Eric Voegelin – Mechanical Owl
Posts about Eric Voegelin written by mechanicalowlblog
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Mechanical Owl
In the first two parts of this essay we have been looking at Eric Voegelin’s late claims concerning the influence exerted by Marsilio Ficino and the Hermetic tradition on the ideas of Hegel. Here we are going to talk about the role played by “magic” in the Hermetic tradition, Hegel and the ideas of Voegelin.

Read More Gnostic Renaissance Pt 3/3

Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) is perhaps the most well-known name associated with Italian Renaissance Platonism. Today, however, he is very rarely read. The last time an edition of his collected works was published was the 16th century and much of his writing is very hard to obtain. However, for the most part Ficino’s fame lies not with his own ideas, but with the effect on subsequent history of his translations into Latin of the works of Plato and Plotinus at the behest of the Medici.

Read More Gnostic Renaissance Pt 2/3

The time has come for another essay on Eric Voegelin. Here we’ll be talking about the late modifications of his famous “Gnostic thesis” towards considerations of the role played by Renaissance Platonism and Hermeticism in the formation of modernity

Read More Gnostic Renaissance Pt 1/3

This week VoegelinView published my six-part essay (chapbook really) Process and the Derailing of Reality, which brings together (in notably improved and clarified form) a lot of the material I’ve been trying to work out on this blog over the past couple of years.

Read More Recent Reworkings Elsewhere

Hello there, reader! In case you get confused, Haunted Platonism 1 and 2 are together the same as part 2 of my chapbook Process and the Derailing of Reality over at VoegelinView. There’s also plenty more recent Haunted Platonism posts hiding on our site. Check out the 2020 posts! What might it look like to […]

Read More Haunted Platonism Pt. 2/2

Hello there, reader! In case you get confused, Haunted Platonism 1 and 2 are together the same as part 2 of my chapbook Process and the Derailing of Reality over at VoegelinView. There’s also plenty more recent Haunted Platonism posts hiding on our site. Check out the 2020 posts! One thing that has often been […]

Read More Haunted Platonism Pt 1/2

I haven’t written anything for this poor old blog for quite a while now, close on a year in fact. The last post was from November 2018. What galloping acedia! However, as there has been some recent interest in the blog, a couple of emails and so on, I have decided I had better hop […]

Read More And after a long hiatus…

This is part of a series on Catherine Pickstock’s 2013 Repetition and Identity. In this part we’re going to be talking about Pickstock’s ideas in relation to several other thinkers in the Platonic tradition: Eric Voegelin, F. W. J. Schelling, Giordano Bruno and Ralph Cudworth.

Read More Pickstock 3: Voegelin, Schelling, Bruno, Cudworth

In the first part of this essay we looked closely at the affinities between the Radical Orthodox movement in theology and the ideas of Eric Voegelin in light of Catherine Pickstock’s 2013 book Repetition and Identity (Oxford University Press, Oxford) and its critique of French post-structuralist Gilles Deleuze. We now come to Pickstock’s attempt to rethink a Christian-Platonist process theology of nature through a return to the Theory of Forms.

Read More Pickstock Pt 2: Process Platonism

In his famous argument with Carl Schmitt about the legitimacy of modernity and secularisation Hans Blumenberg in an aside observes that: “one has to be surprised, in any case, that among the many recorded instances of the secularization thesis, the concept of a person plays no special role, indeed hardly appears at all.” Roberto Esposito’s Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought may well have begun to fix this oversight.

Read More Parousia Without Apocalypse?