Greetings, All
.I am so grateful and excited to be joining Planksip at this time - as it seems to me that spaces like this preserve something extraordinarily essential: the public life of thought. Philosophy, theology, and spiritual reflection become stale when trapped inside their own systems, speaking only to themselves in inherited language. What has always mattered to me is the attempt to bring those inquiries back into contact with lived experience, where they can breathe, be challenged, and become useful.
My name is Dr. Joe Atman. I earned a Master’s in Interdisciplinary Studies from Hofstra University, pursued doctoral work in the Philosophy of Religion and Theology at Claremont Graduate University, and obtained a Doctorate in Sacred Theology from St. Mary’s Seminary - where I also served as interim President and helped guide its move to the Claremont School of Theology, where it became St. Theresa’s. But the deeper purpose of that path has never been credentials; it has always been to think seriously about consciousness, language, spirituality, and what it means to be a human being.
My larger philosophical project asks how we have come to confuse our concepts with reality itself. We live through systems, beliefs, and linguistic structures so continuously that we often mistake them for the world they are meant to describe. My work is an attempt to examine those structures and ask whether a more direct and honest relation to being is still possible.
That concern is central to A Philosophical War. In that work, I argue that modern consciousness has become overrun by conceptualization, by abstraction, ideology, and language that too often mediate reality rather than access it. The title is not a performance of aggression, but a struggle to expose the difference between the word and the thing, the concept and the real. It is, ultimately, an effort to clear space for a more harmonious relation with existence.
That is part of why Planksip feels like the right home both for me, and for my general philosophcial project. It is a place where ideas are allowed to remain alive, open, and in motion. I look forward to contributing to that conversation in a way that is reflective, searching, and above all, human.
