A Philosopher's Ruminations

Is it possible, simply through the study of psychology and without knowledge of mathematics, to tell that 2+2=5 is wrong? Simply through the survey of the internal contents of the mind, can you make any judgement about what is true or false? You cannot tell whether affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent are fallacious forms of reasoning or not. For that, psychology has to turn to other sciences, and so it must necessarily presuppose others. Or take Transcendental Phenomenology, which is the study of phenomena - the subject matter of this science. To arrive at this phenomena we have to abstract from real existence and concentrate on how things appear to consciousness. This epoche, as Husserl calls it, drives a wedge between meaning and reality, but this separation is presupposed within the science and not justified within it. The phenomenological reduction is, as a consequence selective; it knows what it negates and what it preserves. There is already a duality of meaning a...

  Reality cannot be only what our brain perceives because the finitude of all our claims demonstrates the opposite. Is ‘true for me’ true? If it were, it would not conflict with another truth claim. If it is said there is no conflict because ‘true for me’ is true, then there is conflict. If I say ‘this is sweet’ is true for me, and ‘this is sour’ is true for another, and there is no conflict between the two claims, it should be asked whether true for me means the same as true or not. If it doesn’t, then that implies true-for-me and truth are not identical; if it does, then there are two contradictory truth claims, and that means ‘true-for-me’ and truth are not identical. What is real is also objective - applicable across subjective perspectives. If I run into a thief who believes it is right to murder me for money, and if I think I should not die, but if I also believe that he is right from his perspective to think so, then I am going to die. Can I, however, think that I am right t...

  I disagree. Theism or any form of belief in God is based on the idea that the world and finite human beings lack genuine existence, and their existence in a relevant sense about which they may differ is derived from a higher source, which is the ground of all existence. This ground of all existence is God, and its existence is self-explanatory. Atheism denies this because the search for grounds leads us to an infinite regress, because there is nothing whose existence is self-explanatory, so everything that is, is conditioned by something else, and that by something else and so forth. This comes down to - anything that is finite is through another finite entity and does not require the other of finitude, the infinite to explain the finite. Whichever position is correct, there is no reason to think that one is logical and the other is purely emotional. Even Kant, who criticized proofs of God, conceded that Reason, due to its intrinsic nature, cannot relinquish the search for the ul...

  The consideration that led us to seek a first cause also lead to the consideration that the first cause is immaterial. Consider the properties of matter: Composition: matter is something composed of parts, and every part is external to the other parts. Matter is parts outside parts. The first cause must be simple or incomposite; otherwise, we would have to seek the cause of the unity of the first cause, in which case it would not be ‘first’. Potentiality-Actuality: This is a consideration from the Aristotelian framework. Matter is something indeterminate and is something determinate (capable of being referred to as a this-x) because of the presence of a Form. For Aristotle, the first cause must be something actual, or it would not be the first cause of motion. The idea is that if everything were merely in potency to another, then there would be no motion. If the First Cause were in potency in relation to another, it would require another cause to explain its motion. Space-Time: A...

  This would not be true even in a subjective idealism like that of Berkeley because even if there is no matter and the esse of the world is its percipi, it is not the percipi of common human beings but of God. So, if the question pertains only to human beings the answer is yes, the world can exist even if no one is watching. But perhaps the question goes deeper. It concerns the objectivity or the reality of the universe. It is believed that there can be no genuine objectivity if it is relative to the subject. Consider Kant’s thing-in-itself; we arrive at the latter by subtracting everything subjective. The purely objective is then something unthinkable because if I could think it, it would be subjective. But if it is unthinkable, it is also unknowable. Many scientists think that physics informs us about the Kantian thing-in-itself, but if Kant is right, the thing-in-itself is outside the reach of science because it cannot be reached at all. It is so objective that it is as good as...

The concept of ‘coming from’ of becoming requires not just something but also nothing because becoming is the coming forth of that which was not. In Parmenides’s Eleatic Monism, we find that Pure Being is the first principle, but this led him to deny the reality of becoming because this involves negation. If we hold fast to the principle that what is, cannot not be, and what is not, cannot come to be, then becoming is impossible. I concur with Hegel on this point - pure being is indistinguishable from nothing, it resides neither in pure being nor in non-being but in their combination - being and nothing. Anything that is or has being also has the opposite, which is nothing. For anything x that is, it is in so far as it is distinct from something else y, this is to say it is through negating something other than itself. There is no identity without difference and no difference without identity. This leads us towards the concept of unity, which is a unity of opposites that holds together...