JG Bennett

This bibliography provides a listing of published works by British philosopher J.G. Bennett (1897-1974). They are organized in seven major categories for the most part each arranged chronologically by date of original publication:

1. Books by Bennett (for books and other entries on Subud, see category 6 below);
2. Edited compilations of Bennett’s lectures, writings, and editorial works;
3. Entries by Bennett in the journal Systematics;
4. Entries by Bennett in the in-house “Work” journals Enneagram and Impressions;
5. Other entries by Bennett relating to the Gurdjieff Work;
6. Entries by Bennett relating to Subud;
7. Other entries: Travelogue and scientific and academic articles.

LIFE TAKES PLACE argues that, even in our mobile, hypermodern world, human life is impossible without place. Seamon asks the question: Why does life take place? He draws on examples of specific places and place experiences to understand place more broadly. Advocating for a holistic way of understanding that he calls “synergistic relationality,” he defines places as spatial fields that gather, activate, sustain, identify, and interconnect things, human beings, experiences, meanings, and events.
  Recognizing that places always change over time, Seamon examines their processual dimension by identifying six generative processes that he labels interaction, identity, release, realization, intensification, and creation. Drawing on practical examples from architecture, planning, and urban design, he argues that an understanding of these six place processes might contribute to a more rigorous place making that produces robust places and propels vibrant environmental experiences.
  Written in an accessible style that will appeal to academics, practitioners, and the lay public, this book is a significant contribution to the growing research literature in “place and place-making studies.”

Many researchers of Western esotericism today assume a "methodological agnosticism" whereby they limit themselves to historical and textual verification. They do not adjudicate whether the specific esoteric tradition studied is genuine or spurious, reasonable or unsound, grounded in a spiritual reality or premised in fantastical impossibilities. In this article, I draw on G. I. Gurdjieff's understanding of the "Law of Three" as extended by British philosopher and Gurdjieff associate J. G. Bennett to argue that a phenomenological approach is a valuable interpretive complement to methodological agnosticism because it offers a reliable conceptual and methodological means for probing esoteric claims as they might be understood via firsthand encounter and experience. Bennett particularized Gurdjieff's presentation of the Law of Three by describing it in terms of six triads—i.e., systems of three forces that interact to sustain a specific action, process, or happening. In this article, I draw on my ongoing understanding of Gurdjieff's Law of Three and Bennett's six triads to suggest that esoteric knowledge is not necessarily " hidden " or " beyond the ordinary " but can unfold in a process of progressive awareness whereby the student engages in an empathetic, deepening understanding of phenomena. Instead of the " outsider " perspective of methodological agnosticism, one draws on an " insider " perspective of committed, first-person involvement.

This article is now published; readers who would like a PDF, please contact the author at:
triad@ksu.edu
He will forward you a copy.

This article considers whether there might be a canon of the Gurdjieff Work and, if so, what that canon might include. The author emphasizes that any canonical explication must incorporate two complementary aspects: first, texts that describe the psychological, philosophical, metaphysical, and cosmological structure of Gurdjieff's system of self-transformation; second, an integrated set of guidelines, procedures, and techniques that provide the experiential and spiritual engine for actualizing potential self-transformation. Taking this twofold canonical definition into account, the article defines the Gurdjieff canon as an ensemble of texts, methods, and performative media that when, engaged sincerely and persistently, might facilitate self-transformation psychologically and spiritually. The article focuses on written texts because the starting point of Gurdjieff’s system is intellectual understanding. These written texts are overviewed in terms of seven categories: (1) Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson and Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous; (2) additional texts by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky; (3) commentaries on Beelzebub’s Tales; (4) commentaries on the Gurdjieff Work; (5) biographies of Gurdjieff; (6) memoirs of Gurdjieff; and (7) works that extend Gurdjieffian ideas in innovative directions.

Note: This version is the pre-final copy; errors in this copy have been corrected in the published version, including correcting the reference for Mrs. Staveley's description of Jane Heap.

This essay is a tribute to physicist, philosopher, and science educator Henri Bortoft (1938-2012). Bortoft’s best known work is the influential The Wholeness of Nature, published in 1996 (Bortoft 1996). His last book, released shortly before his death in 2012, is Taking Appearance Seriously (Bortoft 2012). In both works, Bortoft aimed to help readers see and understand the world and human experience in a more integrated, compelling way. Melding phenomenology, hermeneutics, and Goethean science into a remarkably fruitful coalescence, he developed a workable way to explore the confounding relationship between parts and whole: That to understand the whole, one must understand the parts, but to understand the parts, one must understand the whole (Bortoft 1971, 1985).

Abstract: To identify and evaluate architect Christopher Alexander’s theory of wholeness, this article draws on the work of British philosopher J.G. Bennett, who developed a conceptual method—what he called systematics—to clarify phenomena by drawing upon the qualitative significance of number. A central assumption of systematics is that there is something inherent in number itself that is fundamental to the way the world is and the way we can understand it. For Bennett, each whole number provides different but complementary modes for examining any phenomenon; thus, one-ness relates to the wholeness of the phenomenon; two-ness, to complementarity; three-ness, to relatedness, and so forth. This article draws on Bennett’s interpretation of four-ness, summarized by a diamond-shaped symbol that he called the tetrad. Bennett claimed that the tetrad provides an interpretive means for understanding any activity directed toward a focused outcome, for example, writing a book, designing a building, or planning a new city district. The tetrad is used in this article to probe and evaluate Alexander’s conceptual and practical efforts to recognize and fabricate wholeness, drawing on evidence from his four-volume Nature of Order (2002-2005) and New Theory of Urban Design (1987). The article first discusses the tetrad broadly and then considers how it helps to clarify Alexander’s efforts to understand and make wholeness.

