G. W.F. Leibniz (1646—1716) also belongs squarely in the tradition of pansophia and encyclopedism. In his “Introduction to a Secret Encyclopedia” (Introductio ad Encyclopaediam arcanum, c. 1679), Leibniz’s description of “General Science” is strikingly pansophic:…
Tag: gnosticism_and_manichaeism
Glenn Magee on Lull & Francis Bacon
Yates devoted a chapter in her The Art of Memory to Lull and attempts to locate him withing the tradition of ars memoria. However, she notes that Lull’s art is devoid of the dramatic images…
Glenn Magee: another summary
Like Moses (according to legend), Hegel is the recipient of Kabbalistic wisdom, only it is a Christian Kabbalah, and it is received not directly from God but from Böhme, Oetinger, and the tradition of speculative…
Glenn Magee on Hegel and the equation of mysticism with rationality
Hegel’s attitude toward the Hermetic tradition was cautious, but cautiously approving. Hegel saw the Hermetic tradition as a manifestation of unconscious wisdom, of the perennial philosophy, struggling to transcend its purely sensuous form. This explains…
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Glenn Magee: more on complete speech & Hegel vs. propositional / predicative philosophy
Unlike “picture-thinking” – myth, art, etc. — Hegel’s speculation involves the use of concepts, ideas, or universals. Here, however, the dissimilarity ends, for although the matter of Hegel’s philosophy — its employment of concepts rather…
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Glenn Magee on the invisible church
He [Sebastian Franck] makes a distinction between what he calls the church “visible” and “invisible”. The “invisible church” is constituted by the Holy Spirit, through the loving hearts of all men. This conception of the…
Glenn Magee on certain counterparts
Some have suggested that that the Rosicrucians were intended as a Protestant counterpart to the Jesuits [Andrew Weeks, Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic; Albany: State University of New York Press,…
Glenn Magee on Luther and alchemy
During the sixteenth century, Lutheranism was a considerable impediment to the dissemination of Hermetic philosophy in Germany, but it spread widely nonetheless. Luther himself, although he rejected mystical “excesses,” incorporated vivid quasi-mystical imagery in his…
Glenn Magee: a summary
To summarize, the doctrines of the Hermetica that became enduring features of the Hermetic tradition can be enumerated as follows: 1. God requires creation in order to be God. 2. God is in some sense…
Glenn Magee on the Hermetic influences in the history of philosophy & science
I consider this work not only a continuation of the tradition of scholarship I have sketched out above but also as a contribution to an ongoing project in the history of ideas pioneered by such…
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