A Philosopher's Ruminations

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...

  I think what motivates anarchism as an ideology is a wrong concept of freedom which is seen as freedom from authority or complete self-determination but this concept is impossible. Perhaps the preachers of anarchism feel that the root of all evil is submission to authority and hence if we are free from authority we are then free from evil. But an anarchic state would be the same as Hobbesian state of nature where everyone would have a right over everything. So in such a state my freedom would exclude yours, so we would have an either-or situation. Or to put it in other words my freedom would cancel yours, so if I am free you cannot be. Clearly in such a situation there can be no rights and no freedom; you don’t get either without certain limits and a right to everything dilutes those rights and freedom that is exclusive ceases to be freedom at all. Hence the correct idea of freedom demands not exclusion but inclusion for it is inextricable bound by the idea of good. This is easy ...

  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...