the Rambam's approach to Aristotle

How do you make sense of the Rambam's approach to Aristotle? In what way does learning the Metaphysics of Ancient Athens bring to love of God?  Perhaps you can say, "It does not", but then you are at a loss how to see "the big picture."
Can you ignore Metaphysics? And get your world-view elsewhere? And if you do, does that in fact lead to a more accurate idea of what the world is all about?

The way to test this is to look at people that have not learned Metaphysics, and never touched a book of Plato or Aristotle. Do they seem to have a more accurate idea of what it is all about? I doubt it.  Just the opposite. They seem to have various mixtures of confused ideas.
Still what does one make of this?
If Aristotle and Plato are good  to ignore, then why would the Rambam and Saadia Gaon have written books incorporating their ideas? And creating a synthesis between Torah and Metaphysics?

[I would like to suggest here two people that had very important ideas in Metaphysics and Philosophy that are  overlooked. Leonard Nelson and Thomas Reid.]

Thomas Reid I think has an epistemology just like the Kant Fries School of Leonard Nelson and Kelley Ross, but since he does not spell it out exactly people in academia are trying to figure it out. In any case I find Reid amazing.

My high school PE instructor tried to get us into shape then by having us run around the track four times--every day.

My high school PE instructor tried to get us into shape then by having us run around the track four times--every day. That was one mile.  This is  think good for other high schools and adults also.
For some reason when  got to Shar Yashuv in NY I was viably more physically fit than most other students. I am not sure of the reason, but I figure it must have had something to do with the running around the track every day for four years which I can guess was not the regular approach in NY high schools.
I am not sure, but the first time that Rav Freifeld saw me in the mikveh, and saw that I was physically fit, maybe was the time he began to think of me as a good prospect for his daughter. [Not that I was in comparison with my classmates anything at all. I ran an average mile. I forget, but it might have been around 6 minutes. There were plenty of other kids my age that were way ahead of me.

{In the end I did not end up marrying his daughter. He must have seen I was too unruly, and would not make good son-in-law of the rosh yeshiva material. The major event which stopped the whole thing was my trip to a different yeshiva. In any case, he was certainly correct that I am not rosh yeshiva material in any sense at all. My view is even though learning the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach and Shas and poskim is important, that is best done privately. The whole yeshiva scene is a disaster zone except for the few great Litvak yeshivas in NY like the Mir and Ponoviz in Bnei Brak.
[That is to say I am not rosh yeshiva material because I do not think the whole project is so great in the first place. Only a few yeshivas are great like the three big ones in NY Mir, Haim Berlin, Torah VeDaat, Shar Yashuv, and one in Israel-Ponoviz. 

U-83 D Major  U-83 midi format  U-83 nwc  [MIDI has the notes and nwc has the notes and instrumentation and the whole score. NWC (note worthy composer) is the format each piece was written in.]

All the nonsense people are forced to waste time on distracts them from what they can excel in.

Some people are enormously talented. I knew one girl like that in high school, who was brilliant in anything she put even a slight bit of effort into. [Wendy Wilson] Wendy was shockingly brilliant. The girl I eventually married also got straight A's, but Wendy's brilliance went way beyond good grades.
But I who am severely limited in brain power, I have learned  and tried very much to limit my efforts towards one thing alone. However even in this I have limited success.In Gemara I also have seen this. My learning partner with the slightest effort could see questions in Tosphot that I knew from experience eluded even great roshei yeshiva.

Still a balanced education has a lot going for it.

Some people like Bryan Caplan think the whole education system ought to be dropped.

Putting my own experiences along with some of the critique of Allan Bloom and Bryan Caplan, I would say education in the humanities and pseudo sciences [Social Studies] ought to be dropped completely. [If the humanities and social studies had any human decency, they would have closed themselves down a long time ago and stop feeding people nonsense. But of course they have no human decency in the first place, and that is why they teach those Sitra Akra (Dark Side) subjects
All the nonsense people are forced to waste time on distracts them from what they can excel in.
[However in STEM universities are doing great. The only thing is-- even there I have a complaint.--There is no reason to limit STEM to smart people. It is good even for people as dumb as I.]

So how do dumb people like me learn STEM? Easy. Say the words in order with no repetition and go on. But just one subject at a time. It is like when the Gra was asked by Reb Haim of Voloshin whether to go on or review Seder Moad he answered "Review."
So whether it is Quantum Mechanics or String Theory, the best thing is to learn the book from beginning to end with no review, but then when you get to the end to go to the beginning and do it again many times. At least four.

The reason people  are fooled by pseudo science is because they have no idea of what real science is. Give people a bit of Quantum Field Theory, and all the pseudo sciences will disappear automatically. That is the solution. Have public schools, but in science offer only the natural sciences [STEM].






 

What makes Israel difficult are the internal conflicts. Ashkenazi versus  Sephardi. Religious versus secular, etc. These conflicts are not intellectual but play themselves out on the ground level. Any one of one group that ventures into an area of the other group is guaranteed to find himself the focus of lots of attention and effort to get rid of him. These efforts are sometimes simple shunning of lack of being helpful. Sometimes these efforts are less veiled and amount to downright sabotage of one's welling place or actual physical violence.
Then on the other hand there are the occasional do good-ers who realize that this kind of thing often results in throwing out the wrong kind of people-people that in fact would be good to have around.

[This is not to say that sometimes it is  a good idea to get rid of criminal elements.]

