The importance of the Gra

The importance of the Gra is hard to overestimate since he seems to have had an amazing intuition about what is straight Torah. So the Litvak yeshiva movement founded on his principles in fact represents authentic Torah to a high degree. It seems to me that after the Gra has come into the world then in order to get to authentic Torah in any sense at all, one needs to go through the path of the Gra.
Mainly the path of the Gra in a practical sense means trust in God, and an emphasis on the idea of "bitul Torah". "Bitul Torah" means wasting time from learning Torah. The idea is that there are things that one ought to do besides learning Torah. However the thing to do when one is not obligated in those things is to learn Torah. [The actual path of the Gra got combined with Musar of Rav Israel Salanter and Rav Shach.]

The only thing that I have to add to this idea is that I believe along the lines of the rishonim [medieval authorities] that held Physics and Math to be in the category of Torah. [Even  though this is an argument among the rishonim]. [These same "Rishonim" Ibn Pakuda, Binyamin the Doctor, etc all held also metaphysics is in that same command of learning Torah. But I have a hard time identifying what exactly does that include. Clearly Aristotle. But what else?

[I would venture to say that the fact that most rishonim do not mention Aristotle in terms of Metaphysics that they must have been referring to the whole disciple as it existed then. That would mean the actual book of Aristotle The Metaphysics along with the commentaries of Al Kindi and Al Farabi. Clearly also Plato and Plotinus. What I would add today would be the three Critiques of Kant and Hegel. Anything after that I am not sure of nor of the people leading up to Kant. That is to say a lot of people were leading up to Kant and all have value. But after Kant their value seems diminished to me. Also Kant and Hegel were the giants so after them I am not really sure of who would be thought to be progress after them? I would guess Leonard Nelson and Prichard. [Prichard was part of the school of  Intuitionists that Dr Huemer is based on.] (There is a great deal of tension between the Hegel approach and Leonard Nelson. I wish I had some kind of resolution for this matter and it seems of great importance to me and in fact to the whole world. But I have no resolution.Both Hegel and Nelson have significantly important points.]

At least Physics is well defined. We know where it is at today and therefore we know what to learn. String Theory.

w35 G Major. Winds, Brass, Violin.   [w35 in midi format]  w35 in nwc format

Howard Bloom mentioned that people are tribal [--in a super-organism] in The Lucifer Principle about what he calls a "social meme". He has got a very nice exposition how people get a certain kind of wiring in their heads that does not get easily readjusted once it is set--like a circuit board.

There are honest stupid people and deceitful stupid people.

The worst type of stupidity for me is not having any appreciation for what you don’t know. There are honest stupid people and deceitful stupid people. The honest variety can appreciate there is a lot they don’t know and could never understand. The deceitful variety portray what they don’t know as not that important and amenable to anyone’s understanding in principle. The deceitful variety are often the “educated” humanities folks and those in the soft sciences.

I prefer an uneducated stupid person to an educated one as a rule because the uneducated ones weren’t propagandized to believe they were smart as part of some soft university degree program. The educated ones are insufferable in large measure.

https://motls.blogspot.com/2020/02/when-dumb-humanities-trainees-deform.html#disqus_thread

Imagine everyone would wake up in the morning have twice as much money. Would anything change? No. Rent would double. Prices would double. Nothing has been added.

G Major Winds, violin, French horn. w34   W34 in midi format

It is a odd thing about Leonard Nelson's diagrams. See https://my.fit.edu/~aberdein/Nelson.pdf on some of the recent history by a  philosopher in Florida Dr Andrew Aberdein. Dr Kelley Ross [California] has his own expansion of the idea instead of a square he expands the method into a cube.

So on one hand you can argue that it simply is  away to make his arguments clear. But you have to wonder. For example you have Feynman diagrams that are common in QFT. They are a device. But he thought that they also present how things actually are.

So perhaps there is a connection between logic principles and Geometry. And perhaps you could expand into higher dimensional Geometry or even Algebraic geometry. [That is kind of like Abstract Algebra, but a little different-- in that it deals with local things instead of global things, like Algebraic Topology.]

But you have to wonder if this is perhaps not such a great idea because after all Mathematics was thought to be reducible to Logic until Godel came along.