June 11, 2019

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 133

He said the journey no doubt was the most significant event of his life.They crossed the entire coast of south america back and forth.This gave many opportunities to gain territorial insight into the region and the trips to Galapagos Islands,in the South America's Pacific West out of many exciting forays was particularly interesting,a special kind with a decisive importance.He collects vast amount of fossils and materials sent back to England.He returned home at the age of twenty seven,kept his reflection on the theory of evolution and life still to himself.He later found himself renowned in this uncharted terrain and as a cautious man,fitting of a good scientist,waited for many years before the publication of the revolutionary ideas.In 1859,when he published "The Origin Of Species",erupted the most heated debate ever mused in England.Its full title(that depicts the complete resume of the theory)On The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection Or The Preservation Of Races In The Struggle For L
Image result for photos of charles darwin
ife.
Image result for photos of charles darwin
Image result for photos of charles darwin
Image result for photos of charles darwin

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 131

Fitzroy,who has been commissioned by the government to survey the southern coasts of South America.I have that i consider you to be the best qualified person i know of who is likely to undertake such a situation.As far as the financial side of it is concerned,I have no notion."He concluded that the voyage will last two years and the rest for Darwin as they say is history.We couldnt recall often gloriously the ignorant teacher,a bagatelle but history barely rebuke the most illustrious son of geology that England and the world ever had.Darwin's father after giving his consent was he who financed the voyage.By December 27,1831,the ship the naval vessel H.M.S Beagle sailed from Plymouth bound to south america and not until I836 October before it returned.It was wonderful and surprising how a two years trip to South America turned out to be voyage around the world.It extended from South America to sails across the Pacific to New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.Then sailed back to South America and later home.

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 130

He was accused of messing around with stuffs,not doing the slightest bits useful for himself,fooling himself and wasting precious time.That is not cramming latin verbs and Greek as was the norm during the day and flying around collecting bees of all kinds.Why wouldnt the ignorant teacher regret it later?Even when he was studying theology,where he later got poor grade,he was far more interested in bird watching and collecting insects of all various types for research.When he was at college,he earned the reputation as natural scientist in the field of geology which was the most expansive science of the period.And as soon as he graduated from Cambridge in April 1831,went to North Wales to do research on fossils and study rock formations.When he was barely twenty three years old,in the August of that year,he received a letter from a friend John Steven Henslow that later transformed the direction of his life.John wrote his friend:"I have been requested.......to recommend a naturalist to go as companion to CaptainDavid Hume

June 10, 2019

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 129

.He was buried at Westminister Abbey.So,their paths crossed in time and space and infact Marx wanted to dedicate the English version of his magnum opus'Das Kapital"to him but what a great honour that Darwin declined.Shortly after Marx death, Friedrich Engels said"As Darwin discovered the theory of organic evolution,so Marx discovered the theory of mankind's historical evolution.In the same way,the presocratic looked for natural analysis of the natural processes and distanced themselves from the illogicity of ancient mythologies and hagiological view of creation, Darwin through Darwinism also sought extensively to distinguish himself.He was able to distinguish himself from church or biblical view of creation,beast and man.He was a natural scientist and biology,and challenged biblical view of creation.He was born in Shrewsbury a little town in 1809 to a father Dr.Robert Darwin a renowned local physician.He was rebuked despite the strict upbringing,by unknown teacher his headmaster at a local grammar school .

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 128

We shall soon be rounding up the synopsis of the longest running marathon treatise ever written by an African or Blogger boy on philosophy.It is also the longest running series of any historical treatise and marathon treatise respectively worldwide.This should earn the blogger the most erudite philosopher blogger in the black continent.To round off this metaedition and whose ebook will soon be available the last three greatest philosophers we shall be treating includes mainly Marx, Darwin and Freud.But for the special treat,Marx's article or those on Marxism will be ommittedand treated specially under Marx,Hegel,Marxism and Neomarxism and could be a tenthousand words thrillerunlike this more than 130,000 words philosophers stone.This remains only Darwin and Freud respectively to close the curtain.Charles Darwin died inLondon in 1882 a yearafter Marx died where he lived the last 34 years of his life and he moved there in 1849.When Darwin died,he was buried with pomp and pageantry of a renowned English son .

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 127

ethical stage requires a moral push to the third stage the religious stage,there are others interested in making a leap because they are not satisfied with ethic stage,then they made the new leap into religious stage that is christianity as kierkegaard put it as "the only path to redemption.When people are tired with the same sort of everyday routine or due to fatigue reaction even to dutiful person,they made the leap while others relapse back into the reflective life of the aesthete,not let go retentive memory.Existential stage transition appeals to critical choices that mankind makes in life.Unlike Kant's ethic of duty and abidance by the law of morals,man must make decision whether wrong or right.Both drew attention to the importance of human temperament,the main concern of the aesthete is whether the stage is boring or not.The Danish philosopher flourished widely in the twentieth century and with the birth of existentialism meaning philosophy of action,the cultural epoch took on another mode entirely.

