Collection of essays on history of ideas and paradigms

SEARCH FOR THE GREAT TRUTHS

The book “Search for the Great Truths” by Edgar Silinsh is a collection of 92 independent philosophical essays. The essays are about the history of ideas and paradigms from ancient Chinese Dao philosophy and Zen Buddhism to modern quantum physics, the general theory of relativity, theory of chaos, synergetics, non-traditional fractal geometry.

The essays follow time-vertical development of ideas and paradigms as well as their time-horizontal or synchronous appearance in various human intellectual and spiritual activities such as science, religion and fine arts as literature, painting, music, architecture – both in the East and in the West.

The underlying principle of the essays is that of complementarity. “A Great Truth is a truth whose opposite is also a Great Truth” as formulated by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1927 and since the principle has become one of the basic postulates of the modern science. Yet, its roots may be found already in the ancient Chinese Tao philosophy of opposites, visualized in the yang-jin symbol.

Each of the truths without their opposite is only half-truth: only supplemented by its complementary opposite, it becomes a genuine Great Truth.