philosophy interesting

On one hand I find philosophy interesting because at least ancient philosophy deals with the humanizing questions that matter. Justice. Beauty. Menchlichkeit [to be a mensch/decent human being]. However the frustrating thing about it is no conclusion. So you can ask why waste the time?

People of the Middle Ages that wrote the great Musar books were definitely depending on Aristotle. Especially Ibn Pakuda. [author of the Obligations of the Heat חובות לבבות ]. But if you look at the Obligations of the Heat חובות לבבות Hovot Levavot] right at the beginning, [end of Shaar I.] you can see that he is along the lines of Neo Platonics. [That system of Plotinus had a kind of synthesis between Plato and Aristotle.]

Some rishonim [mediaeval authorities] put metaphysics and physics in the category of learning the command to learn all the time. That usually means Gemara, but they expand that definition [to include some subjects that are considered secular but not all. Physics and the Metaphysics of Aristotle is open in the Rambam that they are part of learning Torah. But other secular subjects are forbidden, e.g. literature. which he forbids in the commentary on the Mishna in Perek Helek.

Dr Michael Huemer brings the idea that philosophers have said a great deal of nonsense. But on the other hand you can look at it like Ayn Rand--that where philosophers go that is where people go afterwards. And then the ideas of the philosophers becomes common sense. And after the ideas are common sense then you go back and look at the person that introduced the concept in the first place and see that he was just going around it. He was fishing for it because he was the first one to think of it. So now it looks naive. But that is only because his original idea became thanks to him common sense.
[My feeling about Philosophy is to learn Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Hegel.]

A number of more modern thinkers have taken note that most of 20th Century Philosophy is "obviously false" in the words of John Searle. And that is good in terms of clearing the field. But it does not go much further.
Some modern people deserve good mention.
Scruton I have no recollection of hearing about until he was gone. But now I see a lot of important ideas.
Ed Feser is working on the issue of a synthesis of Aristotle and modern Physics.
Leonard Nelson had a kind of understanding on Kant which seems to get around a lot of the problems in Kant. [That is on Kelley Ross's web site]
Hegel also seems in need of explaining and Mc Taggart does a nice job.

But none of this would be interesting to me if not for that fact that they all seem to me to be revolving around a single point-faith.

Rav Shach and the Chazon Ish [In Laws about Murder in the Yad HaChazaka הלכות רוצח ושמירת הנפש פרק ה' הלכה ט]

There is an argument between Rav Shach and the Chazon Ish [In Laws about Murder in the Yad HaChazaka הלכות רוצח ושמירת הנפש פרק ה' הלכה ט] about when one kills someone else by accident and he is on his way to a refuge city and he is killed by the revenger. It seems like an obvious question. The murderer is on his way to the city where he will be safe. Outside of it he is not safe and can be killed. So let's say he was killed, but the case had not yet come to court.
In the actual verses themselves you see this quandary. The verse says he has to get to the city of refuge to be safe even before the court has tried his case. That is to say in the verse itself there are two cases. One in which he is tried and found guilty of man slaughter by accident and the other case is he is running to the city of safety. In both cases he is safe only there. But how do you know his legal status unless the case has already been brought to court?

[That is the exact point of Rav Shach. The Chazon Ish however thinks the revenger is not guilty of murder if he kills the murderer even before the case has gone to court. That means the Chazon Ish is thinking that you do not have habeus corpus. The court has just to judge the case as best they can see the facts. Was the original murder intentional or accidental or self defense [permitted]. Even without teh murderer being there they can decide. Rav Shach agrees with this. But the point of Rav Shach is that  before the court case the murderer is not a גברא קטילא קטל is not someone that the revenger can kill.--even if the case is brought to court and decided later that he was a murderer by accident. But before the case he is just a regular guy.
Rav Shach brings a proof that a court of law that sees someone kill someone else can not become judges because they can not see merit in the guy. [Makot 12] Tospfot understands that to mean they can be unbiased. But Rav Shach shows that the Rambam holds a different reason. That you need a "pesak din" decision of the court. Without that the murderer is not a "bar katala" בר קטלא that is not even obligated in the death penalty until there is a decision of a court.
The question about this is that after the court has decided that he was a murderer by accident then the revenger was as far as I can tell justified. This does not seem exactly parallel to the case of the court that saw some doing murder. That is a case of from now until the future. The case Rav Shach is bringing a proof for has to go in the past. למפרע.
The first proof of Rav Shach seems stronger. There is a case of false witnesses. They said so-and-so murdered on Sunday. Then came other witnesses and said "How could you have seen that? You were with us that whole day somewhere else." So the first set are killed because they wanted to kill. But this applies even if the second set said the murderer did in fact murder but he did so before Sunday. So here we see clearly what Rav Shach is saying. Even after a  pesak din the murderer does not become a איש קטילא  [condemned to die] in reverse. Only after the pesak.

The yarzeit of the wife of Rav Shach was the 18 of Shevat- I just discovered. He attributes the merit of all his learning to the fact that she took care if the parnasa [making a living] aspect of life.
This to me is kind of a reminder that when one is involved in learning Torah, it makes a lot of sense to marry as the sages said "bat talmid chacham". i.e. someone that appreciates what you are doing.
[It does not help if she says that she appreciates it. Rather she actually has to be someone that has real self sacrifice for Torah --no matter what.]
[And so you see there were people like Rav Shach that learned Torah for its own sake. Not for money.]


[I am not sure what to do if you are in a situation when there is no one to a marry except a non "bat talmid chacham." No everyone can marry the daughter of the rosh yeshiva.