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 126

he was often brutal with his verdict and could remark the superficial approach and illbred nature of the crowd as the untruth or that truth is in the minority.He postulated also the three different stages of life.He lives for the moment he who lives at the aesthetic stage and grasp every momentarily enjoyment and opportunity.The person is bound by senses and desires and at this stage you can experience sense of dread and feelings of emptiness.A person who has an aesthetic or reflective approach to even sorrow and suffering is living at the aesthetic stage.Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt portrays a typical aesthete.This shows there is hope for the existential condition of the man-artist andposibility of transiting to higher stage.It may happens or maynot.The choice that causes a person to leap into ethical or religiousstage from aesthetic stage must come from within.If you have read Dostoevsky's great novel Crime And Punishment,it mirrors how existential choice arises from determination or need.While the second stage

June 9, 2019

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 125

of existentialism.This means a thinker that through his own philosophical reflections mirror his entire existence.Kierkeegard in 1841 went to Berlin to attend Schelling lectures,sat alongside Marx under the same roof.He never met Hegel who had died a decade before Kierkeegard rose to prominence.He battled the sort of Hegelian objective truths and argued it was totally irrelevant to individual private life.He advises meaningful kind of truths that can transform a person's life.He made mockery of Hegel,when he quotes him on his analysis for the entire mystory of life.That Hegel has in distraction,forgotten his own name and his nature as mere mortal.He was not interested in the tiring analysis of human nature but most important thing was human existence.Both Budha and Kieerkeegard share the existentialist mode of thinking.He was fond of the belief only personal truths were important and that truth is subjective.Things we can know through reason and knowledge are temporarily not important.With sharp pen andtongue

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 124

The climax of philosophy and then turn around of philosophical reflections took place after Hegel.Kierkeegard and Marx took their point of departure from him.We shall focus first on kierkeegard.Soren Kierkeegard born in 1813 endured strict upbringing as a kid under his father.Kierkeegard was absolutely irritated by the Hegelian approach that focus too much on the broad scope of history.He saw Hegel and the Romanticists as birds of the same feathers flock together.He thought that the obscurity of the of the individual's responsibility for his own was caused by the idealistic philosophy of Romanticism and the Hegel's historicism.He began his theological study at age 17 but was later absorbed by the philosophical reflection of the latter years.His dissertation"On The Concept Of Irony,"for his master's degree was written at age twenty seven.He posited Socratic irony instead and challenged Romantic Irony and their noncommited play with illusion.Kierkegaard called Socrates Existential thinker and became the founder

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 123

He says it is not the individuals that find it but the world spirit itself and becomes conscious of itself in the individual.It passes through three stages to become conscious of itself and this include the first stage when it becomes conscious of itself in the individual.He calls this stage of world spirit subjective spirit and later reaches a higher mode of consciousness ranging from family,civil society and state.He classifies that as objective spirit,given that it shares interaction with people.Then the third stage being absolute spirit where the world soul attains the highest point of self realisation.The tripod of art,religion and philosophy composes the absolute spirit and through the world soul philosophy is able to mirror the world.Of course Hegel was critical of the individual and individual institution and saw every existence as the sum total of only world spirit.There is no doubt that philosophy after Hegel took another mode entirely.The end of great philosophical systems also started under him.

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 122

this process he called dialectical process.When the Eleatics had proposed a claim,Hegel regarded the standpoint a thesis and then the rise of contradictory thought to oppose that claim,he called it negation.Herarclitus for instance and he wasthe negation of eleatic philosophy.Now the tension between these contradictory thoughts with the emergence of empedocles who argued both were partly right and partly wrong.The standpoint of the Empedocles was what he called negation of the negation.Thenhe called the three stages of dialectical process mainly thesis,antithesis and synthesis.For instance,Descartes'rationalism was contradicted by Hume's empirical antithesis and eventually resolved by the synthesis of kant.Dont forget that new synthesis would also be contradicted by new antithesis and this suggests that the growth of world spirit is fundamentallynurtured by the interactive forces of dialectical process.With this formula,he believed he had uncovered basic law for the development of human reason or world soul.

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 121

falsehood.It maybe antihistorical way of thinking to declare Aritotelian,platonic as well as any philosophy of the antiquity falsehood.Neither can one fault Descartes thought or Hume or brand Kant's false and Schelling right.Something new is often being added,as reason progresses and human knowledge expand exponentially.That world spirit has evolved from Socrates to Descartes,from Plato to Kant.In the same in Platonic and Neoplatonic had been critiqued,kant too also get critiqued.Those reason by agregate and collectively become the subject of future criticism.So,Hegel claimed that history deals with the growth of world spirit that comes into consciousness of itself.That world spirit being conscious of its intrinsic value was driven by prime forces of human culture and human development.Then world spirit is developing into ever explosive knowledge of itself.To graphically treats the rise and fall of human thoughts and how a thought previously proposed is opposed by latter thought in the opposing tensions,

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 120

Given its all encompassing and diversified,we shall be content with the main aspects of Hegel's work and the basic method he expoused for the understanding of historical progress.Every philosophical system before him has attempted to set eternal criteria for the limit of human knowledge and research basis of human cognition.Consequently they share opinion and made declarations about timeless factor of human knowledge about the world.However he believed differently that the basis of human cognition changes from generation to generation and therefore no timeless reason and no eternal truths.That the only fixed point philosophy of mankind ordinarily holds onto is nothing but history.And to Hegel,history was likened to a river whose running tiny movement in the water body at a given point rises and falls.That in terms of philosophical reflection,reason is a process and also dynamic.Truth follows the same process,given that there are no eternal benchmark beyond historical process for the determination of truth and

June 7, 2019

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 119 B

He became a don in Heidelberg,the Center of national Romanticism,but first became an asistant professor in Jena.It was in 1818 when he was appointed a Professor in Berlin when the city was spiritual center of the movement and Europe.Prior to his death in 1831 by cholera, Hegelianism had become a household name in almost all German Universities.Though he united almost every idea of the movement but he was sharply critical of them too.This including Schelling,like other Romanticists who enthused that life deepest meaning lay in 'world spirit'.When he uses the term,he uses it differently and he defines it to mean the sum total of human utterances due to the fact only man has a spirit.Then he speaks of world spirit progress throughout history,refering to human life,human thought,human culture.He barely believed man could attain clear cognition of nature's deepest secrets and admitted existence of unattainable truths.He reasoned sharply truth is subjective and no truth exist beyond human reason and all knowledge.