A PDF of this article is available at: https://www.mdpi.com/2413-8851/3/2/46/pdf

This summer/fall 2018 issue of Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology includes the following items:
• A “book note” on the recently published 2nd edition of philosopher Jeff Malpas’ groundbreaking Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, originally published in 1999. This expanded version includes a new chapter on place and technological modernity, “especially the seeming loss of place in the contemporary world.”
• A “book note” on EAP editor David Seamon’s recently published Life Takes Place: Phenomenology, Lifeworlds and Place Making, which gives particular attention to the generative aspects of place and locates six place processes that Seamon identifies as place interaction, place identity, place release, place realization, place intensification, and place creation.
• An essay by the late philosopher and science educator Henri Bortoft, who focuses on ways of thinking holistically, including the conceptual efforts of proto-phenomenologist Wolfgang Johann von Goethe; physicists Niels Bohr and David Bohm; and philosophers J. G. Bennett, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
• An essay by retired environmental educator John Cameron, who begins a new series of essays on the lived relationship between interiority and exteriority, particularly as qualities of the natural world and place contribute to that relationship.

This paper is concerned with elaborating a theory of cognitive development based upon perspective-taking in activity. I refer to perspective-taking as an active orientation, which concerns both conscious and unconscious processes including affective and feeling-based processes and the disposition of bodily readiness for action and contemplation. Active orientation may be considered cognate to psychological set (Uznedze), deutero-learning (Bateson), task goal (Bedny), transference of skill in generalisation, p-individuals (Pask), psycho-dynamic transference (Waddington), or in semiotic terms the pragmatics of circumstances that give rise to the interpretant (Perice, CP 2.228; Morris, 1938). It is also frequently referred to as “intention” in philosophy. The aim is to provide a theoretical framework of cognitive development that establishes a basis for a systematic study of active orientation (Lloyd, 2016).

Published version is now available at: https://correspondencesjournal.com/volume-8/issue-2/

Standard summaries of Gurdjieff’s methods of self-development identify three central components: his writings, facilitating students’ intellectual development; his music, facilitating students’ emotional development; and his sacred dances, or “Movements,” facilitating students’ bodily development, especially a deeper mode of corporeal awareness, engagement and presence. Azize’s book is an innovative addition to the Gurdjieff literature because he offers convincing evidence for a fourth key component that Gurdjieff introduced in his teaching starting around 1930—what he called “transformed-contemplation” exercises; i.e., precisely directed inner exercises strengthening students’ attention, intention, will, and self-awareness. Azize explains that these exercises were provided by Gurdjieff “so that the outer life (life in the social domain) and the inner life should be harmonized by the development of one’s individual reality, with consciousness, conscience, and will” (304).
Drawing on published works, unpublished archival sources, and firsthand accounts from students who worked directly with Gurdjieff, Azize aims to “introduce Gurdjieff’s inner exercises… to a wider world” (80). He attempts to “expound the nature and basis of Gurdjieff’s contemplative methods and to explore his sources, to the degree that is possible” (5). Azize contends that, from one perspective, Gurdjieff can be understood as “a ‘mystic’ who, in his earliest efforts, tried to fashion a workable system [of spiritual development] without contemplative methods, but later found them necessary supplements to his practical methods.”

This paper is the third paper describing an in-depth study of active orientation. This third part describes an experimental study that applies both the theory of part 1 (Lloyd, 2020a) and the strategy of part 2 (Lloyd 2020b). An undocumented fourth component of the project constitutes the design and development of the software application used in this study. Presently, only bare essentials of this application are described in this document.
This document describes the activity of a young child (4 years, 4 months) in practising handwriting skills on a tablet computer. The activity took place over three months and constituted 26 trials.
Using systemic appreciations, particularly those pertaining to dynamics of the activity system, this study emphasises the role of an agent's sign support system that is used in cognitive, action-based work. Through a combination of careful design, detailed metrics, and systemic appreciations, we are able to approach and identify key metrics pertaining to the agent's active orientation. By using some well formulated methods in studying handwriting (Gal'perin, 1982) we are able to approach this cohering factor of an agent's activity that is frequently overlooked in psychological, educational and social studies.

Why does life take place? This question grounds the phenomenology of place presented in this book. Drawing on the phenomenological claim that human being is always human being in place, David Seamon argues that, even in our mobile, hypermodern world, human life is impossible without place. He draws on examples of specific places and place experiences to understand place more broadly. Advocating for a holistic way of understanding that he calls “synergistic relationality,” he defines places as spatial fields that gather, activate, sustain, identify, and interconnect things, human beings, experiences, meanings, and events.
        Recognizing that places always change over time, Seamon examines their processual dimension by identifying six generative processes that he labels interaction, identity, release, realization, intensification, and creation. Drawing on practical examples from architecture, planning, and urban design, he argues that an understanding of these six place processes might contribute to a more rigorous place making that produces robust places and propels vibrant environmental experiences.
      Written in an accessible style that will appeal to academics, practitioners, and the lay public, this book is a significant contribution to the growing research literature in “place and place-making studies.”