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.

Homosexuals Leading the Way in New Cases of H.I.V. in the U.S.A.

In the U.S.A. in 2009 about 26,000 cases of H.I.V. were made through male to male (homosexual) contact. An additional 4,500 cases were contracted in heterosexual relations inclusive of prostitution. Fewer than 2000 cases occurred through the use of contaminated needles.

In the United States, and in Tennessee, the H.I.V.-A.I.D.s issue is largely a concern of homosexuals, illegal drug users, the prostitution industry and those interested in preventing the increase of dangerous disease.

The African H.I.V. issue is a horse of a different color with the non-monogamy historical cultural practice being one of the causes of the transmission of A.I.D.s Many women have several contacts a day, and scientific research discovered that H.I.V. cases increase markedly with promiscuity.


http://www.avert.org/usa-transmission-gender.htm

Broadcast Media of Prions Lurking Out There

A French study of prion transmission between species has shown that the misfolded protein structures that are the cause for Mad Cow Disease make interspecies and human-to-human communications more readily than previously known. Autopsies on brains to determine if the disease was communicated does not necessarily indicate if the disease had been broadcast to organs it might lurk in. Perhaps the blood-brain barrier had protected brains better than in the remainder of the body. In the French investigation the prions were transmitted successfully 26 of 41 times to organs rather than being a minority occurrence in the brains of the targets.


http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-prions-species-easily-thought.html

In Britain as many as 1 in 4000 people may be media for PrPSc prion transmission according to samples of appendixes of the populous. Evidently the prions find lymphoid tissue a friendlier ecosystem than brain tissue.

In Humans the disease is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. The disease causes a rotting of the brain resembling ordinary dementia or an over-abundance of concussions.

State of Union Speech 2012: President Obama's Support for Extended Tax Cuts for the Rich in Dec.2010 Was Unfair to the Poor

President Obama's state of the union speech attacked the under-taxed status of the rich in the nation. Of course President Obama is directly responsible for the present low, low tax rates of the Bush II era that he supported vigorously for renewal in December 2010. If re-elected he probably would assure that the tax cuts become permanent as a sort of woosification of the Democratic political agenda.

President Obama presented the seat of honor to billionaire Warren Buffet's secretary. Maybe she knows that the tax cuts will expire again this later this year if the President does not again intervene to extend them. Probably the Republicans will mercilessly lever the President and force him to forego extended Hawaiian vacations and large entourage unless he capitulates.

President Obama is fundamentally a weak moderate Republican chasing after the receeding to the right Republicans trying to meet them halfway. Sure he insinuated homosexuality into the military and New York to match up New England's policies on that, yet of course the corporate world supported that policy so it cannot be said that it was a Democratic plank.

Can Mitt Romney Overcome the Bias Against Wealth as Ross Perot Failed to Do in 1992?

Mitt Romney has become a kind of poster child for the upper 1% paying inadequate taxes while prospering during hard times. Of course the upper 1% do not experience hard times as the poor know them, so they are not to blame for lacking ideas about how to fully employ the poor so they prosper.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-romney-voter-reaction-20120125,0,2084544.story

Mitt Romney, like Franklin Roosevelt is from the right side of the Interstate. Some Republicans hope that he may be a leader of the people rather than a leader for royalty. Some look for signs of the coronation of Jeb Bush if Republicans are turned off by the unAmerican wealth of Mitt Romney. Real Americans want to work at McDonalds flipping burgers.

Actually I liked the $1 menu and the double cheeseburgers quite a bit during my bicycle riding around America looking for a house to paint decade. They were good years when I could afford two doubles for Christmas and a large coffee.

Florida voters have a choice to make; to elect the Georgian visionary envisioning himself as President making excellent speeches, the morally excellent Rick Santorum

or the former Mormon missionary draft deferred top .006 percent Rich Mitt Romney. I do not prefer royalty for anything although the Queen of England is occasionally cool. All I can say is I wish that Ross Perot had stayed in the 1992 Presidential race and won.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-romney-voter-reaction-20120125,0,2084544.story

A Comment on Russell, Frege and Quine's Theories of Names

I think it useful if one regards one thread of the evolution of analytic philosophy moving through logic and language as well as the relationship to the empirical world culminating eventually beyond 'Naming and Necessity' in Quine's later work 'Ontological Relativity'.

If Russell's approach is descriptivist and Kripke's is causal on names then Quine synthesizes the two complimentary approaches in placing lexicons within ontological sets of meaning.

Kripke gave names the characteristic of being 'rigid designators'. One may hypothesize a modal logic in which 'Richard Nixon' invariably refers to a real individual, yet with M-Theory ideas of an infinite promulgation of all-possible universes it is easy to hypothesize all possible model logic ontologies with infinite varieties of Richard Nixons and Richard Nixon meanings in infinite stages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_and_Necessity

Dialectical Materialism; Contradictions in Production and The 'Creative Destruction' of Capitalism

A thought provoking theme-the idea that dialectical materialism is about contradictions between forces of production and consumers of product or profit. One might regard d.m. as about the producers and the homeless, landless people and aristocrats, or of oppressors and oppressed.D.M. as dualism is perhaps an inadequate all purpose tool for realistic empirical analysis.

