classics digests, reflections and reviews
The Architecture of Reason When reading Critique of Pure Reason, I get the sense that Kant has a penchant for visualization and architecture, so it seems appropriate to represent his system of Reason, as I understand it, with a diagram (shown above). Although I’m using his own terms (translated from German into English), I cannot be certain that I understand them the same way Kant does, partly because he has […]
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Preface The Prolegomena is a preface to (and summary of) the Critique of Pure Reason. I’ll be publishing a series of posts on these books, as I work through them. Kant acknowledges in the Prolegomena that he has been roused by Davi Hume from “dogmatic slumber”. Hume argues that concepts such as cause and effect are invalid as they not based on experience, and so the study of metaphysics and […]
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The essence of this blessed life consists in keeping to the boundaries of God’s will, through which our wills become one single will; so that, as we are ranged from step to step throughout this kingdom, all this kingdom wills that which will please the King whose will is rule. And in His will there is our peace: that sea to which all beings move-the beings He creates or nature […]
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Hell vs. Purgatory What is the difference between Hell and Purgatory in Dante’s Divine Comedy? To put the question in a different way, what determines whether a person stays in Hell or Purgatory? According to St. Augustine, it is the grace of God, which restores free will in man and enables him to desire and attain the Good. Firstly, those in the Inferno are confined to their respective circles, and never […]
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The subtitle of this post should perhaps be “Kierkegaard’s Conception of Time As I Understand it”, but Kierkegaard scholars might strongly disagree with me. I’ve been meaning to write this ever since I read “Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments”, as part of an overall review of the book, but that review is long overdue. A recent discussion with an atheist friend of mine on religious belief reminded me of […]
Read moreI’ve enjoyed reading Kant so far, not because of any originality of his idea, but because of the clarity and architecture of his logic. To me it’s like listening to the music of Bach in a way. Freedom Freedom is the ratio essendi of the moral law, while the moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom. For had not the moral law been previously distinctly thought in our reason, […]
Read more“It is usually said (and I used to say) that smoking facilitates mental work. And that is undoubtedly true if one considers only the quantity of one’s mental output. To a man who smokes, and who consequently ceases strictly to appraise and weigh his thoughts, it seems as if he suddenly had many thoughts. But this is not because he really has many thoughts, but only because he has lost […]
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