Recover - despite their fragmentary state and historical suppression and distortion - the true original teachings of the much-slandered Sophists, Cynics, Stoics, Pyrrhonists, later Academics, Epicurieans, Atomists, Pythagoreans, etc. And trace their profound and undeniable connection to parallel traditions in ancient India, not only original Buddhism but all of the so-called Śramaṇa (including specially the Jains) and Nāstika schools as well as the Nyâya and Vaisheshika.
The common grounds:
1) A highly sophisticated critical and formal theory of language, logic, argumentation and epistemology.
2) A method of self-cultivation based on direct philosophical introspection and a sophisticated phenomenological psychology. The basic idea was to obtain consciousness of oneself and the world as merely an organic system of thought processes, as a flux of thoughts seen purely as a flux of thoughts and to gradually - with the help of psychological analysis and other methods - to obtain complete mastery and direct control over all thought processes with the ultimate aim of being able to transcend thought entirely.
3) An enlightened humanistic ethics and social-political philosophy: cosmopolitanism, encyclopedism, democracy, human rights, animal rights, anti-slavery, rejection of artificial social hierarchies with no basis in nature, rejection of exploitation, war, xenophobia, unverifiable claims and religious superstition.
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