Books
Nietzschean, Feminist, and Embodied Perspectives on the Presocratics: Philosophy as Partnership
Written as a form of activism, this book is for anyone interested in the significance of feminine spirituality for western philosophy and democracy. Readers will gain a novel and cutting-edge understanding of both the origin of western philosophy and Nietzsche’s reading of the presocratics.
This book is the first sustained scholarly account of women and goddesses in presocratic philosophy. It approaches the origin of western philosophy via Nietzsche, Feminism, and Embodied Cognition in order to argue that the presocratics were reviving, within the largely patriarchal and death-glorifying culture of archaic Greece, a paleo/neolithic goddess-centered religiosity that affirmed life and rebirth. By taking readers from prehistoric Europe to classical Athens, Joseph I. Breidenstein Jr. provides a novel narrative of the dawn of western philosophy which is more comprehensive than traditional accounts and which helps us address contemporary problems—the patriarchal attitudes and ideas that continue to corrupt academic-philosophical culture; the fascist-dominator lifestyle that continues to threaten western democracy and which is encouraged by the patriarchal aspects of academia; and the consumerism that continues to result from a materialistic-secular paradigm that is being increasingly recognized as both intellectually untenable and socially unsustainable.
Reincarnation, Psychedelics, and Philosophy: Nietzschean Perspectives (Forthcoming)
The unofficial sequel to Joe’s first book, this work of philosophical activism argues that, in order to meet the demands of the 21st century, democracy must return to a presocratic model of education that uses psychedelics to facilitate past-life recollection. Drawing from contemporary philosophy and science, this book explains how reincarnation work; how it is experienced within one’s lifetime; how and why our knowledge of this has been supressed for thousands of years and continues to be supressed by religious, academic, and political institutions; and, finally, how this knowledge can both ameliorate political division within the west and enable democracy to progress beyond the limitations of western thought. This book is for anyone interested in how reincarnation, psychedelics, and philosophy can transmute the crises and uncertainty of the 21st century into an unprecedented opportunity for global transformation.
‘New Rising Sun’—Breidenstein 2014
Biography
Growing up between West Chester and Ardmore (Philadelphia) Pennsylvania, Joe’s life revolved mostly around skateboarding and playing electric bass but, after a couple of years as an arts major, he was bitten by the philosophy snake and the rest is history. Earning his B.A. at Villanova University in 2014, his M. A. at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis in 2016, and his Ph.D. at Queen’s University in 2021, Joe’s formal training focuses on the history of western philosophy—primarily the presocratics and ancient Greek philosophy, Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze, Peirce, and Whitehead. But, since he began practicing yoga at the same time as he began formally studying philosophy, his work has always been cross-cultural and interdisciplinary.
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