In the period of philosophical development that arose as the influence of the Greek culture bled into the period of Roman/ Latin dominance in the Mediterranean and Near East, both the Stoic as well as the Epicurean philosophic schools rose… Read More ›
Aristotle is arguably one of, if not the, most influential philosophers in the history of Western civilization, outlining in painstaking detail not only a fully formed and comprehensive system of reason and logic, but also a comprehensive system metaphysics, what some… Read More ›
At some level, a religious tradition can be thought of as distinguished by, or even defined by, its creation story – i.e. its cosmological narrative – and the Hindu/Vedic tradition is no different in this regard although it has many… Read More ›
As the Confucian school was referred to as Rújiā, the Daoist school was referred to as Daojiā, each called out as one of the six main philosophical schools during the Warring States Period to the Early/Former Han. While a Daoist “canon”… Read More ›
The first systematic treatment of philosophy, and arguably the most influential, in the West can be found in works of Plato, in particular in his works the Phaedo, the Republic and the Timaeus which are by most accounts the most influential of… Read More ›
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 to some extent or another. Although none of the complete works of Pre-Socratic philosophers survive today… Read More ›
Running parallel to the maturation and evolution of Hellenic philosophy, to the East the Indo-Aryan people were going through a similar intellectual revolution from the prevalence of ritual and ceremonial worship of gods and goddesses embedded in their mythologically steeped traditions… Read More ›
Orthodox Indian philosophy, the legacy of the Indo-Aryans, takes on a much different form than it does in the West, and in turn a much different form that it does in the Far East, despite the fact that the intellectual… Read More ›
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 used, it’s with noting… Read More ›
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…. Read More ›
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 became the what… Read More ›
While we have attempted to describe the nature of the work, and its underlying “purpose”, in Aristotelian terms[1], whenever the author stops to think about it, or whenever he is asked “why” he’s doing it, there never appears to be… Read More ›
via The Hetu and Luoshu Diagrams: Numerology in Chinese Antiquity
Meditation then, in the context of the fairly lengthy discussions and treatment of this specific discipline, or practice, throughout this work (primarily through an Indian theo-philosophical lens) is a fundamentally aspect of, a core component of as it were, the mystical… Read More ›
Perhaps Plato’s greatest contribution to Western philosophy is the idealism embedded in his Theory of Forms, which in essence breaks down existence itself as not only a physical world of inanimate and animate objects, but a theory of knowledge and understanding which is… Read More ›
