Rick DeLano
Welcome to the online home of the Philos-Sophia Initiative, and thanks for coming!
The Initiative exists to foster the wider dissemination of, and engagement with, the work of Dr. Wolfgang Smith, a man whose background, accomplishments, and credentials in the fields of physics, mathematics, and philosophy speak for themselves.
His breakthroughs, conspicuously including his resolution of the nearly century-old “Quantum Enigma,” have the potential to effectuate a profound change in the way we view ourselves, our world, and our destinies. They also invite reflection upon certain implications for the future of physics, other branches of science, and, especially, for the restoration of philosophy itself.
I first encountered the work of Wolfgang Smith in the form of an essay he had written in response to Stephen Hawking’s 2010 bestseller, The Grand Design.
The essay was—is—electrifying.
Dr. Smith first sets forth Hawking’s case in detail, with lucidity and clear apprehension of its comprehensive claim to have dispatched not merely the totality of the traditional wisdom of mankind, but indeed the very idea of God, by means of an application of quantum theory to the fundamental question of reality—why is there something rather than nothing?
The audacity of Hawking’s argument signifies, as Dr. Smith affirms, a kind of culmination of the great project spanning the last four centuries (although discernible, in essence, as far back as the atomism of Democritus) to reduce the cosmos itself to a domain expressible without residue by mathematical physics, its methods, and its entities.
I had for some time been seeking a worthy subject for a documentary film project, one that would bring together the creative team behind, and would represent our follow-up to, The Principle.
By the time I had read these words in Wolfgang Smith’s “Response to Stephen Hawking,” I knew I had found it:
“…it turns out, philosophically speaking, that the physical stands to the corporeal as potency to act. The physical proves thus to be a sub-corporeal domain, which is to say that measurement entails an ontological transition: a passage from potency to act. This constitutes the key recognition, I say, that opens the door to an ontological understanding of quantum theory.”
It was apparent to me that our follow-up to The Principle and its examination of the anomalies of “Big Bang” cosmology—of the universe on its largest observable scales—ought to turn in the direction of the other paradoxes, in the very small . . . those of quantum physics.
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But it would be several years before I would even begin to understand the deeper implications of Dr. Smith’s distinction between the physical universe (which is the universe as conceived by the physicist, based on the methods and procedures of physics) and the corporeal universe, the universe we perceive with our senses; the world in which we “live, and move, and have our being.”
Over the course of the last year, by what I can only view as a series of providential events, Wolfgang Smith has become my dear friend, and I have come to view his work as a stunningly important breakthrough: a restoration on solid scientific, philosophical, and metaphysical ground of an integrated cosmos, a comprehensive worldview where such things as quantum physics, green grass, and, yes—even transubstantiation—can coexist in an ordered and knowably meaningful universe.
It has been centuries, at least, since such a comprehensive cosmos has been elaborated in the West, and it seems to me that the time has come to present the (in our view, world-historical) breakthroughs of Dr. Wolfgang Smith to as wide an audience as possible.
A word, first, about the intentions and aims of the Initiative.
We are not a religious movement, and indeed warmly welcome those of any religious tradition, or none.
What we seek are those who embody “Philos-Sophia”; those who love Wisdom, and who apprehend the dreadful lack of both love, and wisdom, in the increasingly nihilistic globalism now shaken to its foundations—its pillars wobbling, as it were—not only in the realm of science, but also in the realms of religion, politics, finance, and culture.
Over the coming months, we will be presenting excerpts from both published and yet-to-be-published works by Wolfgang Smith, and encouraging a dialogue amongst those of good will and interest in understanding his work and, crucially, fostering its further development.
We will be telling you more about our film project The End of Quantum Reality, which will present Dr. Smith’s life and work in what we hope and expect will be a one-of-a-kind cinematic experience; a worthy successor to The Principle and, ultimately, even a much more daring one.
And perhaps most importantly of all, we will begin to launch an outreach to young students of philosophical talent to assist in their formation as leaders in an intellectual and cultural restoration which appears not to be far off. For the signs are at hand that we are fast approaching the end of an era—what René Guénon has termed “the reign of quantity”—and that before too long the challenge may be upon us to integrate the discoveries of science into a comprehensive worldview. It is consequently a central aim of the Philos-Sophia Initiative to assist in the formation and schooling of intellectual leaders, men and women qualified to engage in this daunting cultural task.
It is my sincere hope that you will find our Initiative to be worthwhile, and will share it far and wide.
We ultimately will depend, for the execution of this Initiative, upon the support of our friends and benefactors.
Please consider becoming a Philos-Sophia Initiative supporter, member, or benefactor, so that our various projects can have the widest possible impact.
In closing, a few words taken from Wolfgang Smith’s Ancient Wisdom and Modern Misconceptions:
“The heavens, I contend, will declare ‘the glory of God’ or the supreme futility of existence: here there can be no middle ground . . . [i]t is surely no accident that the rise of astrophysics has been accompanied by the advent of postmodernist nihilism in its philosophic as well as cultural manifestations. The drift into nihilism corresponds precisely to the loss of substance implicit in the physicist’s worldview: culture and cosmology, it turns out, are intimately linked. In fact, as the cosmology flattens, so invariably does the culture.”
The central aspiration of the Philos-Sophia Initiative is to restore the dimension of verticality to a generation which has been taught to perceive the cosmos as “a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.” Our aim is to assist in the collective restoration of sight: the kind that does behold what “the heavens” declare, down to the majesty of the tiniest insect crawling upon the ground.
The Philos-Sophia Initiative’s feature documentary chronicling the life and work of Dr. Smith, The End of Quantum Reality, is now available.
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