Delphic Podcast by Michael R D James
A series of episodes comparing and contrasting Campbells view of the universality and necessity of myth with the Philosophical and Metaphysical accounts of the Ancient Greek, Enlightenment, and Modern Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy.
Episodes
106 episodes
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells "Myths to Live By" Season 14 Episode 14
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 wa...
The Delphic Podcasts :Opera AI Review of Shakespeares Philosophical Theatre by Michael R D James Austin Macaulay 22nd May 2026 Season 14 Episode 13
Review based on an Introductory essay at the beginning of the work
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells "Myths to Live By" Season 14 Episode 12
"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 remnan...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Shakespeares Philosophical Theatre: Poetry and Plays for all Seasons
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 ...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells "Myths to Live By" Season 14 Episode 10
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...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells "Myths to Live By" Season 14 Episode 9
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 Anc...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells "Myths to Live By" Season 14 Episode 8
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 failin...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Review Myths to Live By S 14 E7
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 ...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells "Myths to Live By" Season 14 Episode 6
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 ...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells "Myths to Live By" Season 14 Episode 5
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"...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells "Myths to Live By" Season 14 Episode 4
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...
The Delphic Podcats by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells "Myths to Live By" Season 14 Episode 3
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...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells "Myths to Live By" Season 14 Episode 2
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 redu...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Review of Myths to live by S14 E1
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 essential...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Ricoeur Memory S 13 E10
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...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Ricoeur Memory S 13 E9
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...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Ricoeur Memory S 13 E8
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 ...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Ricoeur Memory S 13 E7
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 underst...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Ricoeur Memory S 13 E6
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 ...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Ricoeur Memory S 13 E5
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 "actualisa...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Ricoeur Memory S 13 E4
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 exp...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Ricoeur Memory S 13 E3
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 20t...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Ricoeur Memory S 13 E2
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 condit...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Ricoeur Memory S 13 E1
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 ...
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Ricoeur Time and Narrative vol 3 S 12 e 21
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...