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 118

they see world soul in popular culture but that world spirit was viewed as an ego operative in a dreamless state that created everything.While Philosopher Fichte says nature stems from bigger unconscious imagination Schelling concludes that the world is in God.God is aware of some of it and could fathom to even think some aspects of nature is unknown in God,including the dark side of deity.The artist and his work could be embelished in the same light.Using moral vehicle like fairy tales,gave Romantic writer a freerole to hone their universe creating imaginative bias either by innate force or by hypnotic trance during penmanship or versification.Then he destroys illusion as he writes to intervene in the story and address to the reader the burdensome comments momentarily.This would make the writer to realise the mystic power of the pen,and be who he was in the manipulation of fictional universe.This disillusion form they call it Romantic Irony.In Peer Gynt,letting out one of the character Herik Ibsen says

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 116

They also saw language as an organism.Infact,the entire material world like a poetic work was a living organism.Hence,no sharp contrast exist in between them and they bear testimony to the vivid presence of world spirit in people,culture not just popular culture as nature and art.They collected folksongs from distant lands,captioned as the ebulient voices of the people,of which Herder was their preeminent forerunner.He said folktales was the mothertongue of the people.For instance,Brother's Grimm and a host of others collected folk songs and fairy tales in Heidelberg.We refer in this case to Grimm's fairy tales and in Norway,evidences that Asbjornsen and Moe collected folktales were foolproof nationwide.This enabled more intense scientific study of local language.It also led to rediscovery of old Norwegian myths and sagas from heathen times.This influenced composers all over Europe to begin to infuse their songs and incorporate folk melodies into them,improving their compositions.It bridged gap between both, THOMAS AQUINAS BELOWThomas Aquinas

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 115

Romanticism exudes unity and strengthened the feeling of national identity.And it was no coincidence that was instrumental to the succesful Norwegian struggle at gotten national independence in 1814.Based on the orientation,in diverse areas,Romanticism is subdivided into two mainly Universal Romanticism and then National Romanticism.Those aspect of Universal Romanticism refer Romantic sect which were basically preoccupied with nature,world soul and the world of artistic genius.It first blossomed in the town of Jena in Germany as far back as 1800.The last one grew in popularity a bit later,to become the household name,as it flourished first from the town of Heidelberg.They deal with the history of the people,folktales,peoples' language and culture in general.That people like petals of flowers,unfolding homegrown and innate potentiality,were seen as organism,exactly like history and nature.This Keyword'Organism'united the two schools of thoughts and they saw plant and nation as typical living organism.

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 115

Romanticism exudes unity and strengthened the feeling of national identity.And it was no coincidence that was instrumental to the succesful Norwegian struggle at gotten national independence in 1814.Based on the orientation,in diverse areas,Romanticism is subdivided into two mainly Universal Romanticism and then National Romanticism.Those aspect of Universal Romanticism refer Romantic sect which were basically preoccupied with nature,world soul and the world of artistic genius.It first blossomed in the town of Jena in Germany as far back as 1800.The last one grew in popularity a bit later,to become the household name,as it flourished first from the town of Heidelberg.They deal with the history of the people,folktales,peoples' language and culture in general.That people like petals of flowers,unfolding homegrown and innate potentiality,were seen as organism,exactly like history and nature.This Keyword'Organism'united the two schools of thoughts and they saw plant and nation as typical living orga
sitting woman leaning on man's shoulder facing lake during golden hour
nism.

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 115

Romanticism exudes unity and strengthened the feeling of national identity.And it was no coincidence that was instrumental to the succesful Norwegian struggle at gotten national independence in 1814.Based on the orientation,in diverse areas,Romanticism is subdivided into two mainly Universal Romanticism and then National Romanticism.Those aspect of Universal Romanticism refer Romantic sect which were basically preoccupied with nature,world soul and the world of artistic genius.It first blossomed in the town of Jena in Germany as far back as 1800.The last one grew in popularity a bit later,to become the household name,as it flourished first from the town of Heidelberg.They deal with the history of the people,folktales,peoples' language and culture in general.That people like petals of flowers,unfolding homegrown and innate potentiality,were seen as organism,exactly like history and nature.This Keyword'Organism'united the two schools of thoughts and they saw plant and nation as typical living organism.

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 115

Romanticism exudes unity and strengthened the feeling of national identity.And it was no coincidence that was instrumental to the succesful Norwegian struggle at gotten national independence in 1814.Based on the orientation,in diverse areas,Romanticism is subdivided into two mainly Universal Romanticism and then National Romanticism.Those aspect of Universal Romanticism refer Romantic sect which were basically preoccupied with nature,world soul and the world of artistic genius.It first blossomed in the town of Jena in Germany as far back as 1800.The last one grew in popularity a bit later,to become the household name,as it flourished first from the town of Heidelberg.They deal with the history of the people,folktales,peoples' language and culture in general.That people like petals of flowers,unfolding homegrown and innate potentiality,were seen as organism,exactly like history and nature.This Keyword'Organism'united the two schools of thoughts and they saw plant and nation as typical living organism.

