The Perennial Philosophy

Why it’s on the list: Aldous Huxley’s 1945 anthology-with-commentary arguing that the world’s religious and mystical traditions, stripped of their local particulars, describe the same underlying reality — the book that put the phrase philosophia perennis into general circulation.

Where I heard about it

• Pertaining to God — cites it directly.
• My own notes — it is the unnamed source behind a term that recurs in them: Super Uno Pluribus runs the same convergence argument in computational language, What I Learned Running a Junto and Why It Failed uses it socially rather than metaphysically, and The Oldest Idea Keeps Getting Rediscovered is the essay draft that would have to reckon with it.

About this edition

Related idea: Eternalism.