In contemporary global economics producers are declining and corporate bureaucrats and stockholders increasing. Maybe some of that 90s bunk about 'creative destruction' was stimulated by Boston Marxist. Joseph Schumpeter popularized the term previously, yet it evidently has a German etiology referring to capitalism as well: schöpferische Zerstörung

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schumpeter

In other words the concept of creative destruction wasn not invented by the author of Batman considering his character-the Joker.

Perhaps human experience is reducible in some respects to the self-other duality such as Sartre presents in 'Being and Nothingness' as well as in 'The Critique of Dialectical Reason'. In the latter case the individual regards society and its social evolution. Sartre described death as 'the complete triumph of the other'. For those of faith in eternal life awareness that Jesus Christ has overcome death brings assurance that death is not the last word.

One moves beyond solipsism and the odd internal evolutions of ideas in that and leaves the problem of solipsism to The One of Plotinus. Even our Christian God was wise enough to overcome the problem by being a Trinity forever. The proliferation of ideas and forms may be identified sometimes with number, however we know the word and object or number and object relationship are nominal associations at best. The dialectical material approach would have worked better in 5th century Athens or Persia as a heresy of Zoroastrianism.

Dialectical in the day of Marx meant two-part. It would have been electrifying if Marx had using dielectrical to describe the flow of electrons flowing toward positive and negative contradictions, yet that would await a later inventor of ideas. One suspects that the dark energy of the universe is a monopole in contradiction of gravity drawing the world away from immediate pluralism toward the deep, membranous abyss of negativism. Accentuating the positive was a source of hopefulness in the beginning of metaphysics I would think-the 19th century Germans ran toward pessimism. Nietzsche is a mess making gods in twilight of Wagner's play figures Schopenhauer believed the world was an evil illusion, and Schliermacher had to overcome 'The Cultured Despisers of Christianity'. -What a world as will and idea! The good old days of Hegel’s spirit evolving to realize itself in history like our Jewish god being just a tadpole growing up as the world and with Germany as the highest example yet of the increasing Genius had only Keirkeguard as a contradiction making excellent criticisms in Stages in Life's Way and elsewhere left-wing Hegelians feared to tread.

Two is not really the same as three, yet we might stipulate that some Marxists might hypothesize that a two-part evolution such as yin-yang is the equivalent of 11 dimensional M-Universes.

C.S. Pierce (supposedly pronounced 'purse' developed the concept of tri-electical nomination of thought. One gets a wankle rotary evolution on thought instead of the good vs. evil sort of process. I believe I would agree with photographer that Marx was more of an historical realist rather than a metaphysician. If one applies Marxism to cosmology one gets non-sense, and if one applies it to politics one finds a much more applicable verisimilitude of value.

Marx published Kapital after Darwin published his Theory on the Origin of Species. Kapital is concerned with history and politics especially of England and is a fair enough sociological analysis. Much of the later Soviet era Marxist philosophy was a sycophantic effort by Stalinists to rise in the bureaucracy as apparatchiks of ignorance.

Even today corporatists pursue the same sort of repetition of a prevailing idiotic thematic world view (though it differs of course a little from Marxism and is more about Ayn Rand and oil, the New England patriots and New York Giants (joking on that-the dialectic is better compared to Jokavich and tennis perhaps playing on a rotating evolving tennis court forever in motion), NPR and allocation of the broadcast spectrum to the rich instead of the Internet etc.) That is a consequence of the existential condition of mankind concerned with battling for material security instead of regarding philosophical thought and space colonization. There is plenty of material for human security, yet the method of fighting for material production compels some poverty to exist.

Considering quantum mechanics as a neo-Marxist clash of material contradictions is a little weird. C.E.R.N. does have particle colliders that accelerate particles instead of contradictions, and it would be tough to quantify contradictions, place them within general relativistic criteria and so forth. Neither would I believe that ideas arise from social contradictions so much as social networks or even better neural networks within self.

A Comment on the Kiriakou Affair

Evidently not all of the spooks are seig hieling careerists. Since the congress passed a law in a defense bill providing extraordinary rendition rights of American citizens to offshore torture facilities the effort of citizens to defend the rights of the accused so that habeus corpus and full discovery procedures for defense attorneys are conserved is important.

Global corporatism and faceless bureaucratic government goons holding people offshore indefinitely is a fundamental corruption of justice. Abe Lincoln just hanged illegal combatants during the civil war and did not waste time on creating a facade of civil procedures. The back-blast from the Guantanamo Bay production is harmful to the security of American citizens and should be terminated.

Evidently the 1917 espionage law was used just 3 times before the Obama administration who have used it six times themselves to arrest government people for leaking information. Human rights advocates are rather unhappy with the administration.

It is worth remembering that Daniel Elsburg was not convicted for releasing the Pentagon papers, and the administration might need to find a better criteria for determining that some information actually is critical information, such as the omnibus data transfer to Julian Assange or the obvious secret veapon theft and delivery to foreign powers.

