A Philosopher's Ruminations

  For Advaita Vedanta but not for Madhyamika, everything except Brahman is unreal. Why is it unreal? Because they lack a self or an essence. What lacks an essence has no genuine identity, because what is dependent on another cannot also be identical with itself. A chariot, for instance, is nothing over and above its parts arranged in a certain way. It has no essence, no existence that is not dependent on the parts. It has no existence outside of human conventions that treat these myriad parts as a single entity. These conventions have no foundation in reality, and everything is a conglomeration of parts to which we ascribe an essence. For Advaita Vedanta, everything different from the self or anything that is or can be an object of the self is unreal. The Self is something that necessarily exists and is unnegatable, while the existence of the world is transitory and is negated in Brahman-realization, like dreams are sublated upon waking up. Why does the world appear to us if it is ...

Psychologism conflates a genetic account of the acquisition of concepts with the truth of those concepts. In other words, it regards how we come to consider something as true as an explanation of the truth of the belief. This reduction of epistemology to psychology depends on an ontological reduction of the object of thought to the underlying psychological process of thinking. The account is irremediably circular, as can be seen in Hume’s psychologistic reduction of the relation of cause and effect. According to Hume, the philosophical relation of cause and effect is reducible to a natural relation consisting of the feelings of facility in moving from one idea to another and vivacity that compels the mind to believe that something is present to consciousness. Consider a person who regularly sees smoke wherever there is fire without any counterexamples. This leads him to associate the two together and regard one as the cause and the other as the effect. The source of the idea does not ...

  You love something when that something gives meaning to your life. And if I may say so philosophy is the most meaningful activity of life. Without philosophy who are we? We get a job to survive in the world, have kids, make money that we would never really get to use and the same routine in and out of office goes on for years until we grow weak and our infirmity prevents further activity. That is when we stop and start thinking what was the meaning of all this. Only when we realize we are mortal and things may end soon for us that we begin to take stock of life to see how our life has been. The problem is all our life we have done something for the sake of gaining something else. But we have not done anything for the sake of itself. When we turn back we realize that our most happiest period has been our childhood where we have no achievements to show for yet we were happy. Philosophy is meaningful because it breaks us from a mechanical pattern - it allows you to be more than just...

  Philosophy is love for wisdom and this love is fulfilled in the mode of contemplation or meditation. To contemplate one has to withdraw from the realm of facts, don’t take it in the wrong sense that facts do not matter to a philosopher, what I mean by this is, in the contemplative mode facts acquire a different significance altogether than the one they have within the practical mode. In the practical mode, there are facts and theories to explain those facts which are incriminated, as if in a court of law, on the basis of whether or not they accurately represent facts or not, in physics for instance a theory is regarded as correct to an extent it allows correct predictions or more accurate observations i.e. there is a set criteria to   follow   to regard a theory as valid but the philosopher is interested in the norm or the criteria itself due to which something comes to be regarded as valid. For philosophy it is not so much the particular results of a science that matte...

  Three Objections To Philosophy And Reply Objection 1 : Philosophy is impractical. What is meant by impracticality? It means one that philosophy has no relevance for our daily life and two it is devoid of practical significance i.e. it is theoretical and lacks practical application. Reply: First the charge of irrelevance. The objection presupposes that the only thing meaningful in life is something that is tangible or can be measured or in other words has a price. We act in order to achieve our goals and select appropriate means for that purpose. Philosophy too says that its goal is wisdom but of what use is wisdom. Does it solve our problems regarding food, clothing and shelter? Does it help to solve our problems when people in authority oppress us? To this my reply is first life is not a profit and loss statement; basic necessities are important but there are more valuable things in life than that like friendship, relationships — love a parent has for his child or a child’...

  The following quote is from Jakob Fries’s 1816 pamphlet, ‘The Danger Posed by the Jews to German Well-Being and Character’, translated in a footnote to Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right by H.S. Nisbet: Jews can be subjects of our government, but as Jews they can never become citizens of our people, for as Jews they want to be a distinct people, and so they necessarily separate themselves from our German national community. Indeed, they form not merely a people, but at the same time they form a state. The basic laws of Jewish religion are at the same time the basic laws of their state, their rabbis are at the same time their chiefs, to whom the people owe the highest reverence and the most blind obedience . ..Their nationality signifies in itself only their physical origin from a distinct people. Here we have to judge them as favourably as possible. No man who loves justice wants to stand by the proposition that black is the colour of slaves, or any other propo...