June 6, 2019

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 114

from lifelessness to complex forms.They saw nature as organism evolving its innate potentials like roses and flowers growing and protruding their petals.They combined the distinction of the Aristelian extractions and Neoplatonic overtones.The latter had a better organic view of natural process than the scholarship of mechanical materialists could muster.It also reverberated by research into the field of history.The historical philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) was very influential in this context of scholarship.He says history is influenced by continuity,evolution and design and his dynamic perspective of history is informed by the distinction to see history as a mechanical process.They do not have a static view of history unlike the enlightenment philosophers'prejudice of postulating one universal reason could be extant at various periods.He showed that as each nation has its own soul and character in the same way,each historical epoch has its own intrinsic value.The philosophy of the

June 4, 2019

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 113

man draws from the mystery of the world,according to Novalis,of the whole universe that he bears within himself.Therefore with this prejudice,indulging in the tripod of poetry,nature study and philosophy.Hence that form a sythesis,as they sat in their serene hours,both philosophising and dashing off inspired verses and similarly bent on nature study.They massively investigated nature given their belief that nature is not a dead mechanism but an absolute spirit.When Norwegian born naturalist Henrik Stephens who was called Norways'departed laurel leaf'by Wergeland because he settled in Germany went to Copenhagen,he was driven by the absolute spirit to lecture his audience on Romanticism.He reechoed Novalis when he said" Tired of the eternal efforts to light our waythrough raw matter,we choseanother way........"that is they sought embrace infinite by reachinginside ourselves to create a newworld.It was Schelling who saw development from nature earth and rock to the humanmind.This included the slow transition

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 112

They were also influenced by Jacob Bohme and being pantheists they experienced the notion of divine ego in nature.If Descartes and Hume had drawn a sharp contrast between ego and extended reality and kant too left a sharp contrast between cognitive ' i ' and nature itself,the emergent Romanticists crusaded that nature is nothing than one big 'i'.They also popularised the expression"world spirit or world soul.Schelling(1775-1854)a leading Romantic philosopher craved to unite mind and matter and that all of nature physical reality and human soul is the expression of one absolute or world spirit.He concluded that nature is visible and spirit invisible nature,giving that one senses a structuring spirit everywhere in nature.He says matter is slumbering intelligence and saw world spirit both in nature and the human mind.That the natural and spiritual forces are expression of the absolute spirit.Just like Novalis says'the path of mystery leads inwards.' That by stepping inside himself,only then man draws from

May 31, 2019

PHILOSOPHERS'STONE. PART 111

They approached life with belicose and antimiddle class instincts and could refer landladies and police as philistines.They were like hippies popular about a hundred and fifty years ago.We have both Byron a Romantic Poet who provided the age with its idol byronic hero,alien,lonely,rebellious, and then Shelley also poets,both Romanticists of the so called satanic school.Novalis died young because his girlfriend at the age of fourteen was much younger when he died.In 1774 the Sorrows Of Young Werther written by Goethe shot up suicide rate in Germany after its publication.Infact it was banned in Norway and Denmark.Many of them died young and they yearned for nature's mysteries.Rouseau's introduction of back to nature jolted them from doldrums.Hence they gave that slogan bothpopular currency and undiluted frequency.They call Romanticism rebirth of the old cosmic consciousness and then the Romanticists traced back their root to Spinoza and then Plotinus in the antiquity and renaisance scholars like Giordano Bruno.

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 110

of 19th century.While the Enlightenment was begun in Paris, Romanticism took its toll in Germany.The Romanticists saw themselves,given that he established the limit of what man can know of"das Ding an sich".They preached unbriddled ego worship and that led to glorification of artistic genius.Beethoven was a great artist musician and he composed the moonlight sonata and fifth symphony.Unlike Baroque artists like Handel and Bach,expresses feelings and longings himself freely as a free artist.They placed more importance on art and human cognition,philosophy,poetry,drama etc.Sometimes,we are overwhelmed at the history of a great work of art,both the humanists and Renaisance Artists.The importance of art to human cognition and likened artist to a musician making up his own rules and play.He had universe creating imagination and transports artistic rapture to sense the dissolving boundary betwixt dream and reality.It started as urban phenomenon and the typical Romantics were young university students and truants.

PHILOSOPHERS'STONE.PART 109

Finally,kant was a major influence and inspiration to the scholarship of Romanticism.He succeeded in liberating scholars from the philosophical impasse and intellectual bickerings,divided between rationalism and empiricism.With kant's exit plan,the history of the great philosophy finally came to end.He died in 1804 when romanticism was begun.In its graveyard inscription in konigsberg:"Two things filled my mind with ever increasing wonder and awe the more often and more intensely the reflection dwells on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."kant advocated like Maynard Keynes the establishment of the failed League Of Nation-.He said it in his treatise Perpetual Peace,that all nations should unite in a league of nations for the greater progress of the world.The league of nation was born in 1795 125 years after this publication.It was replaced by United Nation at the end of second world war.Romanticism was Europe's last student uprising and was begun by the end of 18th century to the

PHILOSOPHERS'STONE.PART 109

Finally,kant was a major influence and inspiration to the scholarship of Romanticism.He succeeded in liberating scholars from the philosophical impasse and intellectual bickerings,divided between rationalism and empiricism.With kant's exit plan,the history of the great philosophy finally came to end.He died in 1804 when romanticism was begun.In its graveyard inscription in konigsberg:"Two things filled my mind with ever increasing wonder and awe the more often and more intensely the reflection dwells on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."kant advocated like Maynard Keynes the establishment of the failed League Of Nation-.He said it in his treatise Perpetual Peace,that all nations should unite in a league of nations for the greater progress of the world.The league of nation was born in 1795 125 years after this publication.It was replaced by United Nation at the end of second world war.Romanticism was Europe's last student uprising and was begun by the end of 18th century to the

