John O\'loughlin

A Truthful Approach to Knowledge: Collected Essays Vol. 2 John O\'loughlin

Publisher Marketing: As suggested by the title, Volume II of John O'Loughlin's Collected Essays is effectively the converse of the first volume, insofar as its essayistic contents, derived from four prior publications, are much more orientated towards truth than simply rooted, scholar-wise, in knowledge, and it was this new-found and hard-won confidence in his capacity to expand knowledge truthfully, more independently of scholarly reference or literary citations than before, that made much of these writings possible. Although still a long way short of Truth per se, or metaphysical knowledge that transcends the earthly parameters of essays on what becomes an unequivocal commitment to airy idealism on the basis of a kind of aphoristic purism, these essays, together with the dialogues he wrote around this time (1982-84), were a precondition of it and contain ideas and ideals which owe more to metaphysics than to physics, to godliness than to manliness, to truth than to knowledge, not least in respect of the development of Social Transcendentalism, which started in the early '80s and gathered momentum thereafter, becoming the main concern of Mr O'Loughlin's philosophizing, as a new interpretation of and commitment to theosophy inevitably came to the fore and banished mere knowledge not associated with truth to the background of his intellectual history. Therefore this second volume of essays, with material stretching from 'Future Transformations' (1982) to 'Social Transcendentalism' (1984) via 'Post-Atomic Integrities' (1982) and 'The Will to Truth' (1983), has more ideological clout than the previous one, and should serve the interested reader as a springboard to both the 'supernotational' and aphoristic writings of more recent date.