A Philosopher's Ruminations

Philosophy has never been of interest to the masses, nor do people ever understand what it really is. As Cicero said: “Philosophy is content to have but few judges, and flies from the mob deliberately; by the mob itself philosophy is both envied and distrusted. So that if someone wanted to cry down philosophy as a whole, they could do it with the support of the people.” Plato believed that one must not study dialectics till one reaches a mature age of 30 and has learnt all requisite subsidiary sciences, or else the study of dialectics would lead to nihilism. Despite this philosophy, it has, to a great extent, lost the limited influence and respect it once had. The reason for this is that philosophy, as Hegel points out, has the same content as religion, but while religion seeks to understand its subject matter through representations and images, philosophy has a rational form; it seeks to study this content through pure thought. Philosophy seeks to understand everything by tracing it b...

The question is ambiguous between - does anything that exists have a cause, and does anything that exists have a reason or a purpose? In Platonism, mechanical causation is not possible without teleological causation and ‘reason’ is a broader category than causation. For example, for Leibniz, an infinite regress of cause and effects is possible, but the entire series must have a reason for existing, and this reason must be outside them. The infamous PSR is not a theory of mechanical causation, but a principle of harmony that says God orders everything according to the best and the existence of something is its compossibility in relation to the whole. This is to say that a monad is compossible or exists not because of its logical possibility but its ability to add to the overall purpose of things. In this worldview, the purpose is the ‘why’ of things, and this teleology is immanent within the thing itself and not externally imposed. To exist is to exist as a thing that acts to fulfil its...

The problem with creation is this: God is infinite, so nothing outside it can exist. What is limited by something outside itself is finite. On the other hand, the finite being must exist for there to be any creation at all. This is how the problem was solved in earlier times: what is finite is composed of two principles, essence and existence. The finite entity does not have any genuine existence; its existence is derivative, i.e. through another, and no finite being can explain the existence of any other finite entity because it too would have its existence through another. Hence, whatever is finite is explained only by reference to the infinite. The Infinite, on the other hand, is a simple entity, it’s very essence involves its existence, hence its existence is not through another. Plotinus regarded this infinite being as self-caused, but to be the cause of oneself is to suppose a distance from oneself. It seems, however, his intention was only to point out that God is the uncaused c...

  If someone is inherently evil, then they cannot be good; if someone is inherently good, then they can do no evil; and if someone is inherently neither good nor bad, then they cannot be either. So, do human beings have a nature that can be characterized as either good or bad, and is deviation from one’s nature possible? If yes, then why? What is it to be good, and are human beings capable of being good? I will briefly defend a Platonic answer — within the state of nature, human beings are estranged from their true nature, which means that in the natural realm, so to speak, human beings are self-seeking and strive to dominate others. The goodness of human beings is present to them as an endowment and an ideal which has to be converted into an achievement. The process of negation of disidentifying with the false sense of self has a positive result, leading to the recovery of our true selves. The process of recovering one’s true self is the cultivation of virtue. The process of becom...

  Quine is  working at the interface between language and reality. The epistemological question in the case of inference was – a) what justifies the transition from one thought to another? b) What explains the logical validity of inferences? To this, Frege’s answer was sameness of conceptual content, which later became sameness of sense and sameness of reference. If we are talking about semantic understanding, the epistemological question is: a) how do we discriminate between correct and incorrect usage of a word? b) How do we know how to apply the word correctly? To these questions, Frege’s answer was through grasping sense because it is the sense that determines reference. The ability to draw correct inferences and semantic understanding are products of our conceptual capabilities. To possess a concept is to have a norm or a standard of judgment about an object and to understand correct and incorrect use of concepts. The objective side of the content of concepts concerns the...

I find the following pattern playing out in the political field — group 1 says it is historically oppressed by group 2. It treats culture and norms as identities shaped by group 2 to enhance their power and subvert others. Norms are the means of gaining power over others, both mentally and physically. So for group 1, rebellion is freedom. It treats itself as a victim, which allows it to justify actions deliberately aimed at dominating others. Earlier hierarchies were justified by power; now they are justified by victimhood, but the desire for domination is the same. Yet this desire is cloaked as justified, a means to freedom for group 1. Their actions are morally pure; their moral purity is the problem; they are too good, and so are exploited by others. So now they should retaliate. They do to others what they claim others do to them, but it is not the same. There is a moral asymmetry here. Group 2 cannot be victims; that is not their identity. They put the bad apples in group 2, along...