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 108

The difference between wrong and right would be judged by the virtue of human reason.And it has nothing to do with sentiment,concluded in the same way as the rationalists.The form of reason to be used in this context to give the intelligence and discretionary capacity that is practical reason.Our ability to perceive everything that have causal relation must be accessible to the universal moral laws.The moral and physical laws share same absolute validity.He formulates as categorical imperative moral law and being formal precedes human experience.Being 'categorical' means it applies to every situation and 'imperative' means absolutely authorative.Moral law shares similar universality appeal as the law ofcausality.It is unalterable,immortaland cannot be proved.Of course,when kant describes moral law,he is really describinghuman conscience.Yet we cannot prove whatour consciencetell us.He believes everything obeys the law of causality,thatdefy free will.As earthlings,we are at the mercy of this unbreakable law.

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cannot perceive and prove natural laws and later likened them to the laws of human cognition.Philosophers before Kant had been puzzled by the big questions tearing literatis apart such as discusion on immortal soul,the existence of God,the finiteness or infiniteness of the universe,the chemical composition of nature,be it by atom or the indivisible particles.He defied certainty and clarity on the knowledge to be mustered in resolving the big questions.Unlike Descartes,Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas,rejected the proofs about the existence of God.The world must have been spiraled from something and something cannot come from nothing.Everything happens through the necessity of natural law.Both reason and experience cannot be used to prove that existence.And where both fall short,the vacuum left behind can be filled with faith.This mensrea was bent due to originality of the initiative and the attempt to preserve the basis of his christian faith.A weighty big question that is left to the discretion of the individual

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 107

cannot perceive and prove natural laws and later likened them to the laws of human cognition.Philosophers before Kant had been puzzled by the big questions tearing literatis apart such as discusion on immortal soul,the existence of God,the finiteness or infiniteness of the universe,the chemical composition of nature,be it by atom or the indivisible particles.He defied certainty and clarity on the knowledge to be mustered in resolving the big questions.Unlike Descartes,Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas,rejected the proofs about the existence of God.The world must have been spiraled from something and something cannot come from nothing.Everything happens through the necessity of natural law.Both reason and experience cannot be used to prove that existence.And where both fall short,the vacuum left behind can be filled with faith.This mensrea was bent due to originality of the initiative and the attempt to preserve the basis of his christian faith.A weighty big question that is left to the discretion of the individual

May 30, 2019

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 106

foremost modes of perception and hardly any physical world attributes.To analyse the Copernican Revolution in solving human knowledge problem he says mind conform to things and things also conform to mind.How Copernicus was able to prove the earth and other planets revolve round the sun startled skeptics,antagonists and apologists alike.Kant has taken or makes into an attribute of human reason the thing that Hume says we cannot prove.It shows vividly if human reason perceives everything as a matter of cause and effect,then it means eternity of the law of causality is supreme.The law of causality lays in us contrary to Hume and they agree man cannot with certainty the true nature of the world itself.We are only given the capacity to know what it is for every man that ventures.When we look at the dividing line that he draws between matters in themselves that is das Ding an sich and the nature of their appearances.He differentiates things in itself and the thing for me"kant was uneasy when he read Hume that we

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE .PART I05

the foundation of christian faith.He had a great mastery of other people's philosophy and then with solid grounding in his own philosophy.We know that the rationalists had unshakable faith in rationalism that the basis of knowledge lay in the mind.This is in contrast to empiricism that all knowledge come from the senses.Kant here submits that both were partly right but thought were partly wrong also.He thought that both sensing and thinking are players in our conception of the world.He questioned their predilection to place too much emphasis on both.He agrees with Hume that all our knowledge come from sensation.He also realised certain conditions that govern mind operations to shape our experience of the real world.Time and space are two forms of intuition and they precede every experience.Such related perception driven by these forms of intuition is innate.So,we can know before we experience things that will be perceived as phenomena in time and space.He classified these forms of intuition as first and

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 104

Marriage laws'changes were ademanded and equal political rights as men and social conditions to be made favourable to women.In this font they failed to achieve that.Olympe de Gouges two after the revolution who demanded same rights for women as well and had published a declaration on the rights of women.She took bold decision to make declaration having noticed that the declaration on the rights of man was silent about women rights.Unfortunately,in 1793 this unruffled amazon was beheaded for daring to defend king Louis XVI,oppose Robespierre and consequently they banned all political activity for women.Not until the findesiecle before feminism was revived once again from France,Europe to America.Immanuel Kant the first philosopher to be professor was born in 1724 in the east prusian town of konigsberg to a master saddler.He barely travelled until the age of eighty.His religious background and family lifestyle was instrumental to the development of his philosophy.Then he wanted to preserve like berkeley the

PHILOSOPHERS'STONE.PART 103

to adopt a common position,laying a foundation for arts and culture,religion and ethics,the consequence led to enlightenment movement.Towards the end of the revolution the national constitution was drafted and passed into law.The Principle Of Indivldual's inviolability that reached the peak with the Declaration Of The Rights Of Man And Citizen.It was adopted by the French National Assembly in 1789.Almost all the European,took after french constitution.For instance the human rights' declaration was the basis of Norwegian Constitution.The enlightenment philosophers fought for what they called natural rights.In 1787,they established these rights including feminism were natural outcome of the revolution.In the case of feminism,give it the honor to Condorcet an enlightenment philosopher who in 1787 published a treatise on the rights of women.And so two after the publication,revolution started and women were extremely active.They took active part in the old feudal regime such as forcing the king into exile.

