XPost: alt.philosophy.taoism, alt.buddha.short.fat.guy, alt.philosophy.zen   
   From: tanghuyen@gmail.com   
      
   On 11/16/2016 2:50 PM, noname wrote:   
      
   > What is the book you are attempting to have published, and how long has it   
   > been completed?   
      
   I started it some decades ago, with an eye on Buddhism,   
   but gradually my focus shifted to pure reason, in the   
   strict Kantian sense, the a priori domain, independent of   
   experience, though I still keep quite some attention to   
   Buddhism, and extend it to Daoism and Stoicism. I take   
   pure reason, the a priori domain, independent of   
   experience, as the explaining scheme which explains   
   Buddhism, Daoism, Stoicism, and the Greats in European   
   philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Thomas,   
   Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, etc. One crucial witness   
   to the universality of pure reason happens to be a   
   Frenchwoman of low nobility, with little formal education,   
   who writes in popular (and not academic, not learned)   
   French with a street flavour, Madame Guyon. She reintuits   
   much of ancient Stoicism, and also of Buddhism and   
   Daoism, at a time when almost nothing is known of   
   Oriental philosophy and religion. In rational history, she   
   bequeaths the main lines of thought to the German   
   Greats, Kant, Hegel, also to a lesser extent Heidegger,   
   though of them, only Kant mentions her unfavourably in   
   an unpublished note. Leibniz knew of her and wrote a   
   negative letter about her. Hegel and Heidegger probably   
   never heard of her.   
      
   My ambition is to write a rational history of philosophy,   
   from the point of view of pure reason, covering East and   
   West, antiquity and modernity, which includes theology   
   and mysticism (not the experience per se, but the   
   theoretical justification of it). Much of it has been written,   
   but I keep rewriting it, as my thinking goes more deeply   
   and I find more shared patterns amongst the above. And   
   all the fancy talk of methodology aside, my main tool is   
   pattern-matching, which is the revealing factor of   
   commonality, if the patterns can be found that bridge all   
   apparent divisions, like time, space, language, culture,   
   religion, etc., and if such patterns can be made to   
   harmonise together, which makes them a system, in the   
   Greek sense of what stands together.   
      
   So, my manuscript has not been completed, but much   
   has been written, and I hope to complete it and get it   
   published, though it is not going to get accepted easily,   
   seeing that it is revolutionary, in that it turns upside   
   down much of white scholarship, even in the domain of   
   European philosophy alone. This domain of pure reason   
   is mostly a virgin forest, with scarcely any probing,   
   surely not in depth, even if the expressions "pure reason"   
   and "a priori" have been heralded for over two centuries.   
   White scholars talk about it in awe, but don't quite know   
   what it is, as if it was God, no less.   
      
   Tang Huyen   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)