I just wanted to jot down my basic interpretation of Hegel, Heidegger, and Leonard Nelson.

It is not very academic but it is way I see them. It is all contained in one word: Plotinus. That is his neo Platonic system. (1) The One, (2) Logos, Reason, (3) Being.

So to me when ever I look at Hegel I see a modification of Plotinus. That is a modification that had to happen after Kant's three critiques. Hegel gets from Being up back to the One. And he does this by means of the Dialectic.

Heidegger is a bit different. He gets from Being to Logos. That is most clear in his debate with Ernst Cassirer. He sees Kant as dealing with the question of life, not knowledge as one aspect of life. [AS you can see also in his Being and Time.] He like Schopenhauer put the main emphasis on the first Critique before the revised edition. His answer  is that Being uses time to manifest itself, to come into the meadow. And the Transcendental Deduction of Kant is to get from Logos to Life [Logos to Being]. That is how Heidegger understands the synthetic a priori. [See that debate with Cassirer.]

Then Leonard Nelson [based on Fries but going beyond him], shows that not only is there non intuitive immediate knowledge [faith], but that has to come before reason and before empirical knowledge.

So maybe it is just me, but I see Western Philosophy after Kant to be foot notes to Plotinus.

Apparently it takes a certain amount of spiritual awareness to be able to tell who is  a true Torah scholar from the realm of holiness and who is a Torah scholar demon as Rav Nahman of Breslov points out. In those two sections LeM I:12 and I:28 he in fact does not give any hints about how to tell the difference. But I recall that in LeM II:1 he in fact does point out traits that one can hold onto that give one the ability to discern.

I might hold that the Lithuanian yeshiva world would be clear from this kind of problem, but the problem is that by ignoring the cherem signed by the Gra the Sitra Achra got into the Litvak world also.  So what one can do? Well clearly the best idea is to learn Torah at home. Go through the two Talmuds and the Midrashim. Another suggestion would be to start a Beit Midrash on the name of the Gra.  [With of course, Rav Nahman's books would be allowed. That would be different from for example the Yeshiva of Rav Silverman in the old city of Jerusalem.]

But the main point I want to bring out is that trusting any religious authorities at all is tied by too much danger. As far as I can tell the majority might be Torah scholars that are demons. Who knows? And once there is a majority then how can you trust any? Frankly the whole religious world seems a bit creepy. So it is better to simply learn Torah and Musar of Rav Israel Salanter at home and teach your own kids at home.

[In any case there is an obligation to get through the oral law which means the two Talmuds, the halachic midrashim and the agadic midrashim. So the best way to do that without distractions is at home.

There is a difference between keeping Torah in truth and the false appearance of Torah of the religious world. Not that this always was the case. But that was the point of the signature of the Gra on the letter of excommunication.  That is to make this difference clear.

The result of his signature being universally  ignored created the situation that the Sitra Achra [Dark Side] got inside and took over the religious world.

[However I think that Rav Nahman was not included in the excommunication since one day I was walking around the old city of Jerusalem and happened into a small library that had the very famous book that printed all the different letters of excommunication plus and the word for word testimonies that were collected in Vilna. So I saw the actual wording if the letter that the Gra signed. Rav Nahman  would not have come under that heading. See for yourself if you are interested.]

At any rate, the actual result is that in order to keep Torah one has to run away from the religious as far as possible,

Lemaitre already back in 1932 said that time and space come into existence only after there were plenty of quanta.
This goes well with Bell's inequality which nature violates. [the Aspect experiment of 1982].

So not that nature is non local. Rather particles do not have classical values in space and time before measured. [That is before they interact with the macroscopic world. It is not as if they need to be seen by a physicist in  order for their wave function to collapse.] [As Kant already indicated that space and time is how we measure things. But with Kant they also exist, but we do not really know what they are. i.e. with Kant the dinge an sich exist, but we do not have access to what they really are.] 

Dr Kelley Ross shows that QM corresponds to Kant's approach. This is a relief from other "philosophers" that imagine they can refute QM before understanding it.

See the Green talk with De'hooft. 

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x3 A Major

Can an IOU serve as money?

Can an IOU serve as money?
Let's say two people own a slave, and one lets him go. So now he is 1/2 slave and 1/2 free. According to Beit Hillel [Tractate Bava Batra page 13] he works for himself one day, and for his master on every other day.
Beit Shamai said but then he can not get married. That is, a gentile slave can not marry a Israelite woman. And a freed slave can. So as a slave he could have his slave wife and not an Israelite. As a freed slave he can only marry a Israelite. So he would be stuck. So Beit Shamai says the owner must let him go and the slave writes  a document (an IOU) for the money that is owed.

But we know a slave only goes freed in one of three ways; (1) A document letting him go, (2) money or (3) injury [24 types].

So here there is no document letting the slave go. Just an IOU. So that must be considered  as worth money  שווה כסף

[I am being short here as this comes up in Rav Shach's Avi Ezri in the beginning of Laws of Selling. In other contexts clearly an IOU is not money. In Tractate Kidushin [see pages 5 and 8 and 47], the Rashba and Ramban that marrying a women by an IOU does not work.]




[Just as a side issue, it does look to me that Abraham Lincoln, really could not free the slaves by means of a proclamation. Certainty he did not expect that the slaves would then turn around and become the masters of the whites. -forcing whites to work for them by the welfare state. And now becoming the ipso facto masters of white people. It is unlikely that Lincoln would have agreed to this.] [The 14 Amendment signed by the southern states under force can not be thought to be valid.]