The result of all this is often when one is making "Aliya" he finds himself in an unexpected situation where people he thought were his friends [and in fact when they came to the USA to collect money always presented themselves as his best friends] turn out to be his most bitter and determined enemies.
[It is hard to know what to make of all this. The nicest period I had was when I was invited to join Rav Ernster. He had been offered by the State of Israel a set of buildings --on condition he could fill them. So I was invited to live there and join the learning group. That was a really glorious seven years. Later attempts to make it there fell flat and were somewhat disastrous also. I was a loner and people made it clear in short order that I was not wanted.]

Outside of the great Ponoviz yeshiva  and maybe  few other places like the Yeshiva of the Gra of Rav Silverman, the main problem in Israelis simple. The religious are insane. I mean literally insane.

Of course just being insane as long as one does not harm others is not so terrible. The trouble is the religious do as much harm as they can.

learning Gemara and Naphtali Yeager in Shar Yashuv [NY]

I realize there are two ways of learning Gemara.  One way really started with Naphtali Yeager in Shar Yashuv [NY] which is for lack of  a better word "the hedgehog approach." This is very recent, but I imagine it goes back to some distant beginning, but was forgotten. It is a kind of tenacious putting your nose to the ground, and once you grab something, not to let go--no matter what.
The other way is well known. It is the eagle approach. Or what I like to call the global approach. This is called by the name of Reb Haim [Soloveitchik], but it also goes back in time to previous beginnings. It reached it climax and peak perfection in the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach. Some people I imagine still think the Reb Haim is better than Rav Shach, but I just can not see that.
The first approach I had almost completely forgotten about until I encountered it again in David Bronson. [It forms the basis of my book on Bava Metzia.] I have no idea if anyone else in the world learns like that, but I have heard that some people do (here and there), and they call it לחשבן את הסוגיא "to calculate the subject."

How does either of these two approaches have anything to so with Rishonim (mediaeval authorities) or "later on" people [later on means after circa 1520] like the Pnei Yehoshua or  the Kezot HaHoshen, I do not know. I was exposed to all four approaches, and yet never really got the hang of it. The people that come after the Rishonim {mediaeval commentaries} seem to occupy their own particular niche. Certainly you can see a big difference between the Pnei Yehoshua and the book חידושי הרמב''ם of Reb Haim.
Though I found the slow prodding approach of Naftali Yegger and David Bronson to be excruciating, I still think it has the most going for it. [In the Mir in NY, the hedgehog approach was completely unknown.They were all absolutely into the "global approach." Only in Israel did I hear that in some isolated spots the "to calculate the sugia" path was known and practiced.

You might ask then what does this all mean in practice? I would have to answer the the "to calculate the sugia" approach-the hedgehog, needs a high IQ. Since I am not smart, then without a genius leaning partner, it just is not possible. The best idea after that is the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach and the entire school of Reb Haim, that is him and his disciples. [Even my book on Bava Metzia is just answering questions raised by David Bronson, but I never would have been able to see the issues at all without his raising the difficulties. ]


[What one might do is this. To get the book of Reb Haim Soloveitchik and the Avi Ezri and Naftali Troup and just go through them straight.  In a separate session to just go through the Gemara  itself with Tosphot, Maharsha and Pnei Yehoshua.. ]

The Civil War

To me, the war between the states [the Civil War] is a very important part of American history because its tells me a lot more about the USA than the Constitution or any other part of USA history. To erase it means to erase half of the core principles  of the USA.

My basic idea about the USA come from history before the founding fathers. That is the way I conceive of it. I mean I look at the war between Sparta and Athens and realize how tragic that was. Then I look at Rome. Then England in the 1700's. I see in all this- conflicting principles each one important in itself yet when put together they all conflict. Then I look at the USA Constitution and realize the effort put into it to get a synthesis between conflicting principles. But to see the results I look at the civil war to understand what happens when the synthesis falls apart.

I may not be explaining this properly but I am just trying to give a rough idea of how I think of the USA.

[There are a great deal of principles and ideals that go into the making of the USA Constitution. The most important idea comes from the Talmud--the idea that the commandments have reasons that are known and knowable. Natural Law. Though never said openly in the Talmud in that many words, it was expressed simply thus by Saadia Gaon and Maimonides. Thomas Aquinas developed this further. Finally  John Locke came along and Parliamentary system in England with its own range of disastrous civil wars and conflicts. So to put all the ideas into a workable system I see as one of the most remarkable successes  in Human history. ]


[The odd thing here is that the philosophical foundations of Aquinas and John Locke a a bit weak. Aquinas as all medieval  thought take things as axioms that just do not see right. John Locke also. The obvious thing to do would be to look at more rigorous and exact philosophical thought--the German Idealists. But that does not seem to get very far. The puzzle is this: Why does the USA system work, and not just work but seem to work a thousand times better than anything else. Even though other systems seem to be base on much more exact and rigorous thought?  ]

Not that Marx was all that rigorous.The best thing in terms of Philosophy is the Kant Friesian school based on Kant and Leonard Nelson and that is certainly supportive of American Democracy and individual rights.

However to me everything seems to depend on DNA. I simply can not see that a USA kind of democracy would have been able to deal with the problems in czarist Russia. Nor in any population with a large percentage of criminal DNA. For societies that are not WASP, clearly something else is need to keep the peace. To me it is clear  that nothing would have or could have worked in Russia except a czar or the USSR. Nothing even close to the American system could have or can work. The trouble is simple. Too many crooks. When there there just too much criminal DNA in the blood,  you need an absolutist central government.