PHILOSOPHERS' STONE.PART 102

When they visited England they were shocked with the spirit of liberalism they met there.Natural sciences of Isaac Newton and British philosophy specifically the political philosophy of Locke intrigued them.The exposure gained them intellectual freedom and when they returned back they attacked old authority.This later triggered a revolution that lasted almost a decade at the end of which Napoleon Bonaparte became emperor that ruled France and Europe for two decades prior to his hanging at St.Helena.Locke though not consistent with his empiricism believe certain moral norms including faith in God were stamped in human reason.This became the core norm of the enlightenment era that started in Paris and nurtured by Rouseau's book"Spirit Of The Law".Not unlike the humanists of antiquity mainly Socrates and Stoics,most Enlightenment philosophers had robust faith in rationalism.Little wonder historians and historicists and fellow philosophers labelled the epoch the age of reason.When the philosophers came together

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And it is he that influences our profusion of ideas and earthly perception and all our life exist within his nucleus.Every mortal perception is an after effect of divine power and we exist only in the mind of God.He interogates both fickleness of the material reality and whether time and space had any independent existence.He questioned that material reality fake us and all we can know that we are spirit.George Berkeley was a philosopher so to say who denied the existence of material universe beyond the human mind.The English Bishop Of Cloyne postulates that our sensory perceptions come from God.He published his main work A Treatise Concerning The Principles Of Human Knowledge in 1710.Now,we move onto the Enlightenment Era.Hume died in 1776 whereas French Revolution Of 1789 thatarose later was linked to the muchearlier revolutionary forces of mordern rationalism.When Voltaire and Rouseau died in 1778 including Monstequieu had all visited England and widely schooled in the philosophy of empiricist John Locke.

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George Berkeley(1685-1753),an Irish Bishop and a philosopher too discovered that current philosophies,science and technology were a threat to his christian faith and religion.Hence later became the most consistent of the empiricists and believed we cannot more of the world than we can perceive through our senses.He claimed worldly things are not things as we perceive them and the only things that exist are those things that we perceive.Matterial things or matters or tangible things cannot be perceived.He interogated them by the logic of empiricism and to assume that we perceive refers to its own underlying terms such as substance rushing to conclusion.There is no claim to base such experience.He believed in the spirit and opined all our ideas and thoughts have a cause beyond human consciousness andnot of material universe.He wasfond of the fact the existence of God much more clearer than the existence of man,not clearly perceived.That divinity is intimately present in our consciousness and physical nature.

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To probe every single idea that went into making of complex idea preocuppied his attention.He opposed every idea and thought that could be traced back to its corresponding sense perception.Not to feel an alterable ego is not a false perception and egocentric perception deals with long chain of simple impressions that you barely experience simultaneously.What succeed and progress one after the other with uncontemplated rapidity is nothing but a repertoire of variegated perceptions.His human mind analytical model and rejection of unaltered ego had been advanced about two thousand five hundred years ago.It was similar to Budha's concept of life as a limitless and endless succesion of mental and material processes and maintains its constant state of change.Miracle is against the law of nature and as agnostic disputed human ability to prove divine existence.Hume a man from Adam Smith's country also made enviable contribution to the study of economics especially mordern macroeconomics such as balance of trade etc.

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Of Human Nature had a different piles of thought construction entirely.Having deposed medieval thoughts and the rationalistic philosophy of mordern times as obscene,proposed a return to the spontaneous experience of the real world.To see an angel,a widespread belief during his time according to him a complex idea.These are different experiences unrelated to fact and a mere fable of imagination.He barely detest to know how a child experiences the real world.He establishes the two types of perception that man has namely ideas and impressions.The latter refers instantaneous sensation of outer reality and ideas means recollections of such impressions.Sensation is original and idea or reflection its imitation and the latter is livelier and more robust than the reflective memory.Impresion is direct consequence of ideas stored and retrieved from the mind.Both can be simple or complex.He agrees with Descartes it is expedient to construct your thought from ground up.Sometimes we form complex ideas that defy reality

May 29, 2019

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Before we move onto David Hume(1711-1776),we round up Lockean tenets of intellectual and political liberty was responsible to the successful despotic subjugation of the glorious revolution of 1688.He not only campaigned for equality of sexes but also extremely influenced John stuart mill that later played greater role in the crusade of gender equality of the successive times.His liberalism came into full display during the french enlightenment of the 18th century and spoke extensively and the first to advocate separation of power.It did not originate from Monstequieu and the idea was to avoid despotism especially of the type that occured during the period of king Louis.HUME who set the great philosopher kant on his feet to discover his philosophical reflection, stands as the most influential empiricist of all time.He came from Edinburgh in Scotland and had insurmountable passion for philosophy.He lived during the enlightenment era,same time with Jean jacques Rouseau and voltaire.In his main work, A Treatise

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This leads to reflection not sensation and he distinguished the two that the mind is not merely a passive receiver.With later trait it shows ability to categorise and processes the mental passage of every sensation.That the only we have capability to perceive are simple sensations.For a whole apple or pawpaw cannot suppled in one single sensation whether it is green,smells well,fresh or juicy.IT is after eating that you have the true experience where reflection says one is satisfied.That is how to form a complex idea of the apple or pawpaw in question.All material of our knowledge comes to us through sensations and anything to the contrary is false conception.He also defines both primary and secondary qualities that guides our sensation and reflection power in the classification of both tangible and intangible realms of nature.He also agreed with Descartes that man has the capability to discern divine existence with the notion that certain ethical principles and the idea of natural right apply to everybody.

