It seems to me that Kant is going like Aristotle. That is that he agrees there are universals but that they depend on particulars.

That is to say (to take an example from Dr Huemer) lets say I have two pieces of paper in front of me. Do they have anything in common? Yes. They are both white. Whiteness is a universal. It is something that particulars have in common. How do you recognize particulars is by the fact that you see and feel them. But a universal you can not actually feel of see. You recognize it by a different faculty. Reason.

It was a point of Kant to limit the validity of reason to conditions of possible experience. That is particulars.

To be able to get to faith beyond the realm of possible experience it seems to me you would need either Leonard Nelson's Kant Fries School of non intuitive immediate knowledge, or Hegel.

For even though Kant did limit the realm of reason, there were enough problems in understanding Kant that leave room for a Friesian Development or a Hegelian one. [Maybe Shopenhaur also but I am not sure about that.] In any case, I have to say that I am just offering this a a suggestion but have really not do the homework to be any kind of expert. Still Americans have a good and health suspicion of experts as they ought. So I feel somewhat at ease in offering my opinion about areas of value that are more content and less formal. [Going in this like Dr Kelley Ross who divides areas of value along curve of all form and no content like logic and going up to more content like math but less formal. Then justice and art and music which have more content and less form. In those areas it seems the more expert one is the more they lose common sense.]

Kelley Ross has spent a good deal of effort to try and bring attention to Leonard Nelson. At least some of those efforts are gaining success.The  Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy by Nelson seems to have been published in English by Yale University Press.

Shulhan Aruch Even HaEzer 93

That section deals with laws of a widow. The basic law is that a widow gets mezonot [food] from the land of her husband until she asks for her Ketubah [marriage document which gives 200 zuz to a virgin if the husband divorces her or if he dies. But in it are included mentions of other obligations. 200 zuz  I figured might be a few thousand dollars based ona Rosh I saw once.]] or until she gets married again. But the Geonim who came after the Gemara made a tekana [law from teh scribes, not from the Torah] that she can receive food also from movable property. [This does not apply to a divorced woman who gets her ketubah right away but there is no obligation of "alimony".
But what happens if there are a few wives. Since they all got married to the same guy at different times so the obligation of the ketubah stars at different times. So the first one married gets her ketubah first. Then if there is any property left over the second one collects etc. [Just like would be the case if he owed money on loans he took out.]


I only had a few minutes to look at it but it seems to me that one way to understand the Rambam is that the obligation of mezonot starts at the marriage. [If there is the word therefore].

The Raavad understand that the obligation of mezonot starts at the time the husband dies, not when they got married. And that is how I think most of the people on the page over there in the Shulchan Aruch  like the Beit Shmuel and Helkat Mehokek understand the Rambam also.
[The simple way to understand this is that clearly the actual obligation of mezonot stars when the husband dies but the tekana stated at the marriage. The thing here is I actually recall Rav Shach mentioning this issue and that he took it as a simple thing that the obligation starts at the death of the husband. But then you can ask why would the ketubah be any different? There also there is no obligation until she is divorced or until she dies! What is the difference?]

When I saw the importance of  learning metaphysics and physics in Ibn Pakuda's חובות הלבבות it did not click with me right away. I was at the Mir in NY and was not looking for distractions from learning Gemara. still something of what he was saying must have stuck with me because later when I saw the same thing in the Guide of the Rambam, it started making sense that maybe that was the aspect of learning Torah that I had been lacking. However I really was not sure what to do with the metaphysics aspect of the whole thing.  On one hand the Ibn Pakuda and rambam were clear they were not talking about mysticism. [No offence intended towards the Remak (Moshe Cordovaro) and the Ari (Isaac Luria). It is just that that is not what the Rambam was talking about.] But what can one do with Metaphysics? What could be considered the be fulfilling what the Rambam was saying? Aristotle and Plato for sure. I guess Plotinus also. But what about later on people?


To make this short I should just say that I found the neo Kantian people to be pretty important, though I can not say who is better. Leonard Nelson and his Kant Fries School of thought look to me to be very great, but not to the degree of being the only ones that added or improved on things.
I mean to say that when Kant wants to limit the realm in which reason is justified he goes to conditions of experience. But a group pf people noticed some inner contradictions with that in Kant himself. That is the circularity that experience itself depends on a priori assumptions. So Reinhold came up with the Representation. That answers the issue since it is neither just a priori nor posteriori. Shopenhaur made good use of this in his The World as will and Representation. Still it seems that each one of these people fills in pieces of  a big puzzle. Hegel pointed out how the dialectic brings to truth and knowledge From Being to Logos]. And that is an accurate description of how in fact knowledge progresses.[You see this in Rav Nahman also in his claim that talking with God brings one to truth.].

Pantheism

It is not the belief system of Jews , Muslims nor Christians.[See Volume II of the Guide where a similar issue is the focus. If creation was from an eternal substance. The Rambam rejects this and says that if it would be true then the Torah would not be valid.

This all came up because the pope has been in South America recently and the announcement from the Vatican seems to indicate a kind of pantheism that leaves Catholics wondering what is going on with the pope.

The Rishonim held that creation is ex nihilo. Or in Hebrew "Yesh Mei'ain" "יש מאין".[Something from Nothing.--not from any pre-existing substance.]
[You can see this mentioned in all the medieval sages, and even the Ari himself right smack in the beginning of the Eitz Chaim.]