[At the Mir in NY, this issue did not come up. Most people including me were just interested in learning Torah, and more or less went with the idea of trust in God --to help with making a living after getting married. So far I have not heard of anyone starving to death because of learning Torah.] [My own experience was such that as long as I trusted in God things went OK. But instantly when I decided to start making money that is when I lost everything. If that is not a lesson I do not what is.]

Steven Dutch has a nice piece on Hume. https://stevedutch.net/Pseudosc/Hume.htm
And Thomas Reid also.

But you see that Thomas Reid does not knock him nor Berkeley in such away as to say they made obvious mistakes. Rather the matter is subtle.

Also the very idea in itself that reason can not prove anything but what is self contradiction is taken as an axiom in Hume but for some reason is itself never proved. [Huemer pointed out that reason can know more things than just what is not self contradictory. (I think Bryan Caplan was the first to point out this problem in Hume.)
But how does reason know? Is it by Bayesian Probability as Huemer says? Or things that we know by non intuitive immediate knowledge as Leonard Nelson says [based on Kant and Fries]. Or is it by a dialectical process like Hegel says? 

Reform and Conservative Judaism are close to true Torah-- since there is no idolatry involved in their approach.

One issue that seems to me to be highly relevant to me is that of idolatry. This is related in an inverse way to that of trust in God. The problem with idolatry seems to be that it has changed form from worship of statues. So even if people are not worshiping Jupiter, they still might be worshiping other created beings.

This in an ironic way seems to be a problem when people become religious. Being religious you would imagine would mean more trust in God. But instead it seem to get diverted.
I can see that the Gra would have signed the letter of excommunication for this very reason. Sad that he seems to be ignored.  This is clearly a major issue in Torah. [Rav Nahman I think was not in the category of the excommunication as I have gone into before. If you want to take the time look at the books that bring the actual language.]

In terms of this issue, it looks to me based on my experience that Reform and Conservative Judaism are a lot closer to true Torah-- since there is no idolatry involved in their approach. Whatever worship they do is always directed towards God alone.

Now even if people are doing idolatry which is one of the things in the Torah that there is a death penalty for, that does not mean you can kill them. There is a for any death penalty the need of a court of law of 23 judges or the 71 judges of the great court in Jerusalem. Still from the fact that idolatry is serious enough to warrant a death penalty, you can see that it is nothing to play around with or to ignore. So the fact that the signature of the Gra on that letter of excommunication is ignored seems to me to be not a good reason for you to ignore it.

[However you can wonder about Eliyahu the prophet on Mount Carmel that after that test of the prophets of the Baal told the people to take the false prophets down to the river and slaughter them.
Where was a court of law to try the case?]


And besides this I admit that fighting against idolatry can be a hard thing to know how to do it. Take Yoshiyahu the King that destroyed all idolatry in Israel. Well things did not exactly go so well for him afterwards. Apparently some kind of caution is needed. (There were great kings before him but none of them ever uprooted idols from all Israel. King Hizkiah only ruled over Judah and Benjamin.)

I have mentioned before that philosophy tends to go in stages. "How is change possible?" was the question for the pre Socratics. Faith and Reason was the Middle Ages. Mind -Body problem was the modern issue. This last one came to its peak with Kant and Hegel, and then everything after that is picking up the pieces.
So what is the next issue is overdue. Who knows what it will be? But I would like to suggest that these issues all came up because of some need or dire emergency. I do not however know how the problem with change came to deal with an issue then during the time of Paramenides. But the faith reason thing seems clear.
So what ever is the next issue is probably already is a gestation and slowly coming to the surface.

[The Mind Body problem that began being raised in Descartes had connection with the older question how do we know stuff being raised by Socrates.]

I would like to suggest that the major issue today is in wrong attitudes. Or what you could call evil thoughts. And the solution is trust in God. That is to say that everyone on any side of the political spectrum is aware of the problem of evil thinking. At least that is how he or she understands what is wrong with the other side of the political issues. But the connection of this to trust in God is something that almost no one is aware of. But it is a cause and effect. Trust in God brings one to good thoughts and healthy and strong attitudes. So how does one come to trust. I suggest the path of Musar of Rav Israel Salanter, i.e., to learn books of ethics right away when one gets up in the morning. Especially concerning trust in God. 
[Musar means the medieval books of Ethics. However the disciples of Rav Israel Salanter also wrote books of Musar. But those books are not the foundation in the same way that the medieval books are. Still I tried myself to get through this.]



[You can see the problem of  evil thoughts also in the triple billion dollar industry of shrinks. It is known that the whole thing is bogus, but why is it that people still spend in teh USA trillions of dollars on it. Because of evil thoughts. So the problem is clear to people. The solution is not. Unless you learn to trust in God. That was an important insight of  Navardok [i.e. that branch of Musar].

But trust in God used to be thought to mere sitting and learning and not worrying about making a living. My way of thinking is that one can learn Physics with the same intention.

The basic principle of matza is time. So you could put oatmeal into a pot and cook it, and it can not become leaven.

The basic principle of matza is time. There is no way of getting leavened bread without time by definition. So in short, oatmeal or wheat flour it can not become leaven without time. Thus you could put oatmeal into  a pot and cook it, and it can not become leaven.  Same with wheat.
And after it has gotten to be cooked, it also can not become leaven. [So you can have the regular breakfast of hot oatmeal that some people are used to. Not only can oatmeal not become hametz unless it sits in water for over 18 minutes but after it is cooked it can never become hametz ever even after a million years.]
To make you own matza to say a blessing on is simple. Get a frying pan. The only thing is if you mix wheat flour and water to make maza to say the hagada, then there is this issue. If the mix flows like a pancake, then it is not bread but cake. To say the blessing, "Who brings forth bread" it has to be thick enough that it does not flow.
[This can be hard to decide. What if it flows a little, but not like a pancake?]