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The purification of those hollow notions led to the propagation of the empiricism school of thoughts.Such panning for a particle of gold is real experience and the British empiricists were able to examine the predilection of human conceptions to determine the valid rationale of their actual experience.In his main work published in 1690 he explained and clarify two positions where the origin of our ideas and the reliability of human senses.He sees the mind as tabula rasa an empty state before we perceive anything.That all our thoughts and ideas issue in tandem with the earlier excerpts all proceed from what we have taken in through our senses.The mind is an unfinished room or the empty or clean blackboard in the classroom before the teacher arrives.And then the pupils begin to smell,hear,taste hear or sense things or the world around them and it is the same with normal people and their environment or infants.This is sense's simple idea according to him would then be worked upon by thinking,doubting,believing.

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An empiricist derive knowledge from the world of senses.The classic tradition was begun by one of the natural philosophers and popularised by Aristotle who said "There is nothing in the mind except what was first in the senses."In this context he pointed his frustration and criticism at plato.Locke uses aristotle's words with objectivity that aimed at Descartes' words.That we have no innate ideas world conceptions that we are brought into prior to its conception by perception.If such conception is not related to experienced facts,it defies valid and is a false conception.To utilise words like'substance,God and eternity is to abuse reason or misuse it,given that nobody has experienced God or eternity and what philosophers called substance.Such impressive philosophical system inherited in the 17th and 18th centuries by philosophers was regarded as pure fantansies.When the empiricists came such learned but prejudiced dissertations had to be viewed under a new intellectual microscope or with theenlightened radar.

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of the falseness of this supposition,if i should only show....how men barely by the use of their natural faculties may attain to all the knowledge they have without the help of any innate impressions;and may arrive at certainty without any such original notions or principles." Then he goes onto identify the very source of knowledge and reason when he says:"Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge?To this i answer in one word from Experience.In that all our knowledge is founded;and from that it ultimately derives itself." This particular excerpt made him a leading philosopher of the empirical school in the 18th century when rationalism was heavily opposed with deep criticism.Empiricism taught that there was absolutely nothing in the mind that was not initially perceived or experienced by the senses.A group of the empiricism comprises John Locke, Berkely and David Hume,then with the addition of Leibniz,there arose a stark competition between the British Empiricism and Continental Rationalism .

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John Locke(1632-1704)unlike Descartes and Spinoza was an English philosopher of the empirical school.He had tremendous impact with his quentesential writings on the ideals of English political freedom.He wrote extensively on religious tolerance,justice,constitional government.For instance An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was inspired and motivated by a private discussion with friends.His two treatises on governance ordinarily influenced the glorious revolution of 1688 when king james 11 was overthrown.He opened the first paragraph of his essays on human understanding in his attempt to understand the limits of the human mind by criticizing the rationalists of the earlier period.Hear him:"It is an established opinion amongst some men that there are in the understanding certain innate principles;some primary notions,characters as it were stamped upon the mind of man;which the soul receives in its very first being,and brings into the world with it.It would be sufficient to convince unprejudiced readers

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was made up of one indivisible single reality.He was classified therefore as a monist.He believed God or natural laws as the inner cause was responsible to everything that happens.He preaches everything material happens through necessity and had a determinist view of material or natural world.He emphasizes that only one entity is independently of its own cause and only God or nature can act with such complete or nonacidental freedom.There is no such thing as freewill for man even though he can attain freedom without outside resistance.We do not have a free soul incarcerated in a body that functions through a mechanical process.We barely choose our thinking nor control every happening in our body.That it was our ambitions and lust that prevented us from achieving true hapiness and harmony.We can attain an intuitive comprehension of nature,provided we generally realise everything happens by necessity.If we comprehend existence and embrace its universal perception,we shall therefore be opportuned to attain joy.

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was made up of one indivisible single reality.He was classified therefore as a monist.He believed God or natural laws as the inner cause was responsible to everything that happens.He preaches everything material happens through necessity and had a determinist view of material or natural world.He emphasizes that only one entity is independently of its own cause and only God or nature can act with such complete or nonacidental freedom.There is no such thing as freewill for man even though he can attain freedom without outside resistance.We do not have a free soul incarcerated in a body that functions through a mechanical process.We barely choose our thinking nor control every happening in our body.That it was our ambitions and lust that prevented us from achieving true hapiness and harmony.We can attain an intuitive comprehension of nature,provided we generally realise everything happens by necessity.If we comprehend existence and embrace its universal perception,we shall therefore be opportuned to attain joy.

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because of heresy.He was the first to use history to criticise the so called holy book which he ridiculed to the last letter.He was deserted and nearly disinherited by his family due to the heresy.No one did champion free speech and religious intolerance like Spinoza and because of the stiff opposition he faced on all sides he was forced to live in obscurity and a quiet life.He earned a living polishing lenses and also devoted himself to private study as a villified hermit.He was a pantheist for saying "God Is All and All Is In God".That God is the world and did not create the world to abode outside it.Quoting a speech by St.Paul speaking on the Areopagus Hill to the athenians,he says: In him we live and move and have our being".He wrote his best book"Ethics Geometrically Demonstrated".In the same way Descartes used mathematical theorems for philosophical reflection,Spinoza adopted the same rationalistic tradition and a very complex art to deal with.Spinoza rejected Descartes' dualism and that every exist is

