The West's Global Philosophy: Huxley's Dialogue with Taoism

While many readers know Aldous Huxley as the author of Brave New World, few know him as a philosopher. Even fewer readers are aware of his extensive knowledge of Eastern philosophy and the ways in which he perceives epistemological and ethical parallels between Eastern thought and Western philosophy. This essay freshly unveils this unexpected part of Huxley by investigating his dialogue with a classical Chinese philosophy called Taoism and the ways in which Taoism contributes to the formation of his most important philosophical treatise The Perennial Philosophy (1946), written as a book of global philosophy.