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

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.

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

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.