David Appelbaum

The Stop (Suny Series in Western Esoteric Traditions) David Appelbaum

This book is about the turn toward consciousness by which we pass from ignorance to knowledge. The stop is the spark of initiation that arouses our habitual inattentiveness, motivating us toward a higherunderstanding.

"This is one of the most brilliant, interesting, and utterly original books I have read. Its almost mystical conception of embodied perception is solidly founded in reason and evidence. It replaces Derrida's despairing notion of absence with a full and potent foundation of presence, but does so without ignoring any of the difficulties Derrida presents. It says brilliant things about the nature of signification--there is concrete relation between signifier and signified, composed of effort and resistance--and about the ethics of perception. By implication it reanimates the fields of literary criticism, psychological philosophy, epistemology, phenomenology, semiotics, and even--dare one say it?--theology." -- Frederick Turner, University of Texas at Dallas

"This is a brilliant and important book, both for what it says about Descartes and his time, and, more important, as a model for a new way of conceiving the role of philosophy." -- Jacob Needleman, San Francisco State University

The central axis of The Stop is the secret turn of awareness by which we pass from ignorance to knowledge. The stop, then, is the spark of initiation, intense enough to arouse consciousness from its slumber and to motivate the difficult journey to a higher understanding. To stop is to begin a movement toward consciousness.