World Wisdom – serie

This anthology of Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy promotes a new and fresh view of what Hellenic philosophy is and what kind of wisdom it offers us. The book demonstrates through excerpts from the great Pythagorean and Platonic writers that to these thinkers philosophy is a way of life and a means of spiritual realisation-not the dry rationalistic mental exercise philosophy has become in the modern world. The Golden Chain of the title refers to the ancient belief that such philosophy transmits a heritage of unitive knowledge through a succession of enlightened teachers and students. The editor Algis Uzdavinys is an author translator and scholar of remarkable scope who uses his scholarship and his own deep knowledge of the philosophia perennis to illustrate for us the timeless wisdom of these writings. The foreword is by John Finamore.

The conference, convened by the traditionalist journal , Sacred Web featured presentations from many of the world's leading traditionalists/perennialists such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Huston Smith, Jean-Louis Michon, James S. Cutsinger, Reza Shah-Kazemi, as well as another generation of thinkers and writers.Each topic during the two days demonstrated the need to preserve traditional spiritual thought and values and their critical relevance to numerous areas of modern human thought and activity. The topics ranged from the most interior issues of one's spiritual life, to the educating of children, to the pernicious effects of central modernist theories, to reconciling how different faiths view scriptural stories, to the traditional view of art as opposed to the modern and much, much more. The five hour, forty-five minutes of video highlights gives some presentations almost in their entirety, while others are more abbreviated. Even so, the two-disc set gives an excellent introduction to the central ideas of the Perennialist/Traditionalist school of thought, its most important figures, and what it can offer to a world lost in its own intellectual and material refuse. The set would be a very good learning tool for university classrooms and in libraries, which want to include the full history of contemporary even if not "modern" thought.

René Guénon (1886-1951) was the founder of the Perennialist/Traditionalist school of comparative religious thought well-known for its espousal of the "transcendent unity of religions". In a time of unquestioning belief in the dogmas of progress and evolution, Guénon issued a devastating critique of the modern world. A pioneering philosopher, he, also, provided the intellectual keys for a reclamation of the West's spiritual riches through an exposition of the Eastern metaphysical doctrines. His writings range over a vast terrain - Vedanta, the Chinese tradition, Christianity, Sufism, the Kabbalah, world mythology, symbolism and alchemy.