Perennial Philosophy

The Perennial Philosophy This is the belief that all cultures and religions share common traits or patterns. In its simplest form, it is the belief that all cultures stem from one culture which existed in an ancient golden age or that culture was taught to humans by the gods. In its most sophisticated form, it is the Jungian observation of archetypal patterns in all cultures. 

In the literature then available about what we now call psychedelic drugs, the term most commonly used to describe the effects was psychotomimetic (meaning psychosis-mimicking). Yet it is evident from Huxley s description in The Doors of Perception that when he tried mescaline sulfate he was not going through some kind of "imitation psychosis. Huxley believed he had experienced something akin to mystical experience. He was considered an authority on the subject, being the author of one of the classics in this field, The Perennial Philosophy. 

Agostino Steuco, De perenniphilosophia (Lyon, 1540 and 1590). This Italian Augustinian expounds in his book the idea of a perennial philosophy," and of a tradition of which Hermes Trismegistus is one of the representatives. 

Charles B. Schmitt, "Perennial Philosophy From Agostino Steuco to Leibniz," in Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 27 (Jan.-March 1966), pp.505-532. 

Suspension Model, in Mr. Huxley s case, considering his great personal interest in art, the Perennial Philosophy and mystical and spiritual matters, his compassion for the human situation, and his humility, the effects he describes demand such an interpretation. 

Huxley, A. 1944. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper and Row Publishers, New Ifork. 

We may. It is an Alchemical understanding. But don t stop there [Laughing.] If we do, some will think I m trying to turn lead into gold back in the kitchen. Alchemy is a kind of philosophy, a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding. We also may call this perspective Tantric (as Brancusi would say), or (as you like to say) Perennial. ... 

What philosophers of chemistry can learn, and in my view should learn, from the philosophy of biology is the discovery of philosophical issues that derive from the peculiarities of chemistry. There is no simple rule or recipe to do that, as philosophy is a creative enterprise. However, one can take the branches of philosophy as guides, as analytical instruments rather than as sets of perennial issues. To illustrate that, I finally provide a few examples from my own recent work, arranged according to different branches of philosophy and each with reference to, in my view, obvious peculiarities of chemistry.23... 

One of the perennial debates in the philosophy of science has to do with realism What aspects of science, if any, truly represent the real world Idealization is a very important part of mathematical models. The degree to which a model has positive analogies is typically described by how realistic the model is i.e., the idea is that more realistic models contain more truth than other models. 

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