Astrological Reviews and Essays (ARE) is the critical review and essay website of researcher Kenneth McRitchie. 

The publication and critical examination of ideas is necessary in all areas of knowledge. Although some ideas may enjoy a certain status within an insular community, it is only by connecting to the scrutiny of well-informed readers in related disciplines that ideas can evolve and gain usefulness as general knowledge. Lack of open discourse fosters an unhealthy climate of excessive skepticism and mistrust. Informed discourse acts to clarify faulty assumptions and misinformed claims. Critical discourse is frequently necessary to obtain funds for research. 

ARE does not attempt a comprehensive review of all research in astrology. Nor does it try to evaluate the overall performance of all astrological research. In the history of ideas, important advances tend to be made through remarkable insights and momentous breakthroughs. This is why ARE focuses on key, peer reviewed research, specifically the research that is most frequently cited in claims of evidence either for or against astrology. 

Astrology presents many challenges to conventional beliefs that need to be rationally considered. ARE posts articles and essays to develop the more theoretical and philosophical areas of astrological knowledge. These articles build a framework of explanatory concepts and insightful questions. With regard to astrological philosophy and theory, there are a few crucial questions:

  1. What is the existential relationship between the individual and the celestial environment that surrounds the individual? This theory would explain correlations by reference to mathematical frames of reference and semantic models of natural process symmetries that provide access to unknowns.
  2. What are the empirical essences and operations of the signs, houses, aspects, and planets that can be reduced to definitive semantic meanings necessary to describe actions? This theory would develop an astrological taxonomy for empirical observations and inferences.
  3. How is the psychological and empirical mechanism of astrological phenomena to be explained? This theory would develop the evaluation of astrological models and dynamics by observation as well as by the reasoned understanding of astrological wisdom.

These queries must be guided by the assumptions and underlying problems that have left many reasonable people unsatisfied with astrology as a discipline. The discourse of ideas seeks to align: what is known; what is unknown; what is uncertain; and what could further be known.

(Updated 03072023)