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...