Peter Kingsley born is a mystic, philosopher, and scholar. He has written extensively on the pre-Socratic philosophers Parmenides and Empedocles and the world they lived in. Peter Kingsley attended Highgate School , in north London, until He graduated with honours from the University of Lancaster in , and went on to receive the degree of Master of Letters from the University of Cambridge after study at King's College ; subsequently, he was awarded a PhD in classics by the University of London for his research under the guidance of Martin West.
He has lectured widely in North America and Europe. Kingsley has noted in public interviews that he is sometimes misunderstood as a scholar who gradually moved away from academic objectivity to a personal involvement with his subject matter. However, Kingsley himself has stated that he is, and always has been, a mystic , and that his spiritual experience stands in the background of his entire career, not just his most recent work. Kingsley's work argues that the writings of the presocratic philosophers Parmenides and Empedocles, usually seen as rational or scientific enterprises, were in fact expressions of a wider Greek mystical tradition that helped give rise to western philosophy and civilisation.
This tradition, according to Kingsley, was a way of life leading to the direct experience of reality and the recognition of one's divinity. Yet, as Kingsley stresses, this was no "otherworldly" mysticism: its chief figures were also lawgivers, diplomats, physicians, and even military men. The texts produced by this tradition are seamless fabrics of what later thought would distinguish as the separate areas of mysticism, science, healing, and art.
Parmenides, most famous as the "father of western logic" and traditionally viewed as a rationalist, was a priest of Apollo and iatromantis lit. A significant implication of this reading is that western logic and science originally had a deeply spiritual purpose. Kingsley's reading of early Greek philosophy and, in particular, of Parmenides and Empedocles, is at odds with most of the established interpretations.
However, Kingsley agrees with other recent critics in contending that later ancient philosophers such as Plato , Aristotle , and Theophrastus , among others, misinterpreted and distorted their predecessors; hence, conventional scholarship that uncritically accepts their misrepresentations of the presocratics is necessarily flawed. Additionally, he reads the poems of Parmenides and Empedocles as esoteric and mystical texts, a hermeneutical perspective that, according to Kingsley, is both indicated by the textual and historical evidence and also provides the only way to solve many problems of interpretation and text criticism.
