a loss of form which was present in Athens but not in the larger social entities such as Rome, New York, London, and Paris. Freuds myth of the "Band of Brothers" is part of his conjectural history of the evolution of the civilising process and points to the taboo/law of equality. 1914 is the year Campbell believes the process of decline began but there is evidence that the process of decline began much earlier. Universities and their ceremonial rituals are not considered by Campbell.

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The discipline of Psychology is "trans-scientific" which might account for the "conceptual confusion" in the subject that Wittgenstein pointed to. In 1870 research in accordance with the definition "The Science of Consciousness" followed a reductionist program that truncated the broader concerns of Psychology. Sensations, feelings and behaviour replaced wider concerns for the idea of Psuché (forms of life) 

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Science has a metaphysical (Philosophical) foundation which Campbell fails to recognise, preferring to focus instead of certain forms of technology not connected to the weapons of mass destruction the scientists have produced to solve essentially political problems. Freuds work and the History of Philosophy and Psychology are also marginalised by Campbells account 

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Deciding to forget a traumatic experience involving violence such as the establishment of Athens might be a kind of sublimation of ones own anger at oneself. Such an act may have a cathartic aspect and as such be the last good act of a chain of evil consequences. The Historian, however, has a duty  to remember that violence and be as accurate as they can be about the relevant events and their causes. The Angel of History bears witness to the accumulating faults of man with some trepidation.

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Freudian accounts of trauma and the compulsion to repeat until the trauma is "understood" and subjected to a process of catharsis are intimately connected to the themes of memory and forgetting. The Brain is obviously part of the material cause of the phenomena of remembering and forgetting but  it is more the organisational structure of the brain more than particular areas that is the material substrate of even simple mental phenomena such as the perception of colours where, for example it is not distinct colours that disappear if damage occurs but rather the saturation of the entire colour spectrum.

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The work of remembering and the work of expectation are civilisation building and culture enhancing aspects of our "Being-in-the-world": the being in the world of the human psuché. The Bible, many philosophers argue including Spinoza, Kant and Wittgenstein, does contain a work of remembering but this might not be as complete as the more eschatological aspect of the work of expectation we encounter in Biblical texts, including the Gnostic Gospels.

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Nietzsche and the nihilstic force of the will to power  and Collingwoods thesis that almost anything can be counted as historical evidence for anything sets the relativistic scene for Ricoeurs reflections. The categorical powers of understanding, judgement and reasoning are marginalised and called into question during Ricoeurs sceptical exploration of  the trans-scientiifc discipline of History.

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The Work of remembering is not  a work of the imagination but involves memory understanding, judgement and reasoning. Non Historical narratives may use the power of imagination to a greater degree when communicating aesthetic ideas of the artist via their works of art but here too there is a distinct presence of imperatively driven  rational judgements.

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The civilising process is discussed in relation to modern relativising ideas and connected to a "rationalising process" rather than categorical rationality of the kind we encounter in the works of Aristotle and Kant. The Aristotelian "actualisation process, whilst not related to "mentalities" as characterised in Ricouers account is however related to the development of powers of mind  such as sensibility, understanding and reason.

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Augustine asks the aporetic question "What is Time?", rejects the Aristotelian account that refers to external motion and insists instead upon some sort of "distention" of the soul.  Historical documents are constructed in a context of explanation/justification and occur in a community of critics who are testing the veracity of these documents in accordance with a number of different principles. 

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The school of inwardness was created by the thought of St Augustine, Descartes Hoobes, Locke and a number of 20th century Analytical Philosophers seeking to escape the "idealism" of Hegels Phenomenology as well as the Phenomeologists of the 20th century seeking to restore the work of Hegel to a prominent place in the History of Philosophy. The Later work of Wittgenstein, criticising his own earlier logical solipsism created a logical space for the reemergence of Aristotelian and Kantain Ciritical Philosophy. 

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Memory has an aspect of something happening to one when one has learned something but it also has a more active aspect which Freud referred to as the "work of remembering" in his work with his patients suffering from various pathological conditions. Lockes attempt to epistemologise memory by making it a psychological part of the identity of a man reduces the wider focus of thinkers like Aristotle, Kant and Freud.

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The Angel of History confronts the  growing volume of debris of our modern era in the spirit of T S Eliots "Waste Land". Hannah Arendts voice of discontent is echoed by her lover Benjamin who commits suicide because the Marxist vision has disappointed and the Nazis are closing in on him. Ricoeur argues that it is the duty of human psuché to remember crimes committed against humanity.

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The Identity of a human is of course connected to the particular memories that human possesses but memory as such is not a part of the unique essence of being human since some animals aslo have memories. Augustines conception of Time is invoked by the phenomenologists as a competing account to those accounts we find in Aristotelian Hylomorphic and Kantian Critical Philosophy. Narrative and time are linked in Ricoeurs account in ways that neither Aristotle nor kant would find plausible.

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Refiguring Time may be what Historical writing is doing to everyday experience but it retains the before-after structure necessary to be subject to the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The facts of History are not, then, a matter of interpretation but rather amongst the necessary conditions of the knowledge bearing activity of History. The Kingdom of Ends postulated by Kant is an ideal future whose promise is uncertain but it is in some sense part of the conditional structure of ought judgements such as "promises ought to kept"

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Marx turned Hegel on his head with his economic/sociological theory that eschewed all froms of abstraction. Kants Critical Philosophy experienced the same fate at the hands of Hegel in a period of History characterised by extreme "change". Aristotle, we know provided us with a theory of change that did not leave us in a suspended state of ambiguity which it can be argued was the case after the theorising of Hegel and Marx. Kant elaborated on this theory of change but both Philosophies were swept away in this era of radical change.

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Wittgensteins account of the use of language rests upon instinct and action rather than on sensory powers. Ricoeurs insistence upon the "suspicious reader" and  "interpretation"  erode the trust placed in the beliefs that form a part of the construction and appreciation of historical texts. Beliefs such as "the earth has existed for a long period of time" are conditions for the understanding of and reasoning about historical texts. 

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Kants aesthetics manifests traces of Aristotelian  hylomorphic ideas which assist in the analysis of narrative works of art. The author uses forms, principles and aesthetic ideas in his imitations of reality to manifest the "Form of the Good".  The form of universality of the productive work of art is similar to that of the productive speech of the politician who uses rhetoric to "persuade his audience via enthymemes. The work involved on the part of the creator and the audience, then, is a work of understanding  and reason rather than a work of imagination, appealing to the judgement s of the many and/or the wise.

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Bertellis essay on Aristotle and History confirms the view that Aristotles hylomorphic Philosophy would include historiography as an area of knowledge. An area that ought not to be reduced to some inner operation of thought but rather to an chronology of facts regulated by principles. Customs and Traditions are both described and explained in History as part of its moral mission

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