WEEKLY PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW ENDING FEBRUARY 28, 2020 (3)

In this talk, Daffern gives an overview of events this last week, including the recent World Intellectual Forum event for February with a range of interesting speakers, and the recent Cathartic History Conference on line from the University of Western Georgia, USA, with a variety of good classical scholars. He shares jis own view on the nature of Catharsis in both history, religious studies and philosophy and argues that transpersonal history is a way of talking meaningfully about this from both a historical and psychological approach. He shares how in his view Brexit represents a typical tragi-comedy based on ironic reversal, identified by Aristotle. He then explains how Hegel (borrowing from Boehme) also understood that history moves in zig-zags, not straight lines. This leads to a discussion of gnosticism and the purpose of theosophical interpretations of history, which the Gnostics really pioneered, and he laments their exclusion from the canon of received wisdom. Time to reclaim them he say, and reads fr