The Socrates Code

Book excerpt: Peter Hubral sets out a meticulously researched and convincing case that Western Philosophy is founded less upon the original Ancient Greek texts, as on a careless and ahistorical misreading of them, for which he provides an unprecedented rigorous revision. He shows that the original Greek terms astronomía, átomos, kósmos, geometría, idéa, planétes, práxis, psyché, mousiké, sympósion, theoría, and so on have nothing at all to do with astronomy, atom, cosmos, geometry, and so on. The originals terms rather find their equivalents in the Chinese Taiji-practice that he follows since 1997 under the guidance of Dao-Grandmaster Fangfu. He provides abundant evidence that this millennial practice equals the unwritten lost practice of dying (meléte thanátou) about which Plato writes: Those, who happen to grasp the philosophía correctly, risk being unrecognised by others because it is nothing but 'practising to die and to be dead' (Phaidon 64a). This practice - see the front cover - is based on the rigorous implementation of Wuwei, which the Greeks call philía that philosophía refers to, thus giving Greek wisdom (sophía) a completely new meaning. Due matching the Dao-practice to the practice of dying, Hubral completely dismantles the illusion that the western world has constructed about Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, etc. He shows that they made much more profound discoveries with the practice of dying about nature than what we are told about their contributions to mankind in uncountable commentaries!