Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra
Greek philosophy is downstream of Indian philosophy, transhipped through Phoenician ports.
Around 950 BC, Hiram of Tyre and Solomon of Israel signed a treaty to send joint fleets down the Red Sea to the Gujarat coast, and for a full century the ships ran on a three-year cycle. Phoenician crews wintered in India for months waiting for monsoon winds to change. Their trading counterparts were Jain merchants, already teaching atomism, impermanence and that every living thing has a soul.
Ships returning to Sidon carried gold, ivory, peacocks, cinnamon and Indian ideas. Two generations later Kanada was teaching atomism at Dwarka on the Gujarat coast, and by the fifth century BC Leucippus was teaching it in Miletus, on the Ionian one. Democritus, who worked the theory out in detail, is recorded by Diogenes Laertius as having "made acquaintance with the Gymnosophists in India."
Greek philosophers who followed, worked in the same ports where the Phoenician ships berthed. Thales, born to a Phoenician family in Miletus, taught that the world was made of water and floated on it in the manner of a ship. Anaximander taught that air was the breath that animates each life, close to the Upanishadic vayu and prana. By the fifth century BC the animal and human sacrifice that filled Homer’s epics had gone silent in mainland Greece and the doctrine that stopped it had travelled on Phoenician ships from a coast where it had already stopped.
Textbooks call the coincidence a Greek Miracle. Historians should talk of cause and effect - not miracles.
Link to full Substack essay with sources in the replies below. Explore more in my book 'How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World'. maritimetradehistory.com
https://x.com/nickcollins1953/status/2095827466820719059
Consciousness may be older than the individual who experiences it.
Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) was a German Christian mystic who built an entire metaphysical system around a concept he called the “Ungrund”, the groundless. It describes the divine source before ordinary distinctions exist, beyond form, limitation and opposition.
For Böhme, creation was not simply the production of matter. It was a process of manifestation. Divine will and desire unfold into differentiation, and with differentiation come opposing forces such as light and darkness, attraction and resistance, spirit and nature. These oppositions make manifestation and experience possible. The human being occupies a special position within this system. Böhme described humanity as a microcosm, containing within itself the same tensions found throughout creation. The human soul is therefore not isolated from the cosmos but reflects its structure.
https://x.com/AtlasOfWisdom/status/2095540508076491208
Reality doesn't exist on its own; without subjectivity to perceive it, the universe would be radically different. | bit.ly/4teWHXg
Drawing on Schopenhauer, philosopher David Bather Woods argues that it is the will behind our subjectivity that also makes up the world itself.
https://x.com/IAI_TV/status/2095898938628812956
"[A] sparklingly original book." —@DrRupertS, author of "Science Set Free"
In "Why Is the World So Beautiful?," Nicholas Humphrey explains why beauty matters and how it has played an evolutionary role in our understanding of the world. Out Oct. 6th: bit.ly/4wMShYk
https://x.com/mitpress/status/2095856934221906270
Vedic Tadatmya: A Confession
This is my personalized biased approach to the Veda, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita
To establish a deep relationship with these great works of literature and Art
Literature and Art? Aren’t you disrespecting them by turning them into secular works?
No, I apologize deeply if anyone gets offended but my approach is to assimilate them in me as best as I can. While also enjoying their rasa. They are beautiful and they are fun. I have taken primarily a spiritual and literary approach to the Sastra and this is my experience. Because that is who I am
These three are great spiritual creations because they are great works of literature. I have attempted to show this with the Bhagavad Gita in my previous book, The Literary Genius of the Bhagavad Gita.
If we accept their genius… Then it doesn’t matter if we become Pandits or not. Neither for you nor for me
Don’t forget that 66.66 % of Vedangas are literary: nirukta, siksa, vyakarana and Chhanda.
It is like being at the beach. If you wish to enjoy the ocean, wade in. Doesn’t matter if you do it in Goa or Miami or Siesta Key. Doesn’t matter if you do in shorts or trunks. Get wet! Then, you and I can share what we felt. Then we enjoy as we heal
So, tasting and experiencing the rasa of the Veda is the key. To me We can’t bring ambition or fear into it. Nor dry dead rote. But a living connection that is organic and transforms us each moment. That is my yoga of the Veda and I pray that more lovers of Art and Literature discover it in their hearts
https://x.com/AmazingVedas/status/2095836634642092263
New article in Political Philosophy: "Enforceability, Legitimacy, and the Right to do Wrong" by Thomas Sinclair (Oxford), available open-access at...
I have developed the insight in a Kantian framework, in which certain conditions on the wielding of force must be met if the boundaries of freedom structured by it are to be morally authoritative in the first place. But the underlying thought is more general. Republican, realist, and relational egalitarian frameworks can agree that the solution to the puzzle of enforceability must be determined in the first instance by addressing moral concerns about relations of power and force, rather than by reflecting on the content and stringency of independently binding moral duties, or on the value of duty-bearers’ unforced conformity with them.
https://x.com/PolPhilJournal/status/2095629245527601447
Liberalism and democracy are often seen as inseparable. But from the start, there has been tension between democracy as the will of the majority, and liberalism as the protection of minority rights and free speech. Now we are seeing the rise of so-called 'illiberal democracies', sceptical of checks on executive power and liberal institutions. Illiberal democracies are now the most common form of government, according to The Economist.
Does illiberal democracy threaten the rise of autocratic or even fascist regimes? Or are unelected bodies such as the civil service and the law themselves potential threats to the democratic will of the people? Singaporean diplomat and scholar Kishore Mahbubani @mahbubani_k, former Leader of Canada's Liberal Party Michael Ignatieff @M_Ignatieff, and historian and sociologist Marlène Laruelle debate.
Tap here to watch now. Hosted by @rdhearing iai.tv/video/the-age-…
https://x.com/IAI_TV/status/2095574828610674722
Karl Polanyi correctly anticipated that the “human psyche” would rebel against the world homo economicus had wrought, demanding a return to “embeddedness in the community,” James K. Galbraith writes.
https://x.com/ProSyn/status/2095678267458269479
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theological state, thank you sir! But what else can he say. While the whole nation
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championing the cause of Hindutva and the cultural … : “Even as I saw Doctorji, who
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