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Saint John’s Gospel |
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Perhaps the most mystical book of the New Testament, perhaps best known for its equation of Jesus with the divine logos. |
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Sanskrit |
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The ancient Indo-European language of India, in which many of the sacred books of Hinduism and Buddhism were written. |
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Sartor Resartus |
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1838 book by Thomas Carlyle. |
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Saturday Evening Post |
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American periodical, first published in 1821. |
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schizophrenia |
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"[M]ajor mental disorder of unknown cause typically characterized by a separation between the thought processes and the emotions, a distortion of reality accompanied by delusions and hallucinations, a fragmentation of the personality, motor disturbances, bizarre behavior, etc., often with no loss of basic intellectual functions: this term has largely replaced dementia praecox, since it does not always result in deterioration (dementia) or always develop in adolescence or before maturity" [Webster's New World Dictionary]. |
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scholasticism |
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Generally speaking, the philosophical teachings, heavily influenced by the dogma of the Roman Catholic church, of the Middle Ages. |
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Science and the Modern World |
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1925 book by Alfred North Whitehead. |
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scientism |
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The treatment of science, and scientific ideas, as a religion; the unquestioned acceptance of scientific truths. |
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Scopes monkey trial |
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A 1925 prosecution in Dayton, Tennessee of a biology teacher (John Scopes) for having taught Darwin's theory of evolution in violation of state law. |
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seance |
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A gathering in which a medium supposedly makes contact with the dead. |
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secularism |
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Emphasis on the public, political world at the expense of the sacred and religious. |
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Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) |
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1927 book by Martin Heidegger, considered one of the key documents in the development of existentialism. |
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semantics |
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That branch of linguistics which studies the meaning of words. |
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Semele was the daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, and the mother, by Zeus, of the god Dionysus. Because Zeus slept with Semele secretly, Hera only found out about the affair after the girl was pregnant. Bent on revenge, Hera disguised herself and persuaded Semele to demand that Zeus come to her in all the splendor with which he visited Hera. As a result, Semele asked Zeus to grant an unspecified favor, and got him to swear by the river Styx that he would grant it. Unable to break his oath, Zeus came to her armed in his thunder and lightning, and Semele was destroyed. However, Zeus rescued the unborn child from the mother's ashes and sewed it in his thigh until it was ready to be born. Thus Dionysus is sometimes called "the twice-born." [from Encyclopedia Mythica] |
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Semiotics |
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The systematic study of signs. Co-invented by Charles Sanders Peirce and De Saussure, it is usually known in Europe as Semiology. |
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set theory |
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The branch of mathematics that deals with the properties and relations of sets set a prescribed collection of points, numbers, or other objects that satisfy a given condition [New World Dictionary] |
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Journal devoted to the life and work of C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, and George MacDonald, published by the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. |
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Sheffield |
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City in South Yorkshire country in North Central England. |
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"The third deity of the Hindu triad of great gods, the Trimurti. Shiva is called the Destroyer, but has also the aspect of regeneration. As destroyer he is dark and terrible, appearing as a naked ascetic accompanied by a train of hideous demons, encircled with serpents and necklaces of skulls" [Encyclopedia Mythica]. |
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"In ancient times a prophetess who, in a state of ecstasy and under influence of Apollo, prophesized without being consulted" [Encyclopedia Mythica]. |
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signified |
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In semiotics, that which a signifier represents. In a photograph of President Clinton, the photograph is the signifier; the person William Jefferson Clinton is the signified. |
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signifier |
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In semiotics, that which represents a signified. In a photograph of President Clinton, the photograph is the signifier; the person William Jefferson Clinton is the signified. |
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single vision |
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Blake's term for the unimaginative, literal, logical perspective exhibited by key figures of the Enlightenment, especially Newton. |
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Sisyphus |
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In Greek mythology a man punished for disobeying the gods by being forced to eternally roll a boulder up a steep hill only to have it roll again to the bottom. |
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Socratic dialogue |
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A work of Plato, written in dialogue form (examples include The Republic, The Symposium, The Phaedrus) in which Socrates serves as the spokesman for Platonic philosophy. |
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solicitor |
