the big picture in learning Torah.

Why do you need the big picture in learning Torah. I mean to say why emphasize learning fast when it is known that one gets only a rough idea? [As you see in Sicha 76 of Rav Nahman of Breslov to say the words and go on.] Because you need the small pieces of the big picture but also the overview.
You can see this by this example. This is not a car.

 


This is a car:

On the blog of Michael Huemer there is a comment that compares changes in philosophy to changes in science.  And I have been wondering about that. After all, changes in science are because of new evidence. But that does not mean that philosophy is just speculation. Rather philosophy has a different kind of task--to get the big picture and make sense out of it.
And also I might mention that in fact changes in science are not just because of new evidence. Rather taking a look at Einstein. There was a contradiction between Maxwell and Newton. A certain kind of sense caused Einstein to choose Maxwell and to modify Newton. And Copernicus was not accepted because of new evidence. Rather his approach was simple as opposed to having to add more rings. It was the math that appealed to people--not new evidence. In the editions of his books, it is the math pages that are greased from fingers going over and over them.


[But sometimes it is experiments that do say something. The black box causing the Plank h bar. The success of QM to explain the spectrum of light coming out of excited atoms. String theory from things spinning around faster when they have more mass.]

w39 e major i recall this song i might have written some version of it a few years ago.

w37

Thinking about theological questions can cause a person to go nuts. However you can tell something about a religious belief because of the general kind of people that follow it.

I think that in Kant there is a kind of skepticism about any kind of thinking outside the realm of "conditions of possible experience" which limits what we can reason about. It is not just that you see this in his system but also in his separate writings about Swedenborg. All together you get the idea that he accepts there are metaphysical realities but best not to reason about what there is no way of testing.

[In a later essay, he held that even thinking about theological questions can cause a person to go nuts. So it was not just an idea that he had that Reason when going into areas of unconditioned realities comes up with self contradictions but specially any person doing so would also end up insane.]

I think that this that Kant noticed about the effect of thinking about spiritual things [making people insane] must have been noticed by him in his daily conversations. He was a great "socializer" as is not well known.

[ Rav Nahman's belief in the limits of wisdom is one of his most famous doctrines [I think it is mainly in LeM vol II]. There is a place in the "Hashmatot" at the end of the LeM [not printed in all editions] where he says openly that to wisdom was set a limit so that it could not expand beyond that limit.]

It is well known in the Lithuanian Yeshiva world that thinking about spiritual things is discouraged. Simply one ought to learn Gemara in depth and that is that.

[In short the less there is of this, the better.]


Also I am not saying that Kant needs to be taken here without a grain of salt. He certainly has a point. However it was Hegel who felt the dinge an sich is possible to get to and I also happen to have a lot of respect for a mystic of the Middle Ages Rav Avraham Abulafia. His approach to Jesus is certainly an eye opener. His basic idea is that Jesus would be someone along the lines of Joseph in Egypt. He calls him the חותם של יום הששי which you would think would refer to Yoseph, i.e. Foundation of Emanation. So why or in what way does Jesus fill that same job description?]



However there are ways of testing: It is not as if all religious systems are beyond testing. Not exactly scientific testing in a microscope. But rather in terms of character. And of course even with that people have free will so you can not get an exact  result. For example it is rather clear that Nazi doctrines  had something to do with WWII. So sometimes results can indicate something about a set of doctrines. You can see this also in Dante. The different levels of hell all have to do with traits of character. And clearly I have  a feeling that Rav Nahman was right about a lot of stuff and the Gra and Rav Shach. So I do attribute to them a kind of sixth sense--an immediate non intuitive knowledge [not sensed with the five sense--but perhaps still sensed?]

So you can tell something about a religious belief because of the general kind of people that follow it.

Kant morals are universals

Kant was trying to capture something mentioned in the essay, “Why I am not an Objectivist” [by Dr. Huemer] i.e. that morals are universals. But they are different than universal laws. They are “oughts” not “is”. That is at least what I think he was trying to get at. [nd we can know universals as shown in the Critique about synthetic a prior which is equivalent to universals.--also as shown by Dr. Huemer in "Why I am not an Objectivist"

Hegel

 Hegel has this idea that there is kind of progress in philosophy in such that they are trying to progress towards a kind of understanding of the world --which means they are trying to question assumptions and also to build up sometimes their own system.

 Hegel was not unlike most other philosophers was not anti Christian though he is often thought to be. Just the opposite. He was doing in his way what Aquinas was doing. Except to me it seems he sees the world as an organic whole.

The reason Kelley Ross [The Kant Friesian School] and many others  are not happy with Hegel I think comes from politics. And in fact it does not seem that politics was Hegel's forte. As far as politics goes I think the founding fathers of the USA were much better. The problem with the Constitution of the USA is what the founding fathers said about it in the first place. It can only work for a certain kind of person.  That might explain some of the more difficult to understand aspects of the USA today. 

Ayn Rand

According to Ayn Rand. philosophy trickles down to the general world view of people--if it is accepted in the first place as legitimate. So you don't know the assumptions of people  before there is philosophy. It might be wildly insane. There is a sort of background of assumptions that people start with. So though philosophers now might seem off, that might be after there is already a background of rationality.