When I was growing up you never saw a book by Hegel or any of the German idealists around in libraries of in bookstores. Never. In my high school library I recall there was some side writings by Kant but not any of the three Critiques.

But lots of the post modern garbage was out there. Lots.

Thinking back to it I think people were blaming Kant and Hegel  for WWI and WWII.

Why I mention this is that even though Hegel has problems still I think that McTaggart deals with a lot of them very well. And as for Kant I think that there also are plenty of problems but I think Leonard Nelson and the Friesian School of Kelley Ross deals with them very well.

Possession by the dark side from a biological perspective

The problem of possession by the Dark Side is not something that people think much about nowadays. And even when Rav Nahman from Breslov mentions the problem with religious leaders as being in general possessed by the Dark Side, few people really connect the dots.

I also would not think much about it except I saw recently a book by Daniel Defoe that goes into this problem and as I was thinking about it I was reminded about Howard Bloom's The Lucifer Principle.
And then it occurred to me the whole thing about toxo-Plasmosis.That even in the physical realm there is such a thing.If I would have a computer and be able to blog I might have written about this but now since I can's I simply am recommending that people pay a bit more attention to what Rav Nahman [Breslov and Uman] was saying because it has a strong basis in evidence and also makes sense beyond what it seems like at first.

To see the idea of possession by the dark side from a biological perspective see the lectures of Sapolsky at Stanford.

Howard Bloom approaches the subject from a different angle--that of the super-organism.
In the Middle Ages this was also a large subject. Even in Rouen where the trial of Joan [Jeene] of Arc was there were multiple trials on the issue at the same time. How can you tell if someone's visions are from the realm of hiliness or not?

I feel that sometimes you see in  life that everything is going well for a good long time and then everything falls apart. You can see this with Joan of Arc who had astounding success --for a while. A 17 year old girl declared war on the one of the  powerful Empires in the world and won. She said she would raise raise the seige of Orleans--and did so. She said she would have Charles VII crowned King in Reims and led him through enemy territory and had him crowned King of all France. And then she was captured and burnt at the stake. But somehow even in her fall there was something astounding. The trial was recorded almost word for word. Without that all there would be today would be an unconfirmed legend.

Now I do not think that I or anyone else can compare ourselves to Joan of Arc but still there is a lesson to learn from all that--that things can go great for sometime and then suddenly stop. But even in that time of fall there is still the compassion of God and helps in hidden ways.

an idea from the Ramban [Rav Moshe ben Nachman]

I hope that someone that has learn authentic Torah will start a blog. I am clocking out of blogging out of force of circumstances.I have no computer is it is only on rare occasions I can borrow from a friend.

Even if the police decide to give me back my computer, that does not mean I will be able to go back to writing music or ideas in Torah like I used to do in Uman. I realized even before I got to Israel that it was likely that things would be hard here. But to have my own daughter making false allegations against me was not expected.

In any case since I have a few minutes here I would like to take the opportunity to write an idea from the Ramban and a question I have about his idea.

In Bava Metzia there is a case of a person that loses an object and before he gives up on it someone else picks it up with intent to keep it. That is he decides to steal it. But then later after the owner has given up on it he decides to give it back to the owner. The Gemara says at that pointy he is simply giving back a present-. not fixing the original sin of theft.
The Baal HaMeor asks on this that the Torah holds there is a way to fix theft -and that is to give backthe object. השב תשיבם לאחיך.
The Ramban answers that that is only on regular theft. But here it is a case of an object that has been lost and then taken in theft. The difference is that theft is not owned by the thief if the owner gives up on it. But my question is that I am not sure why that makes a difference.[ The Ramban is saying the fixing of theft by giving it back is only as long the act is continued. But here the act is over so the is no correction.]

Dr Michael Hueemer has a tremendous amount of great ideas non his site. However I have not been able to see his point about no state having any authority.  A British philosopher Danny Frederick also has criticized this idea of Dr Huemer. The idea of government being a contract also has brought both of their critiques. But looking at the war between Sparta and Athens I can see that contract theory  and agreement to follow a certain form of government makes a big difference.  

Shulchan Aruch of Rav Joseph Karo. I can see why my learning partner did not think to learn it unless one knows the Gemara. [It was written to be a review of the Tur and Beit Yoseph which brings the Gemara and Rishonim.]

I have been seeing interesting things in the Shulchan Aruch of Rav Joseph Karo recently. I can see why my learning partner did not think to learn it unless one knows the Gemara but I have been seeing that there is a lot of interesting things there even when one has not leaned the Gemara. For example a few days ago I noticed the question is there is such a thing as giving up an obligation like a loan? This is brought in Choshen Mishpat 164 in the Taz and the Ketzot HaChoshen that are arguing about the law that the Rema brings there that there is such a thing as giving up on a loan--not forgiving it but giving up. The Rema brings a case that a Jewish town made a loan to the prince and the prince promised to reduce the taxes in return. In the end he did not reduce the taxes and the town gave up on the loan. Then the prince much later died and his son paid back the loan. I was not going to write about this but the subject is certainly interesting but also complicated and I have no had time to delve into it. 

