I don’t know who that is and I have never evaluated his work. It’s the not the question I opened this thread with. It doesn’t support your argument to list names of professors. Knowing names of professors doesn’t tell me that you understand the philosophy being discussed. - Lausten
I assure you, I do. Not because I can name professors but despite their annoyance with the questions I confronted them with, in my debates with them.
The philosophy being discussed doesn’t depend on Lao Tzu being a real person, or on how the Tao Te Ching was translated. Billions of people have lived and died since then and have contributed to the validation of the ideas. I’m discussing the ideas, not trying to invalidate the particular words based on how they came to appear on this page.
The ideas you want to discuss is the problem. They are the stuff of superstition that comes from the validation of ideas accepted by billions of people to live in the misery those ideas caused. The Chinese people were really messed up by those ideas by the time the British moved in to push their Emperor around and took Hong Kong. The humiliation still rankles Xi Jinping today every time our politicians foment riots there and our Navy test his patience in the South China Sea. Anyway, Mao Tze Tung ripped those ideas out with extreme brutality when he adopted Marxism and launched the Cultural Revolution. There were no two ways about that. Today, China is westernized and thoroughly sanitized of ideas harmful to the motherland.