The Millennial Turn with Emile Alexandrov

Emile Alexandrov is an assistant professor of philosophy, formerly at the University of Tyumen in Russia, and currently a visiting scholar at Waseda University in Tokyo. He is author of The Other Platonist Beginning and Metaphysics and Ineffable.

Emile examines the millennial turn around the year 1000 as the pivotal transition from the early to high Middle Ages and the emergence of high scholasticism, driven by new Latin translations of Aristotelian logic and the flowering of demonstrative philosophy. He traces the gradual shift from non-discursive, intuitive modes of knowing toward discursive, logical reasoning in figures such as Anselm, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus, showing how this altered understandings of God, the soul, will, and the intelligible order of the cosmos while shaping a unified culture expressed in Gothic architecture. Alexandrov highlights the lasting consequences of this historical rebalancing for modern thought, the overemphasis on calculative reason, and the contemporary hunger for non-discursive approaches.

00:00:00 Introduction

00:05:00 Importance of the year one thousand

00:09:30 Gothic architecture and medieval habitus

00:12:30 Shift from non-discursive to discursive thinking

00:16:30 Anselm and the ontological argument

00:22:30 Balancing reason with intuition

00:27:30 The soul will and choice in Aquinas

00:34:30 Duns Scotus and haecceity

00:40:30 Renaissance freedom and the individuated subject

00:49:00 Conclusion

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science.

(Recorded on Wednesday, August 26th, 2026)

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