If one has crops that he has not taken any tithe from and he puts let's say wine in a jar and closes it and calls it maasar sheni [the second maasar] then the jar itself becomes maasar sheni. [Tractate maasar sheni 3. mishna 12]

Both the Mishna Rishona [a commentary by a person named Ephraim Isaac] and the Tiferet Israel ask on this from tracatate Msaasar sheni 1 mishna 4 and 5. There it says if you buy a closed jar of wine of maasar sheni in Jerusalem the jar goes out from the category of the second maasar to become secular.

To me it seems there is a difference between calling a name of maasar sheni to crops that have not been tithed yet and buying something with maasar Sheni. So I do not see any question in the first place.

The Tiferet Israel answers this question from the mishna in which one sells closed jars in a place where one usually buys open jars, but that answer depends on there being some connection between calling a name and buying.
 

[The problem that the Tiferet Israel deals with is why are the jars not consecrated? But to me it seems the reason is the same that when buys a animal with the money of the second tithe that the leather is not consecrated.] 

There is something I noticed in Ketuboth. I had done Ketuboth as well as I could when I was in Shar Yashuv [That is Rav Friefeld's yeshiva in Far Rockaway.] Though I was just a beginner then, I still did it with most of the Tosphot and Tosphot HaRosh and some Tur Shulchan Aruch along with it. So when I got to Israel and discovered that courts were awarding מזונות ]alimony to divorced women it seemed strange to   me. There is on one hand an award of money to a widow until she collects the Ketubah. But from everything I recalled in Ketuboth that does not apply to a divorced woman. She gets the Ketubah and that is all.

A woman gets married. Her מעשה ידיה [money she makes by working] and any objects she finds go to the husband.

A woman gets married. Her מעשה ידיה [money she makes by working] and any objects she finds go to the husband. So why does the Rashba in Ketuboth in the chapter that starts האשה שנפלו say what she finds is נכסי מלוג? [Or at least that is how the Tosphot Yom Tov quotes the Rashba].

 נכסי מלוג is property she owns before the marriage. The husband gets the profits of the property, but she retains the title.

A woman owns property she brings into the marriage, but not wat money she makes while married nor any portion of her husband's. The reason a woman wants a  divorce is supposed to be that she no longer wants a connection with her husband. But nowadays the opposite is the case. She gets a divorce in order to hurt her husband as much a possible through children, money and any other means necessary.

[I wish this was clear to people. There are three kinds of property. Property the woman owns as she comes into the marriage but is not written into the ketubah. The husband can use it. Or if it is property that one gets rent from, that is owned by the husband.  But the property itself is owned by the woman. If the marriage ends, she gets that property. The same thing applies for property written into the ketubah, except that if it goes down in value, and the marriage ends, the husband has to make up for that loss in value. The third type of property  is what a woman makes while married. That is owned by the husband in full.

Obviously she does not magically own her husbands property just by the fact of being married to him.

Even though Dr Kelley Ross is very critical of Hegel, still in his comments he made a very important remark about what Hegel was trying to do--to finish what Socrates had started. [I only have a few minutes on this friend's computer so I can not expand but to me it seems crystal clear]. Dr Ross [the Kant Fries School] would not have put it in that way but I am sure that is what he meant.


Since i seem to have a few more minutes let me just add that Socrates was expert in finding the hidden contradictions in every single position offered by the people he was talking with. But not in a systematic way.  But he did have a system --or at least that is what we see in the dialogues of Plato. So Hegel was making Socrates into a system and also certainly held from the Neo Platonic View in which the Good emanates the Logos which emanates Nature.[It is the same system as the Arizal except the Ari goes into more details.

Another thing about Bava Kama. An ox [tam] gores another. Each are worth 200. Since it is the first time you the owner of the gored ox gets 100. If the ox does it again to another ox it the two owners get 50 and 50. If again then 50, 25 and 25. So my question is what happens then next time? I can not figure out what kind of progression the mishna is getting at.

L.T Hobhouse wrote a scaling critique on Hegel's idea of the State. But looking at what he wrote before World War I you can see he was leaning towards socialism. This seems to me to be the case with Bradly also--the most famous Hegel scholar before WWI. WWI changed his point of view drastically also to the degree that as far as I recall he ended his days denouncing Hegel and everything that he had written defending him.

[My own feeling about this is that I think Hegel was more of a philosopher than a political thinker. In terms of politics i think England got it right to a large degree in the 1700's and then the founding fathers of the USA made their improvements on that system.]

There is something odd that I can not figure out. If an animal devours some part of a persons's crops then in the Gemara in Bava Metzia it says you measure one part from 60. That is you do not measure just the amount of that one small area because that will be too expensive if someone would buy it alone. Nor do you measure by the whole field. Rather you go by 60 times that area and then take 1/60 of the crops value.

The question I gave came up a week or two ago when I was looking briefly at the Mishna in Bava Kama where it has the exact same case but it says you measure the amount of a field needed to plant two seahs.[Not like the Gemara in Bava Metzia.] I recall learning that part in Bava Metzia with David Brosnon and then for some reason I looked at the Aruch Hashulchan and saw how he explains Tosphot over there But I do not recall anyone mention the mishna in Bava Kama.