Gra who is classified as a rishon

The climatic end of the Rishonim was the Gra who is classified as a rishon but yet comes later as a sort of seal on the period. And the significant thing about the Gra was the purity. He defines what Torah is about--even for us folks that are not on that level to fulfill any or even most of the details. That is why I recommend having a yeshiva on the name of the Gra in every city. This would have the benefit that even us common folk can have an idea of true and authentic Torah is about, even if we are not up to that level of being able to fulfill it.

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Rav Israel Salanter's and the idea learning books on Ethics.

 Rav Israel Salanter's and Musar [learning books on Ethics]. Learning the books of Musar tends to give a different impression of what Torah is about than what one would assume. Without Musar the tendency is to imagine Torah being about all kinds of things that it really is not. Even though that can exist even inside of Litvak yeshivas where Musar is learned, still the tendency is a lot less.

That is to say that Musar more or less defines the major emphasis of Torah as being about Love and Fear of God and good character traits. And it goes at length into defining what is good character. Since that is not at all obvious not easily apparent to pure reason, there is a need for Musar.

Why is it that Musar [books on ethics written during the middle ages] does a better job of this than later books is not clear, still the fact is that later books that are claiming to show what Torah is about are usually just examples of religious fanaticism and insanity, --the result of schizoid personalities. 

[Musar  refers to a small set of books written during the Middle Ages, but also can include the books of the disciples of Rav Israel Salanter or the Gra.] 

[The idea of Musar is predicated on the more general idea of Litvak Yeshivas that the Rishonim [medieval thinkers] define what Torah is all about.]

Hegel has an idea he adapted from Goethe that the universe is one organic whole like a plant. Not just that each part is possible to figure out, but that all parts are part of one system. There can not be any part of truth that contradicts the other. This is similar to the method of Socrates who was able to find self contradictions in the opinions of others. He was thinking that once one gets to truth, contradictions will not be there. 

Particles do not travel through what we would normally consider to be space and time

 Particles do not travel through what we would normally consider to be space and time. They can not have that kind of trajectory since then at any specific place on that trajectory they would have  a definite position and a definite momentum. Rather they travel through Hilbert space.[i.e. a complex vector space with inner product. But that is an inner product where the first term is complex. Not the same as the inner product with just the cosine. (QM needs the "i" for it does not work without it.)] So they do not have classical values in space and time as the Bell inequality shows. That is: the Bell inequality does not show non locality [or as sometimes called causality] as some people have suggested that are not familiar with QM. Rather  they have values in Hilbert space. [So Bell's inequality does not show anything against relativity.]

[The way to conceive of this is that particles travel on a sphere inside the Hilbert space.]

There is a sort of limit to the areas where pure reason can reach as Kant showed.

 There is a sort of limit to the areas where pure reason can reach as Kant showed. And he also saw that when human reason attempts to pursue areas beyond what is beyond the possibilities of experience, that it comes up with self contradictions. Furthermore he saw a sort of psychological insight from that observation. That people that do attempt to probe into areas beyond the possibility of experience tend to go insane. So you can see why in the Litvak Yeshiva world, interest in mysticism is usually discouraged.

[However, that does not mean that I distrust anyone with spiritual insight. For example, the Gra himself   and from the middle ages, Rav Avraham Abulafia. Rather, it is just not something to do unless one is really on that level. Plus, there is the problem of discernment.]

The kind of approach that I take towards issues of faith is more or less this. That moral principles are universals. [I.e., laws or characteristics. Moral laws are universals since they are laws that things have in common. Like: it is wrong  to torture people for the fun of it. That is a law that applies to people, and they have in common.] And some universals are known or can be discerned by reason. Also morality is objective and not reducible to physical laws. See G.E. Moore and Prichard.  

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