On Philosophy

Philosophy is a method or process of reasoning rather than an ossified practice. Philosophical syncretism is a way of building that model of the man-in-the-Universe Johnny Cash sort of one-piece-at-a-time opinion about reality before one physically dies that differs from religious syncretism. The latter present ossified doctrine and the former is a map in progress.

It is possible to extract ideas from the sky religion that gave rise to Hinduism and Buddhism too indirectly and regard those elements within a cosmological context such as the recurrent Universe of Nietzsche, the spinning bucket in the void thought experiments of Newton, The World as Will and Idea of Shopenhauer, 'The Three Dialogues’ of Bishop Berkley and his ideas about idealism contrasted with the illusory nature of reality of Buddhism and of course the noumenal-phenomenal dichotomy of Immanuel Kant and so forth.

Sakyamuni was perhaps a prince of a society over-run by another culture. He may have became a political and religious exile and in some respects resembles Abraham more than a little. Abraham and the Buddha were founders of social events-methods that would become morph into religious practices. Buddhism is far more of an historically reviewable religion than is Brahmanism, and less complex in its kit.

The fifty billion year kalpa of Hinduism and a recycling Universe are fascinating primitive cosmological theorizing. If one views very early Hinduism and Buddhism without the elaborations accreted upon them one discovers more philosophical outlooks.

That reminds me of the saying of God to the prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament that everyone knows him, and they intentionally forget that He is. What Sartre calls 'false consciousness' set upon ancient ideas long ago. Christianity isn't much changed over two millenia though one may consider the accreted sectarian and heretical syncretisms that have flourished. Some forms of Hinduism and of Buddhism seem quite changed in comparison to the content created by their founders too.

One might enjoy reading of the historical growth of philosophical and religious thought concurrently in the past and perhaps today too. The rise of symbolic logic in the 19th century, and of Leibnitz' mathematical logic centuries before followed the ongoing progress in scientific knowledge and mathematics and was energized by the emerging paradigms. I would think that Darwin was stimulated not only by his Christian upbringing and the notion of sequential accretion of life forms in Genesis but from the entire continental expansion of knowledge as well. There were others regarding evolutionary change before Darwin.

The comparison of Descartes' cogito and 'Discourse Upon a Method' with Sartre's later 'Being and Nothingness' reveals the same sort of ratiocinating individual encountering an objective experience of a different real physical world-universe that is an implicit aspect of duality in other religious and philosophical methods.

One regards Zoroastrianism and its emphasis upon a duality of Good and Evil and reflects how that faith was historicaly eradicated by elimination of the believers. 'Beyond Good and Evil' was Nietzsche's tome, yet the only way one might rightly compare the transcendence of good and evil is through monism with pluralism as an apparent, or even illusory fact of the expression of being and life.

Thus one finds the malleability of words and reference objects of late 20th century analytical philosophy Strawson, Quine, Kripke etc within the ontology of uncertainty paralleled in the uncertainty of quantum mechanics. A quantum universe itself uncertain is a sort of larger expression of the subjective uncertainty and temporality of the world-for-itself.

One may find quite a lot of philosophy to favor, and then regard The One and The Son of God as the best inference worth faith.