Intersections: Philosophy & Astrology

An unobtrusive, but recurrent, contemporary rhetorical gesture is the invocation of astrology as the epitome of a disreputable mode of understanding.

Unobtrusive, not least, because assumed to be beyond dispute. In Intersections, philosopher Mark Foy seeks to show this complacently reiterated assumption is mistaken, and that the epistemic pariah status of astrology is undeserved. He does this partly by including in his discussion examples of astrological delineation, presented in the context of a critical examination both of the various ways in which astrology can demonstrate its efficacy, and of the epistemological problems these demonstrations involve. This epistemological focus is in turn part of a wider exploration of the relationship of astrology and philosophy from a diversity of perspectives: what we can infer philosophically from the practice of astrology, what astrology shows us about some of the central ideas of the philosophical tradition, and what it can tell us about the thought of the philosophers who formulated these ideas. Foy discovers in astrology's remarkable capacity to map celestial cycles in such a way as to show them as legible the recognition meaning must be coincident, not only with our birth, but with existence itself. Astrology identifies personality, and, by inference, meaning, value and purpose, not as belated and derived, but as inherent in all eventualities.

Accordingly, he contends, we can discern in the practice of astrology underlying conceptions counter to the relegation of metaphysical perspectives retrospectively pivotal to the emergence of what we now call 'the modern world'. To credit the qualitative epistemology implicit in astrology, to recognise, therefore, existence as intrinsically, not derivatively, meaningful, involves a profound reconsideration of who, and what, we are, and suggests very different ethical and spiritual conceptions of our lives than those currently prevalent.