A Philosopher's Ruminations

  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...

  History has been unjust to Hegel but in recent times his philosophy is garnering some attention. In my opinion he is perhaps the greatest western philosopher since Plato and Aristotle. He should be counted as a Platonist who has developed the Aristotelian version of Platonism combined with Spinoza’s theory of material causality of God and the demands of critical philosophy. Below is a brief summary of his important works: 1.      Faith and Knowledge: This is work is critical of Kant, Fichte and Jacobi all of whom believed that it is important to make room for faith by limiting the pretensions of reason. Jacobi argues that reason cannot prove its own validity and so we need a salto mortale to justify reason - a faith based or poetical justification of reason. The need for such a justification arises because reason is mediated and incapable of providing immediate knowledge. What is mediate is finite and through the finite or conditioned we cannot grasp the unc...

  Philosophy at its inception was considered to be a science — a paramount science, with a distinctive method and a criterion of validation of its own. Philosophy can be regarded as a science if it has its own subject matter and method. What then is the subject matter of philosophy? Aristotle in his Metaphysics says it is being qua being. Other sciences study a particular segment of reality but philosophy seeks to study reality as a whole. But it may be objected that there is no such thing as reality as a whole, there only particular segments of reality so to say and the total number of sciences covering these potentially infinite segments will inform us about what reality is in its totality. To this Aristotle could reply the science studying one part of being would not be able to say anything about another part of being, how can physics for instance which according to him studies physical objects so far as they are movable inform us about mathematical objects that are not changeab...