Rav Nahman did not hold with learning philosophy nor any secular studies. He echoed Rav Hai Gaon. But this was not the approach of Ibn Pakuda and Rambam. I went with the approach of Rav Nahman for a few years and yet my experiences with the more or less ghetto [frum] ultra religious world gave me reason to  reconsider. And so with due respect to Rav Nahman, I tend to the approach of Ibn Pakuda, Rambam and Gra who all held from the importance of some secular disciplines - but with a lot of limitations. In the long run, I have to conclude that certain philosophers of the ancient Greeks are important, and Kant also. The natural sciences also. However psychology is pseudo  science. See Karl Popper for the reason.

[In the approach of the Rambam, physics and metaphysics are apart of the mitzvah to learn Gemara. in laws of learning Torah where he says divide the learning into three parts--written law, oral law, gemara. and the subjects brought in the first four chapters are in the category of gemara.]

a good argument for the role of faith that goes beyond reason

There is a good argument for the role of faith that goes beyond reason, This is in Kant when he showed

even to begin reason one needs categories of space and time and causality that can not be known by reason. Nor can they be known by empirical reasoning as Hume showed 

 Whitehead suggested a third kind of fact that is not a mind fact  nor a physical fact in order to escape the Mind -Body Problem. {Process and Reality published 1929}. This has been excluded  from academia from around 1980. But this idea dovetails nicely with the Friesian kind of third source of knowledge that i non intuitive immediate knowledge.[And that too has been excluded from Academia]. [The third kind of fact is what is known by the third kind of knowledge.]

For someone like me this sort of thing that Whitehead suggested make a lot of sense because I am used to seeing in Quantum Mechanics formulations based on Lagrange [Kinetic without potential energy] or Hamilton. In these formulations f Physics the electron knows where to go. It goes where there is minimum of energy, the lowest energy level. But it doe not try out other venues before it does so. So how does the electron know? 

The advantage of Whitehead and Fries is in the categories of Kant. The Kant proof of their validity has been a problem almost immediately after  the ink was dry on The Critique of Pure Reason

 In the beginning of Roman history there is an event that is brought about ''the gods that avenge parents''.[This was the event that caused the downfall of the last Roman king at which it became a republic.] While on one hand, we do not believe in  other gods, but we are also aware that God has angels and archangels  that are appointed over certain tasks (as is brought in the Gemara). To be aware that there are Furies that will never forgive nor ever forget can be helpful to remind one that there is a Judge and there is judgment, people may think they have no responsibility to honor and obey their parents and to blame all their troubles on their parents as Saint Freud taught. And even their parents may forgive and forget. But the gods that avenge parents will never forget  nor forgive and will always collect payment- sooner or later , because they are the ''Furies''--the gods that even the gods of Mount Olympus fear. No sacrifice can appease them. No  prayer can turn away their wrath.

A dimension where time goes backwards and entropy also goes backwards

 In String Theory there are 26 dimensions that have to be curled up to make our  dimensional world. This is promising because only in String Theory is there a viable theory  of quantum gravity. Also there i the advantage of no need for artificial steps to get re-normalization. In these extra dimensions I think there  must be some in which time goes forward and entropy also goes forward. But there must be one in which time goes backwards and entropy goes forward. Also another in which time goes forward and entropy backwards. And another in which time goes backwards and entropy also goes backwards. The reason for  i partly based on Feynman who put forward a paper in 1948 about time reversal and later some people suggested entropy reversal. Even later Georg Ryzanov suggested showed in unpublished papers that the values of electron and proton mass result automatically from these assumptions.

His mechanism for the physical process which would resutt in this was flawed, but it would work well in the context of String Theory'

I spent a lot of time with the papers of Ryzanov but have no more of them and I think they might be lost. It i ad because he showed amazing results in hi equations  

      

scroll of Ruth

In the scroll of Ruth it looks that Ruth was subject to Yibum. That is curious. When he was the wife of Mahlon, she was not Jewish.  How then would yibum apply? Plus Yibum is only for brothers from the father. Not uncles.

The whole discussion between Boaz and Ploni Almoni would have made sense if they were brothers of Mahlon, not Elimelech.

Plus what was that about if Ploni would buy the field then he would have to marry Ruth?

Just to be clear Yibum is when when one brother marries but then dies before he has children. Then one of hi brothers takes the wife [so that his memory will not be lost. Children that that net brother will have ill be considered a children of the first brother.]  

 

 Robert Hanna does a great service to philosophy in showing the flaws of all USA and British ''analytic'' philosophy of the 20th century. And he is quite right about the ''Forward to Kant'' approach, but he does also acknowledge the great contributions of G. E. Moore [who forms the approach of Michael Huemer]

Still, I am waiting for someone to acknowledge Leonard Nelson and Kelley Ross.   It must be that too much of the lashon hara [slander] of Husserl stuck. [i.e., psychologism].   

 It does take a certain kind of sense or intuition to feel the importance of learning Torah and I think that it is something that  needs to be nourished, for it can be lost. This is the reason I think that the sages said one should marry only the daughter of a Torah scholar. For (as it was said in the great Litvak yeshivot): "If one's wife wants him to learn, he will learn; and if she does not, he won't." The wife of Rav Kinyevsky one time when he was learning  told a visitor to come back at a later time when the Rav was accepting visitors saying "Do you want my husband to be an am haaretz?"[i.e. "ignoramus" ]

I actually wanted to marry the daughter of a talmid chacham [Torah scholar] for that very same reason, but did not succeed. The interesting thing is that my wife [Leah/aka Paula Finn]  did have a great sense and intuition about the importance of learning Torah, even though she was not really a daughter of a Torah scholar. But that is not so clear in itself for her father [Bill Finn] certainly had a sense of the importance of trust in God and in learning Torah though he was a working guy.

So, to conclude, I think it is more important to marry someone with a sense of Torah rather than someone who is publicly learning, but might be doing so just because it is a way to make money nowadays.