Dinesh's articles

Still later, Kant tried to fix the argument by introducing language first used by Fichte plato.stanford.edu/entries/johann-fichte The subject constitutes itself as a subject. Kant now argues that we can be aware of being moved only insofar as we move ourselves, and, more importantly, that we are aware of other things only insofar as we are aware of our ourselves. In a most remarkable passage, Kant claims that “Iam an object of myself and of my representations that There is also something externa…

. . .(1) The “beautiful is what pleases in the mere estimate formed of it (consequently not by the intervention of any feeling of sense in accordance with a concept of the understanding.) From this it follows immediately that it must please from all interest.” (2) The “sublime is what pleases immediately because of its opposition to sense.” It is “an object (of nature) whose representation determines the mind to regard the elevation of nature beyond our reach as equivalent to the presentatio…

. . . Kant believed that it is in our fortieth year that we finally acquire a character No one who in his way of thinking is conscious of having character can have such character by nature. Rather, it must always be acquired. We may also assume that the foundation of this character and its beginning wiol be unforgettable. It is like a kind of rebirth, like a certain solemn kind of promise to oneself. Education, examples, and teaching cannot gradually bring about this firmness and constancy in…

So even before the microscope had been put to serious use, the telescope created vertiginous sense of the infinite vastness of the universe and the insignificance of human beings when viewed, in the mind’s eye, from outer space. In the Lucretian universe the gods are indifferent to human beings, and human beings are an accidental consequence of the random jostling together of atoms. The Scaling Revolution had the effect of forcing even those who continued to believe in the divine architect to…

"Do not suppose that I was a very deep thinker, or was marked as a precocious person. I was a very lively imaginative person, and could believe in the Arabian Nights as easily as in Encyclopedia!" ~ Faraday.

In ‘Civilization and Its discontents’ www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/FreudS-CIVILIZATION-AND-ITS-DISCONTENTS-text-final.pdf Sigmund Freud wrote, “One can try to recreate the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity with one’s own wishes. But whoever, is desperate defiance, sets out upon this path to happiness . . . becomes a mad man” This idea that being mentally healthy m…

As a historical science, evolution is confirmed by the fact that so many independent lines of evidence converge to its single conclusion. Independent sets of data from geology, paleontology, botany, zoology, herpetology, entomology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, genetics and population genetics, and many other sciences each point to the conclusion that life evolved. This is a convergence of evidence. Creationists can demand “just not proved through a single fossil. It is prov…

Science is "Organized common sense"

When the past has ceased to throw its light onto the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity. ~ Tocqueville.

What most interests us here is not the truthfulness of a person but the truth of a story, and the story tells us that there exists such intense happiness in acting that the actor like a gambler, will accept that all the odds are stacked against him. This I admit, is difficult to believe; what convinced me that I had heard a truth was that the story remained me instantly of a strange passage in the last letters exchanged between Jefferson and John Adams, when, at the end of their long lives…

. . . Politics begins, as it were, to expand its realm downward to the necessities of life themselves, so that to the philosophers’ scorn for the perishable affairs of mortals was added the specifically Greek contempt for everything that is necessary for mere life and survival. As Cicero, in his futile attempt to disavow Greek philosophy on this one point -- its attitude to politics -- succinctly pointed out, if only “all that is essential to our wants and comforts were supplied by some magic wa…

World History is the Final Court of Appeals” ~ Hegel

I learn more from your doubts than from All that the divine Aristotle, the wise Plato, and the incomparable Descartes have affirmed so lightly

Consciousness is the 'appearance of a world'. The essence of the phenomenon of consciousness experience is that a single and unified reality becomes present: If you are conscious, a world appears to you. This is true in dreams as well as in the waking state, but in dreamless deep sleep, nothing appears: the fact that there is a reality out there and that you are present in it is unavailable to you; you do not even know that you exist. Consciousness is a very special phenomenon, because it is…

* Everything in life is meaningless, the pain and suffering are fruitless and futile. There is no object in life. To nature nothing matters but the continuation of the species. And is not this last a hasty proposition based on over-brief periods of time, the observation of an eye that sees but a little way?

The incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy the human heart

Arthur Schopenhauer shared with Hobbes a pessimistic view of human nature, but he posited the source within the individual: he exposed the dark side of humanity. Hobbes saw people at war with one another, whereas Schopenhauer considered that they were at war with themselves. For him, the internal ferment is fueled by irrational motives that far exceed our ability to control them. His is a philosophy of the irrational in contrast to the prevalent rationalism adopted by his predecessors. It is thi…

I’m Tibetan, I’m Buddhist and I’m the Dalai Lama, but if I emphasize these differences it sets me apart and raises barriers with other people. What we need to do is to play more attention to the ways in which we are the same as other people