In spite of this being the belief of Spinoza, it does not seem to have a lot of evidence or support even from reason. --Because the basic assumption of Spinoza that one substance can not effect another substance is not at all obvious. [And the reasonableness of axioms is important. For example in mathematics you do not start out with wildly unreasonable assumptions. You start with things that are almost too simple to state. Like the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Or if A =B and B=C then A =C. So for Spinoza to build his system on shaky foundations does not add a lot of credibility to it.


So when Rav Nahman emphasizes the importance of faith, I have to assume he is not talking about pantheism. In fact, in the context of the L''M of Rav Nahman, it seems he is simply talking about straight and simple faith in God,--not pantheism nor even facts about God, but simple faith and trust.

[He never mentions the 13 principles of faith of the Rambam and might well be thinking along the lines of Rav Joseph Albo that the actual principles are 6 or like the Abravanel that they are 3 principles.]

The meals that a husband owes his wife. [Shulhan aruch of Rav Joseph Karo Even HaEzer 70 sif 8]

Lets us say a husband has gone off to work in a foreign country and his wife borrows money to feed herself. Then of course the husband is obligated to pay back the debt when he returns [Shulhan aruch of Rav Joseph Karo Even HaEzer 70 sif 8] But what happens if she forgives the loan?  Normally I would think that once one is obligated in some debt then that is that. But that is the odd thing about loans in general. A lender can always forgive a debt even after it has been incurred.

So I just happened tp stop by the Breslov place of learning today and noticed this issue comes up in the Shulchan Aruch. The Halkat Mehokeke says in fact she can not forgive the loan.[[opposite of what the Rema writes there from the Mordecei in in the end of Ketuboth. I saw that the Beit Shmuel does in fact defend the Rema and the Mordechei but I did not get a chance to see his reasoning. It might be what I am saying here. That the loan the debt does not go directly from the husband to the lender but rather it goes through the wife. But if that is the case then this whole issue certainly depends on that exact issue that i recall came of in Shas and I recall seeing that Rav Shach brings it in his book the Avi Ezri.

But if I recall this issue was decided already in the Gemara itself and in the Rambam that the middle man can be excluded and we can consider the debt as going directly from A to C without B.[In the case of loans]. That is all I have to say about this issue for now except that I did get a second or two to notice the Taz over there does bring up this issue that it is like a a regular loan.


I ought just to add that over there you also see what I mentioned a few days ago that the husband does not owe a lot of מזונות [meals] to his wife. Just two a day plus one me'ah of money per week. Which is just a few dollars. And you can see right there in shulchan aruch that a divorced woman get zero support. --which just goes to show how the religious nowadays are liars as they claim the Torah gives alimony to a divorced woman.

In any case we do see also in the Shulchan Aruch at the end of 69 that the wife can forgive the meals.- Just like you see when people get married on condition that the husband keeps on learning Torah. This is clearly a great thing --as long as the husband is not using Torah to make money.

כנגד מדינת הלכה A state of halacha is against halacha.

I claim that a state of halacha [Jewish Law] is against halacha. [There is no such thing as ordination. Authentic ordination stopped during the time of the Talmud. After that there is only pseudo ordination. And even if there would be the authentic thing no one today were qualify.]  It is merely an attempt to use the appearance of ordination to gain power and money.  The whole religious world is just one big scam. [There is no legitimate excuse to use Torah to make money or to be excused from military service. But the problems are much deeper than these two issues.]
  One one hand there is much to learn in Torah about values and morality. But the attempt of the religious world to impose their power and authority on others would result in the worst kind of nightmare I can imagine.
   The main support for this idea is experience, not theory. That is to say I can pick out things in which the religious world is obviously against the Torah.  But these would be after the facts that I and anyone who has lived under the authority of the religious leaders knows about.
  There is a kind of cult mentality in the religious world that you would expect more in Adi Da or Scientology.
  There are better places and worse but the major emphasis of getting the fry to be frum has hidden agenda. It is no as innocent as they try to make it look.
  Netanyahu [The Prime Minister of Israel] was actually asked a few days ago about this exact question and he said a state of halacha. that is just a sick joke. I will not give any support to such a thing.
  I do not know how he knows this. But it is clear that he is as aware of the evil and sickness of life under Jewish religious authorities as I am. It is no accident that anyone who has lived under that kind of authority leaves it as soon as they are able.
  However on the positive side of things --if I could I would try to learn a and keep Torah as much as I could. But that has nothing to do with the sick frum world.
The basic idea is that part of the Torah בין אדם לחבירו obligations between man and his fellow man. In these areas as is well known the frum religious world is a nightmare.

[ Rav Nahman was aware of these problems. Especially you can see this in LM vol I chapter 61 where he warns about allowing religious leaders to claim ordination.]

I thought the USA was doing well when it was basically WASP. There is a principle --a guest can not invite a guest. So WASPs graciously allowed people in need to come. But that does not mean they the guests ought to invite others. The change in the USA is such that a swamp of people in the USA are hostile to America. Also the Socialist Left made the USA seem a lot different than the period that I recall.


A similar thing seems to apply to Israel. The religious did everything they could to stop its foundation. But now want all the benefits.