Raymond Barfield

Theories about the nature and function of philosophical imagination depend on our understanding of what kind of universe we inhabit. Some theories are compelling if the universe is meaningful as a whole, but they make no sense if it is not. Raymond C. Barfield discusses conditions that would be necessary if the universe is meaningful as a whole, and then develops a theory of philosophical imagination in light of that starting place. The theory moves toward the conclusion that if the universe is meaningful as a whole, the concept of the analogia entis, the analogy of being, illuminates philosophical imagination in a way that changes our understanding of its function and potential, along with the value of its discoveries through the things it creates.

This is an exciting, but difficult, season for the practice of medicine. The effects of corporate transformation on the practice are part of a larger cultural crisis. The arena of medicine is a proving ground for our responses to this crisis, because it is so intimately and immediately related to our bodies. Our answers to contemporary challenges in the practice of medicine will depend on, and probably shape, our answers to philosophical questions at the core of our existence: How do we inhabit our unpredictable and limited lives in a way that allows us to flourish, and how can the deep practice of medicine help? Time is the condition for all human experience, but for mortals like us, time is limited. This limit gives our lives the arc of a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. Unfortunately, many of us in the modern world avoid thinking about limits in our lives—especially the limit on our time called death. The practice of medicine serves people who are facing limits in their lives brought on by the threats of disease and death. Because good doctoring is so intimately related to the complex impact these threats have on our limited lives, this book argues that the significance and meaning of the practice of medicine is inextricably bound to existence in time.

“These brilliantly crafted poems inhabit a rich space where experience, psyche, myth, and the gem of language intersect. Raymond Barfield invites us to the soulful journey C. G. Jung imagined when he wrote, Everything living strives for wholeness. In reading Dreams And Griefs Of An Underworld Aeronaut we travel beside this poet mindfully searching and pointing beyond by way of his art, grief, faith, and love.” —Rachel Blum “Raymond Barfield writes that he just needs ‘room, air, and the unknown,’ but his collection gives us this, and far more. These poems pulse in their textured, sensual language, creating a world chromatic and incantatory, brooding with ‘puppets, shadows and tales,’ tangible and elusive at the same time. These poems draw us in and give us breath.” —Brian Swann “Raymond Barfield circles us through hell in a hot air balloon that doubles as an Italian bagpipe blowing through ecstatic nights of betrayal’s rave.The poet is back to escort us through a nightmare path in chocked terza rima sonnets while a mad dog howls at the moon and a gargoyle croons in the background. Barfield gnaws his pen into flame on the darkness of the white page to perform transfusions that translate hymns of Ars Signorum into your mind. These poems take you there. It is up to you to come back.” —Kevin Gallagher “In this wonderful book, Raymond Barfield draws inspiration from the narrative terza rima of Dante and from the compressions and turns of the sonnet form to compress his meditations on life, pain, love, and death into 15-line poems that amaze with their range of feelings and their turns of language. The emotional depths and verbal surprises pull the reader forward through Barfield’s fascinating layers of worlds and underworlds.” —John Bensko

Glimpsing life out of the corner of the eye, Raymond Barfield’s poems in Life in the Blind Spot seek that space where direct vision is elusive, but essential. “Ray Barfield’s poems are hot ice, metaphor and metaphysics. His style is beautifully controlled and then he lets go at just the right moment. Wonderful.”—Katia Kapovich “Raymond Barfield’s poems are essential to the age we live in. These philosophically searching, lucidly sensual poems drive at the heart of our understanding. With mindful grace, and ‘suspecting / more than the world to be the case’, Barfield brings to mind our sense of ‘the variations of history’, the many signs and moments that flicker and converge in the various single flame of our existence.”—Ben Mazer “You just have to read one poem… ‘Driving’…to realize that Raymond Barfield is a great American poet. You read other poems and you realize that he is more than that. You put the book down and wonder how you ever lived without it.”—Joe Green

Yslea is a 19-year-old young woman struggling to make a life in Memphis, Tennessee. From the outside, others judge her as a caricature of herself - she's poor, she left school after 9th grade, she's pregnant, she's single. Her mother was black and her father was white. Her life seems full of contradictions and surrounded by pain. But one day, she drifts into the lives of four strangers who live in three dilapidated row houses along the train tracks outside of Memphis: "The way their three little row houses sort of leaned in toward each other and the way the paint peeled and some of the windows were covered with cardboard, the row might as easily have been empty." The story builds slowly, at the pace of her life. Her palette of language is simple, but she reaches for anything she can find to express her thoughts, which are bigger than the language she has learned. As she learns to say what she sees and thinks, she discovers the beauty and adventure of her own mind, and she overcomes in her own quiet, powerful way.

How do humans explore beauty, virtue, love, justice, and goodness? This book argues that philosophical attention to our lives, shaped in part by our choices, is our instrument for investigating these parts of reality. Constructing a life is a philosophical act. Philosophical acts that are shaped by a life, and that shape a life, constitute philosophical style. Everyone has a philosophical style, which is fundamentally about the way we live in the world through our bodies, our reason, our imagination, and our virtue. It is about what we love and how we are loved. Beauty, suffering, and being in the world are placeholders for everything that makes up our lived experience. As we live our lives between beauty and suffering, we learn most about being in the world. The argument of the book moves from a discussion of philosophical style, through the three placeholders for human experience as they are affected by philosophy (beauty, suffering, and being in the world), arriving at a reworking of Pascal's wager about living in relationship to the presence or absence of God as a way of understanding the commitments that are our only way into the truth of our life.

In the tenth book of Plato's Republic Socrates discusses an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. I trace this quarrel through one strain of western philosophy which starts with Plato's work, and which includes the work of Vico, Hegel, Dilthey, and more recently, Owen Barfield, R. G. Collingwood, and Mikhail Bakhtin. From the perspective of this particular tradition, both poetry and philosophy originally make claims to a certain kind of knowledge which has as its referent something which transcends the world of fallibility and error. The sort of poetry to which Socrates refers claims to offer a peculiar kind of knowledge which begins in the mythopoeic mind and continues in various forms always to be the artifact of a growing human consciousness in relationship to something transcendent. Philosophy, for its part, insists that the only way the content of such claims can ever qualify as knowledge is through the philosophical question. These two modes of inquiry mean different things to each of the members of this particular philosophical story. The fundamental conviction, which motivates the quarrel, is the conviction that we live among significant and meaningful things, but that we are susceptible to error. The thing towards which we move through the reciprocal efforts of poetry and philosophy is some sort of real presence aimed at by the various notions of Plato's Good, Hegel's Absolute, and Vico's Divine Providence. Both are necessary and neither is sufficient for this asymptotic approach which allows us to remain moral realists, to make meaningful statements about the transcendent, and to embrace the possibility of absolute truth without having to deny our fallibility. But always the quarrel is present as an image which both bonds and keeps separate the two. Taken together, poetry, philosophy, and the quarrel between the two emerge again and again as elements constituting one human instrument for spying out the meaning of things, and this image as a whole is, I argue, one very important governing principle for the enterprise of speculative philosophy