Robert Hanna wants to get back to Kant and to me that makes some sense.

 Robert Hanna wants to get back to Kant and to me that makes some sense. Except that it leaves the problem that I think Kant Kant's argument about against Berkley does not seem to work. The reason is the step of the difference between dreams which are not rule based and the categories which are the rules by which the mind processes data. But this step seems weak. The rules are themselves synthetic a priori. --the very things Kant is setting out to prove. 

Now you could ignore Kant and go like Michael Huemer, but that seems to be a sort of quietism [things are the way they are because that is how they are.] Huemer is based on the Intuitionists [Prichard, Ross, G.E. Moore] but also on the insight of Bryan Caplan who noticed that Hume never proved a very basic point that all philosophers after him assumed to be true. [The pure reason can only tell us what is implied in definitions.] {A idea based on Euclid's Geometry. You start with the axioms and go from there.

I have long thought that Hegel is away to get around the problem in Kant that in similar to Huemer in this: why place arbitrary constraints on Reason?  

There is also Kelley Ross's idea that the categories of Kant [Why When where how--space time causality etc.] are known not by reason nor by sense perception, rather immediate non intuitive knowledge.

(At least that is what I think Dr. Ross is saying. Lack of time and energy has caused the sad fact that I have not read the actual writings of Leonard Nelson. But from what I understand, he uses the idea of non intuitive immediate knowledge to justify the categories.[That is to say they are not based on reason nor the senses.]

[If it is not clear my own view let me just say I see there are three different schools of thought, Kant Hegel and the Intuitionists that each has some aspect of truth and I think they are all pointing in the same direction and I think some kind of synthesis ought to be possible to combine them.

Dr. Huemer is modifying the Intuitionists [GE Moore, Prichard. Ross] in a way that takes account of some odd fact that Hume never proved his point about that reason can only tell us about contradictions. In that way the point of Berkley seems not even to start. So one question that Kant was addressing in the CPR does not even start. However this does not seem to answer the questions exactly.  For I still think that Kant and Hegel were addressing real concerns. Even Thomas Reid saw that Berkley had a point. 

attachment with God

There is an aspect of attachment with God-- that is not emotion, nor reason nor sensory perception. This is why there is a interest in immediate non intuitive knowledge.

That being said, I admit that the religious world tends to lunacy, since every area of value can deteriorate and even become its opposite.

So obviously most of the religious world is insane and in fact highly immoral. But that in itself ought not to reflect on Torah. The way I see things is that Torah is to bring to objective morality. But when Torah becomes a business as is the case nowadays it becomes its opposite --as the sages said סם חיים למימיניים בה וסם מוות למשמאילים בה It [Torah] is the elixir of life to those that walk on its right side for its own sake and a poison of death to those that walk on its left side(learn and keep it for personal benefits)

Being religious and keeping Torah are two opposites.

 Being religious and keeping Torah are two opposites. Being religious is group identification. That is directly opposed to keeping Torah which means to follow the law of the Torah no matter what any one says or believes. 

And in fact we find most practices of the religious are directly opposed to Torah. E.g., honor your father and mother. This is given hypocritical lip service.

But the legalistic aspects of thing is not what is the most pressing issue. Rather there is some deep kelipa of Amalek which infests the religious world. Some real viciousness that is hard to talk about since they use the show of keeping Torah which makes it difficult to see into the hypocrisy. 

the very emphasis on appearance of religiosity ought to give a red light to warning since thenTorah says the opposite--to walk privately with God.

music file z57

 z57 D Minor

even though marrying the daughter of a Torah scholar in an important value, I can see that it is more important to marry someone that appreciates learning Torah [for its own sake].

 Human relations are hard to figure out. My wife was absolutely intense on marrying me. This relation had started to some degree in high school. She was a  violinist in the high school orchestra when I first saw her. We got along very well but there was no serious relationship. Then when I went off to Shar Yashuv in NY [a great Litvak yeshiva in NY], she had written a note to God telling him that she thought that I had discovered something important, but I had disappeared. She was hoping I would call her and let her know what I had discovered. Then after a year, I called her. [For the last year in high school and my first year at Shar Yashuv, I had no contact with any of my former friends. Intentionally]. But while I was back home in California, after one year I decided to call her. This is a long story, but she became extremely intent with trying to get me to marry her--which I did.--And I am very happy that I did so. But she was not the daughter of a Torah scholar, so she did not really understand what I was doing in learning Torah. Maybe I myself did not understand this. Learning Torah is after all an area of value that is beyond human reason. 

And the odd thing is that very often daughters of Torah scholars also do not seem to appreciate learning Torah. I began to see that Torah to most people is a means to make money. So even those that learn Torah for its own sake would be at a loss to understand why the religious world cannot see learning Torah for its own sake as a positive value.

So even though marrying the daughter of a Torah scholar in an important value, I can see that it is more important to marry someone that appreciates learning Torah [for its own sake].

The answer of Dr Ross to my letter about the difference between Copenhagen and Everett.

[I was advocating Everett as being a better approach since there is no magical collapse of the wave function. But then Dr. Kelley Ross points out that in in Bohr there must be an observer (somewhere) for Quantum mechanics to work. And this two level of reality is essential to Kant and Plato also.    

[I also want to mention that Everett's many worlds theory does not mean many universes, but can simply be different areas in our universe where the different possibilities of QM come to be.]

I think it is important to mention here that even in Everett, there is an observer. So the two levels of reality are preserved. I.e., in Bohr if u have two and one observes the other then there is a collapse of the wave function. But someone outside of that system can see them both as one system and thus still connected by one wave function. [You can see that even a piece of matter like an electron can have a wave function--because of E=mc^2. So the outer observer sees just these two inner people as a connected wave.]  

When you say "QM just gets larger and larger as far as one wants to go," I take that to mean that there is no "magical collapse" of the wave function, ever.  This "Everett" must be one of the people who doesn't like the dualism implied in quantum mechanics.

He's not alone, although usually it goes the other way, that the reality of the wave is dismissed and particles affirmed.  But it is hard to leave out the particle part, since particles do at times behave like particles:  They have definite location (within Uncertainty) and Dirac's mathematics for them postulates a geometrical point, which a wave is not.

So this doesn't seem right or helpful to me.  The whole idea of a Kantian quantum mechanics is that the dualism is preserved, as in Kant's metaphysics.  You don't like that?

KR

the importance of the Gra

There is on one hand the very great importance of learning Torah. On the other the religious world which makes it money by means of a pretense of keeping Torah is quite corrupt. Even though there are here and there great yeshivot which keep and learn Torah sincerely, the religious word itself is mainly fill with delusions. Thus it is clear that for anyone to keep and learn Torah sincerely he or she must stay away from the corrupting influence of the religious . I have no claim to understand the hearts of men, but I can see clearly that the practices of the religious have nothing to do with Torah at all. It is all a show or the sake of money and power.

However, the general world of the Litvaks is basically OK.--except that they have not and do not realize the importance of the Gra. If they would the signature of the Gra on the letter of excommunication would be listened to.