English Literature in high school and college is depressing

Instead of the greats Chaucer, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Sophocles, they force people to learn stupid books by blacks


The issue is the quality of the thought of the great writers, not their color, nor sex. This is why English Literature in high school and college is so depressing. They force you to learn second rate hacks just because of their race or sex. Just see an average anthology of English Lit. what garbage they are forcing down people's throats.


But philosophy might be a good idea, or music and art courses. First year Philosophy usually deals with Plato and Aristotle which are in fact important.
The Rambam and Saadia Gaon both wrote books describing the world view of Torah and their books are not possible to understand without background in Plato and Aristotle.

thunderous creation-

Life is very precious. Be happy for every minute and every breath, and for the privileged of being a part of thunderous creation--the universe.
Learn Musar i.e., the books of Ethics of Torah written in the Middle Ages which represent straight Torah. It is very different from what is taught as Torah today which is crooked, pseudo Torah.

Also the books of Musar of the school of thought of Israel Salanter are important. 

Musar is a tool to work on one' character. People can misuse it I admit. But still I think it is effective when used right. 

What I recommend as far as Musar goes is to go through the entire set. That is every single word of the basic classical works, plus the basic works by the disiples of Reb Israel Salanter

Ideas in Bava Metzia chapters 8 and 9 edited I did what I think are some spelling corrections. Tosphot I am thinking of as either male  plural as authors of Tosphot. or sometimes male singular. The buyer is "מסופק"
Ideas in Talmud Did some grammar corrections. Lashon Hara is לשון הרע is masculine. But I also thought to use לשון רעה at least once to show that לשון itself is feminine.

r76  [r76 in midi format]  [In midi you can download the notes and that is the reason i am putting the link here]

I thought to expand a drop on the idea I wrote about Kant Hegel and the Ari based on some math. The idea in simple terms that I put on my blog was if you take an identity element and three other things, you get a kind of triad. This is the basic idea behind a certain thing called an algebra. But do not let the word scare you. There is nothing scary about it. It is just three things with an identity element. But what Cayley- Dickson  Algebra does is expand on this to make a 8 component group and then  16 and then 32 etc. It is reminiscent of what Hegel was doing and also the Reshash (Shalom Sharabi).

This would in itself not be that interesting if not for seeing how these Cayley Dickson Algebras are significant aspects of reality as in Special Relativity and String Theory. That already seems to hint at the idea that they are somehow a part of the metaphysical structure of the world.

Colleges can have a problem in the humanities and social studies departments. Avoid them as much as possible. While it is a great thing to go there to learn STEM and computers, still try to avoid these departments as much as possible.

Allen Bloom went into this in detail in The Closing of the American Mind.   

Instead one should learn Musar, that is Mediaeval Ethics.

There are however a few redeeming things which one could take. First year philosophy is usually about Plato and Aristotle. These are important. Also the arts.

The octaves [the expansion of quaternions, octonians] I think would be something that would fascinate Pythagoreans. There seems to be some odd connection between the way you remember the order of octaves and the musical scale and the fact that Shabat is the middle day of the week according to the Arizal and the recent result by Viazovska that the lattice is the most compact way of packing oranges in eight dimensions. I do not have any great results to report about this. But it seems to me that it must be more than a random coincidence. I think there must be some close connection, but I have not been able to figure out what it must be. Of course Hegel would have a field day with this. He would claim that this is what he was saying all along with his triads within triads.


I am sure lots of people would consider these to be totally unconnected, but maybe I was influenced by reading the Ari a few years back. In any case the Triads you do not need to go to Hegel for. Kant was the originator in his limited scheme. Only Hegel expanded the original idea of Kant. In any case you can see this same scheme --not in the Ari so much as in Shalom Sharabi [known as the Reshash].[That is the author of the Nahar Shalom.]

The curious thing which continues to be of interest to me is the connection with Kant . In Kelley Ross's modification of Kant he a theory of necessity, which  results in the description of eight modes of necessity. See his PhD thesis chapter 5 sec 1

Kant  does not want to expand the original triad. But I wonder.

Even  in Kant we get this triadic structure: