I wanted to defend my point of view a little so that it does not seem like I am just picking up pieces of conflicting philosophies. Even though I am not trying to build any kind of system, I still have a basic world view that I think needs defending.
[This is meant to be a continuation of previous blogs where I mentioned the philosophers that have influenced me.]
So in short:I think there are universals and universals are perceptible by reason. That is reason knows more that how to discern contradictions. That is about the sum and size of it. Moral values are simply out there and reason applied to moral values perceives them just like reason applied to math perceives certain rules.
So that means that my concept of Torah is like Saadia Gaon and the חובות לבבות Obligations of the Heart that things are not moral because the Torah says so. Rather the Torah comes to reveal objective moral values that are already "out there."
Michael Huemer has a web site paper of how there is no such thing as pure empirical knowledge.You always bring some a priori into it. And I am grateful to Dr. Huemer for his clarity in stating these ideas more or less in the form I just gave them.
But this basic orientation of mine started when I was younger than now. Probably even before high school. But at least I recall I was doing a good amount of reading philosophy in high school.-and even had organized a little group with Wendy Wilson and Roland Hutchinson learning Chinese Philosophy. In any case, I was pretty convinced even back then that something was seriously horrific with Post Modern Philosophy [even though I did not know exactly what.] But I can see why I though to learn Torah in the Mir in NY rather than have anything to do with the terrible stupid philosophies of the twentieth century.
[If the Philosophy departments had been teaching Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, that would have made me more interested but in those days, the world of philosophy was really full of pseudo intellectuals].
At any rate, you can see in my short three sentences version of my philosophy that I take the back line of Plato Aristotle, Hegel, Leonard Nelson.--a world that Mind and Being are complementary.And also that reason perceives much more than contradictions in language. Outside of this, most 20th century philosophy I understood even when I was in high school is just lunacy expressed in fancy language.
Michael Huemer has a web site paper of how there is no such thing as pure empirical knowledge.You always bring some a priori into it. And I am grateful to Dr. Huemer for his clarity in stating these ideas more or less in the form I just gave them.
But this basic orientation of mine started when I was younger than now. Probably even before high school. But at least I recall I was doing a good amount of reading philosophy in high school.-and even had organized a little group with Wendy Wilson and Roland Hutchinson learning Chinese Philosophy. In any case, I was pretty convinced even back then that something was seriously horrific with Post Modern Philosophy [even though I did not know exactly what.] But I can see why I though to learn Torah in the Mir in NY rather than have anything to do with the terrible stupid philosophies of the twentieth century.
[If the Philosophy departments had been teaching Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, that would have made me more interested but in those days, the world of philosophy was really full of pseudo intellectuals].
At any rate, you can see in my short three sentences version of my philosophy that I take the back line of Plato Aristotle, Hegel, Leonard Nelson.--a world that Mind and Being are complementary.And also that reason perceives much more than contradictions in language. Outside of this, most 20th century philosophy I understood even when I was in high school is just lunacy expressed in fancy language.
