Episode 114

The fifth episode in a series featuring religious studies scholar Angela Voss, exploring the history and nature of astrology. There's not much astrology in this episode, as we continue our discussion of the evolution of academia, and the emergence of the "third classroom" (Jeffrey Kripal's idea) as typified by the MA course in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred run by Angela at Canterbury Christchurch University. She talks about the challenges involved in operating against the grain of mainstream academia, and touches on Rupert Sheldrake's observations about the differences between his skeptical colleague "on" and "off" the record when discussing certain unexplained phenomena. We end up talking about the dangers of trying to reduce the symbolic level of understanding to purely rational terms in order to satisfy skeptical critics. The almost universally experienced phenomenon of falling in love serves as a helpful example of something undeniably real that cannot be reduced in such terms, and this leads us to talk about medieval troubadours, the differences between the Greek concepts of eros and philia, etc.

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• Jeffrey Kripal
• esotericism courses at Amsterdam University
• Canterbury Christchurch University
• CCCU's MA course in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred
• Kent University's (Business School) Bloomberg Suite
• Sophia in CCCU chapel
• Rupert Sheldrake
• R. Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home (1999)
• medieval troubadours
• Eros
• Greek words for love
• Plato on eros and philia
• fruit-piercing moth (Eudocima phalonia)