Early Chinese Philosophy: The Humanism of Confucius

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The classical period of ancient Chinese philosophy runs from about the 6th century BCE till the 2nd century BCE and is marked by the proliferation and flowering of many varying philosophical schools, an era in Chinese history referred to (by…
Death of Socrates

The Legacy of Socrates: Skepticism, Knowledge and Reason

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One of the best indications of the influence of Socrates on the development of Western philosophy, what the Hellenes, or Greeks, termed philosophia, his ideas being primarily represented by the writings of his best known pupil Plato, is the…

Pythagoras: The Father of Hellenic Philosophy

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Pythagoras, Thales of Miletus, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Xenophanes, Zeno, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, and Democritus all made contributions to Pre-Socratic philosophical thought and were referenced by later philosophers and historians…

The Metaphysics of the I Ching: The Alignment of Heaven, Man and Earth

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While the translational difficulties from Traditional Chinese into English are fairly well documented, even with the introduction of the Pinyin Romanization system of Chinese words in the middle of the twentieth century which is now predominantly…

Ancient Chinese Theology: From Shàngdì to Tiān

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The Chinese civilization is if not the, then certainly one of, the oldest persistent civilizations on the planet.[1]  Its roots go back to the early part of the second millennium BCE with the first dynastic empire, the Xia Dynasty (circa c.…
Evolution of the Chinese character for Tian, or Heaven in ancient Chinese script

From the (Ancient) Far East: The Translation Challenge

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We see the first evidence of Chinese writing, pictograms or logograms on bronze and bone artifacts from the last years of the Xia Dynasty (2070 – 1600 BCE), almost four thousand years ago.  This writing system, the foundations of which…

Eurasian Mythos: Establishing the Laurasian Hypothesis

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These mythological narratives clearly reached back at some level or another into the pre-civilization times of the societies within which they emerged, there was clearly not only similarities between the accounts, but also clearly some “borrowing”…

Roman Cosmogony: The Metamorphoses of Ovid

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When trying to ascertain the belief systems of the ancients, and specifically as related to their views on cosmogony and theogony, one is apt to conclude that anything written by the Latin/Romans can add nothing to the historical record of…

Ancient Chinese Theology: Shàngdì, Pángǔ, Tiān and the Dao

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Before the evolution of the more esoteric and all-encompassing principle of Heaven (Tiān) which we find so prevalent in classical Chinese philosophical circles after the advent of the Zhou Dynasty, the primary divine entity that is worshipped…

Vedic Cosmogony: Skepticism, Puruṣa and Hiraṇyagarbha

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When one looks at the early creation myths, i.e. mythos, of the Indo-Aryans[2], what we today call Hinduism, one is confronted with the fact that their early mythology was not so clearly codified or synthesized as its sister cultures in Mesopotamia and…