to learn in depth

The main way of learning Torah that I think is the best is one that most people coming into the Litvak Yeshiva world find impossible to accept --that is to learn in depth even before you have gone through Shas even once. I mentioned this one time to David Bronson and he agreed with me. The reason is simple experience. If people do not learn "how to learn" [that is how to get into the depths of Talmud] right away, then they never get it.

And I admit my first years in Shar Yashuv were frustrating for this very reason. There was a great insistence to get into the depths of learning the Gemara and Tosphot even before you had even finished the tractate itself.

But how to get into the depths of learning is hard to know. I have mentioned Rav Shach's Avi Ezri which is of course an amazing masterpiece. But the type of learning of Rav Shach is different than what they were doing in Shar Yashuv. Not that they conflict, but they are simply different.
The path of Shar Yashuv was more along the lines of what is called in Israel "calculating the sugia" (sugia means the subject matter right on the page, but it also can mean that subject as relevant to other places in the Talmud.]: getting Tosphot--every word, and not going on until you do. Rav Shach and Rav Haim Soloveitchik are more interested in global issues: how does one sugia compare to another?

Modern pseudo scientists. The pretense of being able to understand the human soul and to diagnose its ills and cure them is as old as medicine itself.

For some reason people think that going to witch doctors will cure their nervousness or arrays of mental problems. Clearly this cure has never happened nor will it ever. Psychology is just a way to milk people out of their money by pretending to know something about the human soul.
It was clear to me that the steam engine model of the human psyche of Freud never had the slightest chance of being accurate. But even more modern models are just as absurd.

[This in itself gives a good reason for people to learn Physics and Math--so that by being exposed to real science they can tell what is pseudo science.]


[I ought to mention that the  pretense of being able to understand the human soul and to diagnose its ills and cure them is as old as medicine itself. And the people that were thought to know something about that were usually on the religious side of things. So the fact that they really knew nothing about what they pretended to know opened to way for modern pseudo scientists to pretend the same thing. Same pretense in new clothing

Rather the Torah comes to reveal objective moral values that are already "out there."

I wanted to defend my point of view a little so that it does not seem like I am just picking up pieces of conflicting philosophies. Even though I am not trying to build any kind of system, I still have a basic world view that I think needs defending.

[This is meant to be a continuation of previous blogs where I mentioned the philosophers that have influenced me.]

So in short:I think there are universals and universals are perceptible by reason. That is reason knows more that how to discern  contradictions. That is about the sum and size of it. Moral values are simply out there and reason applied to moral values perceives them just like reason applied to math perceives certain rules.

So that means that my concept of Torah is like Saadia Gaon and the חובות לבבות Obligations of the Heart that things are not moral because the Torah says so. Rather the Torah comes to reveal objective moral values that are already "out there."

Michael Huemer has a web site paper of how there is no such thing as pure empirical knowledge.You always bring some a priori into it. And I am grateful to Dr. Huemer for his clarity in stating these ideas more or less in the form I just gave them.
But this basic orientation of mine started when I was younger than now. Probably even before high school. But at least I recall I was doing a good amount of reading philosophy in high school.-and even had organized a little group with Wendy Wilson and Roland Hutchinson learning Chinese Philosophy. In any case, I was pretty convinced even back then that something was seriously horrific with Post Modern Philosophy [even though I did not know exactly what.] But I can see why I though to learn Torah in the Mir in NY rather than have anything to do with the terrible stupid philosophies of the twentieth century.


[If the Philosophy departments had been teaching Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, that would have made me more interested but in those days, the world of philosophy  was really full of pseudo intellectuals].


At any rate, you can see in my short three sentences  version of my philosophy that I take the back line of Plato Aristotle, Hegel, Leonard Nelson.--a world that Mind and Being are complementary.And also that reason perceives much more than contradictions in language. Outside of this, most 20th century philosophy I understood even when I was in high school is just lunacy expressed in fancy language.

Russia does not want a Ukrainian naval base in the Sea of Azov

My impression is that Russia does not want a Ukrainian naval base in the Sea of Azov and that Putin was thinking that the Ukrainian flotilla going into the Azov sea was a prelude towards making a base there.

It is kind of the same reason that Kennedy did not want Soviet atomic missiles in Cuba. But I think Russia is even more sensitive about guarding its perimeter--even more than the USA.

Russia thinks that Ukraine can be unpredictable because it has two different kinds of populations. One set is the actual ethic Russians or Russian leaning people that long for the values that made the West Great.The Peter the Great values.[And those people include lots of ethic Ukrainians, not just Russians]. The other set of Ukrainians are the low lives that steal at any and ever opportunity they can find and that population is just starting to show it murderous tendencies after the thawing out period after the USSR.So Russia knows these tendencies are real. It is really frightening to see what lays under the surface in Ukraine, once Russian rule is gone.