It is unfortunate that Richard Nixon did not have Guantanamo Bay to send Jane Fondas to for at least brainwashing and re-education (only joking). One can consider the what if's of history's past and future.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/24/john-kiriakou-cia-leak_n_1229526.html?ref=mostpopular

Why Did Some Regard Marx's Contradictions as of a Formal Logical Nature?

The effort to reduce Marxist dialectical materialism to formal logic is a wrong effort. The contradictions of Marxist dialectical materialism were posited to be of an historical nature-rather like a Toynbean challenge-response criteria describing evolving phases of cycles of civilization.

The meaningful aspects of dialectical materialism if there are any, are as an historical description of diction and contra-diction rather than of the abstract idea that p and not-p may exist concurrently.

Democrats say that Obama has improved the economy a little-Republicans say phooey, he has made it worse and thus a diction and contradiction have been acceptably presented.

One ought to narrow down the meaning of terms like dialectical materialism and seperate that particular one from Hegel's notion of dialectical spiritual evolution. Marx contra-dicted Hegel's idea of the world as a dialectical spiritual presentation making the evolution materially based. That contra-diction was for Marx o.k.

Marx as a student of Hegel exploited the idea of dialectical or progressive evolutionary change in a sociological and historical context. Marx did not have much concern about writing any sort of logic-and Frege was yet ahead in time a bit and beyond Marx's philosophical vision. Marx was concerned with real politics and hostory and less concerned with scientifically describing a meta-physics as might Democritus.

Since Marx was fundamentally wrong about dialectical materialism-there are more than two physical forces at work in the Universe today plus dark energy and whatever else even though ultimately everything that appears pluralistic may be contingent upon monism of The One, it become retroactively theoretical, or perhaps necessary to construct a hypothetical dialectical material logic for academic purposes if one wants to model a theory of meaning of contradictions that Marx may be credited with yet did not have.

Philosophical Comment About Ancient Names & The Tetragrammaton

Some scholars suppose that 'the ineffable name of God" was not rediscovered by Hebrew scholars-Cabbalists until in 300 a.d. I will post a link to one modern pastor's research on the Tetragrammaton.

http://www.jesus-messiah.com/studies/yahweh-full-copy.html

This isn't a thread on the pro-con of faith for-itself. To a certain extent that is something like the partisan points in congress or whatever.

Dr. Reckart's article on the Indo-European origins of the word Yahweh is worth reading. There are of course numerous avenues of approach for words from proto-Indo-European/Ukrainian languages drifting into Sanskrit and Syriac terminology. Cultural transmissions of ideas about the origin of ideas of God and of the linguistic and cultural ideas about gods in the singular or plural are valuable for historical learning, yet ideas about God that one might have for-oneself are not solely dependent upon and historical-cultural transmission.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08329a.htm

One may consider God's attributes philosophically as Aquinas did. God and his relation to the universe or cosmos may be regarded with logical thought for some...many have.

Rosenberg in his biography of Abraham wrote that Elohim arose as a term for God in an area with a tradition of three pagan gods. Evidently some of the earlier writings and knowledge of the J and P writers about the Court of Solomon and Rehoboam were then lost and unknown to the Northern Court a couple hundred years later.

I recommend reading Rosenberg's excellent book. He retraces Abraham's route from Sumer up the Euphrates and over to Jerusalem and his meeting with the Jebbusites and Melchisedek. The cultural transmissions through history are valid enough to have historical value. There is an oral tradition in the Middle East and of song that is said to still be influential. Abraham's migration to Israel and development of a personal relationship with God evolved into what was in effect a new people culturally that believed in God.

One may associate numerous cultural references to comprehension of ancient times and points of religious interest. I have read history and philosophy simultaneously more or less, including ancient history for several decades. The depth in history leads me to expand understanding and not to approach ancient meanings and circumstances illogically as if the events-processes were math formula that might be proven or disproved necessarily. Also read items translated into English by scholars. I had only a little reading of Hebrew in Biblical languages.

Cultural memories of Martin Frobisher's explorations continued in the Bay from his early 16th century encounter with Inuit until recent times so far that locations of archeologically valuable sites were rediscovered with their tribal memory of the locations. Ancient Jewish history was also perpetuated until the development of the aleph-beth perhaps in the 15th century B.C.

When King David made Jerusalem his capital the accumulated scripts were probably brought together in his court and the J writer along with her knowledge of ancient Babylonian and Sumerian cultural traditions was able to put together the book of Genesis-perhaps adding the flood story to it from the Abrahamic heritage.

Obviously with the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls it was possible to compare the texts and textual inconsistencies of the scripture of different eras and there weren't many.

It is probably that the ancient Persian Gulf about 15,000 B.C. had a much lower sea level and that ancient cultures formed farther out in locations that today are under 200 feet of water. There was hence much cause for flood stories.

There is much scholarship on Bible history-so much that one may take one's course through making an image of the ancient world's history.

It seems that many non-believers would want to find some linguistic point, or an historical reconstruction as a point to dispute the existence of God. I have found ample reason historically to have faith in God that is reinforced by logical philosophical reasoning about the nature of God.

In order philosophically to consider the Universe as a contingent element within God's purposes it may be necessary to actual have a belief that God is actual, rather than dismissing that a priori.