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In the British legal system, a member of the legal profession who can not (unlike a barrister) argue cases before the bar. |
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solipsism |
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In philosophy, the largely rejected stance that the reality of the world is dependent solely upon each individual mind. |
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"The Greek word for wisdom. In Proverbs 8 she speaks like a goddess. The Gnostics conceived Sophia as a saintly spirit. The emperor named his great cathedral in Constantinople (Istanbul) Hagia Sophia, 'Holy Wisdom'. Some sources identify her with Siduru sabaut, the Mesopotamian goddess of paradise" [Encyclopedia Mythica]. |
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"The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion" |
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In "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" (1798), Wordsworth writes: I cannot paint |
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Space,Time, and Deity |
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Book by philosopher Samuel Alexander, published in 1920. |
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speakers meaning |
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The individual, intended meaning of a speaker in using a word or words, as opposed to the shared, common, lexical meaning. |
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Spiritual Science |
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Rudolf Steiner's designation for an approach to epistemology he sought to develop, a "science of meaning" (as Barfield called it) that would bridge the gap between religious and scientific ways of looking at the world. He called this spiritual science Anthroposophy. |
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spiritus mundi |
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Literally, "the world of the spirit" or "spirit world," a term common to the whole esoteric tradition and used prominently by William Butler Yeats in such poems as "The Second Coming." |
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St. John's Gospel |
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Perhaps the most mystical book of the New Testament, perhaps best known for its equation of Jesus with the divine logos. |
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Followers of a school of philosophy which originated in Greece and became influential in the Roman Empire. |
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String Theory |
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"[A] type of theory of particle physics that treats elementary particles as extended one-dimensional "string-like" objects rather than as the dimensionless points in space-time used in other theories" [Britannica Online]. |
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structuralist/structuralism |
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A methodology, with its origins in the work of the Swiss-French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, influential in such diverse fields as literary criticism and anthropology, emphasizing the underlying "grammar" of human signifying processes. |
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structural linguistics |
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The empirical, "scientific" examination of language which followed in the wake of the advances made by de Saussure and Leonard Bloomfield. |
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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions |
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Thomas Kuhn's seminal 1962 study which proposed a theory of how scientific paradigms are overthrown. |
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“Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" |
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Essay by Derrida, originally given as a lecture at a 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins, often seen as the beginning of deconstruction. Published in Writing and Difference (1967). |
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Studies in Words |
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A 1960 book by C. S. Lewis. |
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subjective idealism |
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Philosophical idealism which stresses the centrality of the perceiving and thinking self in the construction of reality. Not to be confused with Barfield's own objective idealism. |
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suffragette |
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An advocate (originally Victorian) for women's rights, especially the right to vote. |
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Sufi |
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A follower of Sufism, a mystical school of Islam. |
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Summae Metaphysices Contra Anthroposophos |
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C. S. Lewis treatise (unpublished) refuting the basic principles of his friend Owen Barfield's Anthroposophy, part of the Great War debate. |
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super ego |
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In Freud's tripartite conception of the psyche, the equivalent of the conscience: a censor/critique of the behavior and thoughts of the ego. |
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Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life |
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C. S. Lewis' autobiographical reflection on his youth, published in 1955. |
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surrealism |
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A post-World War I literary and artistic movement that sought to make the content of dreams and the unconscious mind the primary subject matter of art. |
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Swann's Way |
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The first book (1913) of Marcel Proust's monumental novel Remembrance of Things Past. |
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syllogistic |
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In philosophy, argument which moves in a logical fashion from premises to a conclusion; reasoning from the general to the specific. |
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symbolic logic |
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"[M]odern embodiment of formal logic . . . the study of valid inference in artificial, precisely formulated languages" [The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy 274]. |
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syntax |
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That branch of linguistics which studies the order of words in grammar. |