I am not sure how to explain another thing I saw in the Ukraine. Almost anything good there was built by the USSR. And the people that are nice and good were often those with Russian blood or at least highly leaning towards Russia.

Kant Friesian School

In terms of the Kant Friesian School of Thought of Kelley Ross, I do not see why there is made such a big difference between that school and Hegel.  Hegel is mainly about Metaphysics and the Friesian School is mainly about epistemology. These are two different areas. And Hegel never claimed to have any answer to the Mind Body problem. He simply is not concerned with it and thinks its is not related to the structure he is trying to build. Clearly he thinks there is no problem in the first place--like Thomas Reid already said.
So we have with Leonard Nelson an answer to the question. Why does that have to cancel out Hegel?

[A difference is supposedly about the dinge an sich[thing in itself]. To Hegel one gets to knowledge about the thing in itself through a dialectical process--it is not by just pure reason as McTaggart makes clear.[It is pure reason applied to Being] And in fact that is how we know stuff. We reason things out sometimes over eons and ages based on a back and forth dialog between what we see and measure and what we think is the reason for what we see.

It is not just by non intuitive immediate knowledge. That kind of knowledge does give a starting point however.



You might think this is not so important to you but  it is to me. I do not have an overwhelming interest in philosophy as a discipline but I do have a need to make sense of the world I live in. And I find a few philosophers that help me do that. Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Hegel, Kelley Ross. They certainly do not say the same thing, but each one for me adds one extra piece to the puzzle. [I also should add Rav Nahman and the Gra --but not as philosophers but more in the way of filling in the missing pieces. With Rav Nahman I learned the importance of שמירת הברית sexual purity, the tikun klali, learning fast and other things. From the Gra I learned trust in God and the importance learning Torah. From the חובות לבבות (Obligations of the Heart) I learned the importance of learning natural sciences. That however took some time to sink in until I saw the same thing in other rishonim (medieval authorities))] I do not assume any one person has everything right. I try to use common sense to put together a coherent world view.

I ought to mention that Gauss had a very positive thing to say about Fries and David Hilbert had a whole file devoted to documenting his efforts to help Leonard Nelson.

Patriotism and Nationalism:

That one's country comes first is as sound an idea as that one's family comes first: each family has the right to prefer its interests over the interests of other families.  If my wife becomes ill, then my obligation is to care for her and expend such financial resources as are necessary to see to her welfare.  If this means reducing my charitable contributions to the local food bank, then so be it. Whatever obligations I have to help others 'ripple out' from myself as center, losing claim to my attention the farther out they go, much like the amplitude of waves caused by a rock's falling into a pond diminishes the farther from the point of impact. Spouse and/or children first, then other family members, then old friends, then new friends, then neighbors, and so on.

From here:maverick philosopher

Homosexuality

It is more simple if you start with the Old Testament and then work backwards from there. That is what Aquinas does as far as I recall. He starts out that the laws of the Old Testament are binding in the areas of Natural Law. Only the rituals are not in his view. That leaves  the sexual relations in Leviticus 18+20 in their place. This is somewhat similar to R. Shimon Ben Yochai that we go by the reason for a verse, not the letter of the Law. And to the Rambam and all the Medieval Authorities we know the reasons for the verses and they are all natural law except for the Red Heifer.


 So if you would take the Rambam literally along with R. Shimon Ben Yochai, you do not end up all that different than Aquinas.--Though it is hard to imagine how this is possible, but it still is simple logic.

The reason this is more or less like Aquinas is the Rambam says that most of the laws of sacrifices and rituals are certainly Divine, but rituals were given because the the  tribe of people that he names that were in the Middle East at the time that did the opposite. And the sacrifices were given because of the weakness of human nature that people will sacrifice anyway so we might as well do it for God.

The reason that sex issues are unclear today is that Protestants start in the opposite direction from Aquinas. They assume nothing is binding unless they can find it in the New Testament. And that simple fact is from where all the confusion begins--since even if you find something forbidden in the NT, it is easily cancelled, by some other verse.
I have tried to tell Protestants for  a long time that ignoring Thomas Aquinas is not a good idea-but I can not think of any instance when I got through to anyone.

My own appreciation of Medieval thought probably goes back to Beverly Hills High School when I used to learn Dante. But especially in the Litvak Yeshiva World the Middle Ages is considered far superior to anything and everything that came later.

My own feeling about Philosophy however is more based on Kant and Hegel and Neo Platonic thought. But I was and am still highly influenced by The Gra and the Litvak approach to straight Torah which I really hope to get back into some day,
I ought to mention that Hegel has no epistemology. He just by passes the Mind -Body problem. So I do also depend on Leonard Nelson and Immediate non-intuitive knowledge for my world view]