I was asked a few weeks ago about Leibniz and other pre-Kantian philosophers. I do not recall how it came up. I simply walked into the Na Nach Breslov beit midrash and someone asked me about this. My short answer to them was "They are not relevant". My main point was that pre_Kantian thinkers got to a certain point in the conflict between Mind and Body and it needed Kant and Hegel to come up with a kind of synthesis.
On a larger scale, my idea is this. Philosophy before Plato was leading up to Plato and then everything after that was picking up the pieces. (The question the pre Plato people had was "How is change possible?")
This question went up until Plotinus. Then a new problem arose: Faith and Reason. [And that in itself had a subset of a different problem free will as opposed to Divine knowledge. That went up until Aquinas.
Then a whole new question came up with Descartes; the mind body problem. Then that went on back and forth between the people like John Locke and Spinoza and Leibniz until Kant. Since then everything has been getting trying to get a handle on Kant and Hegel.
And the relevance of all this is great as politics is downstream from Philosophy. What kind of idea people have about what is truth and justice will determine what kind of society they will live in.
[And you do not really get to skip this process by assuming you know the whole truth because of some religious text you read. The problem with that is that truth is not determined by "identity philosophy." That is to choose who has the truth based on what religious group or ethnic group they belong to. If that would be valid, then why did the Rambam make such a big deal out of the importance of Aristotle? You have to say that he did not think in terms of identity politics.]
I ought to add that in terms of the post Kantian debate I think that Leonard Nelson is unjustly ignored. To me his system [the Kant Fries School] seems important. And just to add weight that that it is a fact that Karl Gauss saw the book of Fries and praised it and David Hilbert clearly held that Leonard Nelson was on the right track. But I also do not think that this takes away from the importance of Hegel. But after Nelson I think 20th century philosophy really took a nose dive into the mud.
Kelley Ross does use the Nelson Kant approach for knowledge and Shopenhaur for Metaphysics but I am thinking that Hegel's Metaphysics might be better.
On a larger scale, my idea is this. Philosophy before Plato was leading up to Plato and then everything after that was picking up the pieces. (The question the pre Plato people had was "How is change possible?")
This question went up until Plotinus. Then a new problem arose: Faith and Reason. [And that in itself had a subset of a different problem free will as opposed to Divine knowledge. That went up until Aquinas.
Then a whole new question came up with Descartes; the mind body problem. Then that went on back and forth between the people like John Locke and Spinoza and Leibniz until Kant. Since then everything has been getting trying to get a handle on Kant and Hegel.
And the relevance of all this is great as politics is downstream from Philosophy. What kind of idea people have about what is truth and justice will determine what kind of society they will live in.
[And you do not really get to skip this process by assuming you know the whole truth because of some religious text you read. The problem with that is that truth is not determined by "identity philosophy." That is to choose who has the truth based on what religious group or ethnic group they belong to. If that would be valid, then why did the Rambam make such a big deal out of the importance of Aristotle? You have to say that he did not think in terms of identity politics.]
I ought to add that in terms of the post Kantian debate I think that Leonard Nelson is unjustly ignored. To me his system [the Kant Fries School] seems important. And just to add weight that that it is a fact that Karl Gauss saw the book of Fries and praised it and David Hilbert clearly held that Leonard Nelson was on the right track. But I also do not think that this takes away from the importance of Hegel. But after Nelson I think 20th century philosophy really took a nose dive into the mud.
Kelley Ross does use the Nelson Kant approach for knowledge and Shopenhaur for Metaphysics but I am thinking that Hegel's Metaphysics might be better.
