I see in the USA the effects of socialism are terrible

I think L.T.  Hobhouse has a great set of critiques on the Hegelian State and Hegel's Metaphysics. [Therefore I mentioned Hobhouse to Dr Kelley Ross wondering what he would say about Hobhouse.] 
However even before that I had seen than Brand Blanshard did not think highly of the critique of Hobhouse.

These are delicate points.  I see that the an authoritarian system is very necessary for Russia because of the types of people the Russian czars were ruling over, I see in the USA the effects of socialism are terrible. Still I await the answer of Kelley Ross to hear what he thinks of this debate.

The most serious critique I have seen on Hegel point by point seems to be Hobhouse. But even McTaggert-, Hegel's defender brings up problems. In any case, the attitude of Hobhouse is no where near as dismissive of Hegel as most of his detractors.



I have to admit that I think Hegel's critics can go overboard in being dismissive of Hegel.

Thomas Sowell

debate on Utube

false versions of the Truth. Slight deviations that are only barely perceivable,

There always have to be false versions of the Truth. Slight deviations that are only barely perceivable, but nonetheless cause the result to be the exact opposite of the results of following the Truth.
This is the real reason for the signature of the Gra on the letter of excommunication.
The point you can see in a fighter-craft. It takes only a slight readjustment to make the whole thing simply crash after takeoff. Seemingly slight mistakes in Torah also have led the entire religious world down the path of idolatry and only the Gra saw this before it happened.

Nice video

Dinesh D'Souza

Obligations of the Heart. [Rav Behaye ben Yoseph Ibn Pakuda]

I am kind of trying to figure out something in the Obligations of the Heart. [Rav Behaye ben Yoseph Ibn Pakuda] He has ten categories of people that learn. The first ones are about learning the Old Testament. He divides them into a few subcategories (of levels of understanding).   Then he gets up to the Mishna. So far everything goes smoothly.
Then he gets to the category of those that learn Talmud, and his first category is those that do it for honor, and not for its own sake.

There is no question that I stumbled on this my first time reading this book in the Mir Yeshiva in NY. And I stumbled on it again today.

But then he gets to the next category of those that learn Gemara for its own sake.

I am pretty sure almost anyone reading that passage is wondering exactly what I am wondering. Why specifically the Talmud? All the other kind of learning one can do also for the sake of honor or cash.

It is confusing.


If you take what he says in his introduction of Metaphysics this might become a bit more understandable.He takes Metaphysics [in the Intro] as important for the sake of Torah-but not being Torah itself. So he must be thinking along the lines of Saadia Gaon about the need for Metaphysics along with Gemara.

[You have to be exacting in his words in the Introduction to see this.]

When I was at the Mir and read the Musar Book of the disciple of the Gra Reb Haim from Voloshin [נפש החיים] I saw he was saying also this same kind of idea.--the need for fear of God along wit learning Gemara.

[Anyone who knows the major book of Reb Nahman from Breslov will already be familiar with this idea that there is a kind of tendency to learn Gemara for the wrong reasons--money, pay, privilege as he brings in Volume I section 12. The idea seems the same--to work on one's fear of God along with learning Gemara so that the learning should be for the right reasons.]

Godel proof of God

I tried once to strengthen the Godel proof of God by the  Compactness Theorem, the finite to the infinite. The simplest use of the Compactness Theorem is to show that if there exist arbitrarily large finite objects of some type, then there must also be an infinite object of this type.] The idea if applied to God means that he has infinite perfections.


This would defend Anselm and Godel from critics.  Also I recall I used an idea from Anscombe about compatibility of positive traits --that is some possible world all positive traits are compatible. [I do not recall the source where I had seen that.]

the simple basic path of the Gra and the Mir Yeshiva

For me leaving the simple basic path of the Gra and the Mir Yeshiva was a disaster, but for some reason I was never able to get back to it. The path of Straight Torah.

But as the מעפילים לעלות [those that dared to go up when God said not to] discovered,- you can not just correct a mistake by doing the opposite.

[The event in the Five Books of Moses was after the decree to be in the desert 40 years, some people decided to attempt to enter Israel anyway. They figured the sin of the spies and the congregation was to refuse to go up into the land, so they would correct that mistake by in fact going up. That ended in disaster.]

Same with Torah. It might be a terrible mistake to leave the world of Straight Torah. [The Gra and the Mir in NY or whatever Litvak yeshiva one is in.] But it can be doubly a mistake to try to get back in once one has left.

The idea then is not to try to get back in, but to learn Torah and Musar at home. In fact, nowadays, it makes sense to avoid the religious world entirely.