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resolved no longer to seek any other science that the knowledge of myself or of the great book of the world."That".......our senses sometimes deceive us,i was willing to suppose that there existed nothing reallysuch as they presented to us...,.,..i supposed that all the objects that had ever entered into my mind when awake had in themno more truth than the illusions of my dreams.But immediately upon this i observed that whilst i thus wished to think that all wasfalse,it was absolutely necessary that i who thus thought should be somewhat;and as i observed thistruth i think therefore i am,was so certain....".In the principles of human knowledge,he says"That in order to seekthe truth it is necessaryonce in the course of our life to doubt as far as possible of all things....".Now we move onto controversial Baruch Spinoza,a DutchJew(1632-1677),who hailed from jewish community of amsterdam.He denied that the Bible was written by God and heavily christicised the established religion.Consequently,he excommunicated

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interaction between the spirit and matter.Emotions and passions affecting the mind constantly do not relatively bodily needs.If the mind could detach itself from such muses and impulses and explore its freedom,it implies that its main intent is to get reason to subsequently assumes command or control.So we have moral power to act rationaly above the body needs.There is no difference according to him between the mind and the thought.He was a member of prosperous middle class French family as a military engineer also fought during the thirty years war. Rene Descartes was in this capacity in 1619 in Germany when he made the wonderful discovery he described in his discourse on method.Discourse On Method appeared in 1633 some years after the controversy and condemnation of Galileo.A little excerpt from Discourse On Method,truly shows his concept of Cogito,ergo sum.Hear him:"..,...as soon as my age permitted me to pass from under the control of my instructors,i entirely abandoned the study of letters and resolved

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Yet both quite independent,share no contact with each other.To theorise this independence or freedom of the material processes and the intangible made Descartes a diehard dualist that depicts their sharp division.To arrive at a conclusion that only man has a mind and not the animal,the latter been seen as complicated automaton does not too logical of a mature mordern philosophical,given that they posess soul atoms too.Just like St.Augustine and Thomas Aquinas,he also sees man as a dual creature with both a mind and extended body.Our mind is perfect machine that can operate independently of the body.While bodily processes operate different laws,with different freedom,the application of reason barely occurs in the body,but in the mind.How could he accept the possibility that animals could think yet accept only man has a mind or that they were automaton?He did not deny interaction between the mind and body through the neuro logical process where the brain as special organ or the pineal gland maintain constant

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This was his weak spot as pundits later agreed,even though he meant to prove a claim that all mortals posess within this idea of perfect entity.He believed the idea of God is innate emulsified with man or stamped upon every man at birth.And he also believed like Socrates and Plato,that there is a connection between reason and being.The closeness they both share is self evident of their existence.To douse our doubt about the posibilities of outer reality including sun and the moon as mere fantasies,requires our intense understanding of their mathematical properties.Hence,with divine guarrantee,whatever we perceive with our senses of reason corresponds with outer reality.With this axiom of outer reality guarantees differently from the reality and composure of thoughts,he maintains two forms of reality.From the first substance,mind or the thought to extension or matter as second substance he opines both originated from God.The first is purely conscious item divided into smaller parts and matter its extension.

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of life,through the first law that makes one doubt everything occupies his aim.The rationalist believes in principle was possible to doubt every and this ordinarily informed his intellectual freedom to think,philosophise and theorise himself out of the scientific lacuna that early mordern age was inflicted.It is by no means certain the mordern age would advance philosophical quest by relying on the outdated philosophical norms of the antiquity and pelucidly began his thought construction.He believed not their deception and instituted mordern rationalistic culture that had lasted till this day. With his popular phrase " Cogito,ergo sum- i think therefore i am"boldly proves himself as a thinking being;an evidence that what wegrasp with our reason is much more real than what we grasp with our senses.He had included with his nature of thinking i his mindhad a clear and distintive idea of perfect entity that his senses.Although it appears debatablehow the idea of perfect entity can originate from imperfect being.

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He opines unless we can clearly perceive a thing,that we cannot accept them as being true.This requires breaking down compound problem into compound pieces,broken in diverse single factors as many as possible.This allows us to form logical conclusion.It could have been similar to Galileo's concept of measuring the immeasuring but certainly Descartes believed philosophy should move from simple to complex and consequently,one can construct a new insight.To reach such philosophical conclusion requires constant calculation,enumeration and deep discretion.He was a mathematician,father of analytical geometry and a great contributor to algebra science.He was fond of using mathematical method for philosophical conclusion and often set to prove philosophical truths with mathematical theorems or in comparison.Like Plato and Galileo,he shared such affinity that mathematical and numerical ratio give us concretes and more certainty than the stark evidences that our mortal senses bestow.To reach certainty about the nature

May 28, 2019

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The basic life principle according to Aristotle present in every matter and organism was the soul.He was able to identify and categorise them as plant soul or animal soul and they could not be conceived as separate from the body.The radical division of soul and body by all ramification was not introduced by philosophers until the dawn of 17th century.And it was nt feasible,given the fact that they were seen as one big indivisible mechanistic entity,that is all material objects'motion,body human or animal and plant involving mechanical processes.To believe that there must be esoteric connection between body and consciousness,clearly influences Descartes' thoughts and theory.Like Plato,he did not jettison his bold conviction of a sharp contrast between spirit and matter.Unlike Plato could not only just interogate but also discover then how the mind influences the body or soul in relation to the body.In solving a philosophical problem,he in his Discourse on Method,raises question on the method to solve them.

May 23, 2019

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He openedthe philosophical floodgate with discourse on method and debated question of importance about the relationship between the mind and body.This dominatedphilosophical argument over the last hundred and fifty years.While his philosophical comtemporaries in the school of skepticism taught that man should accept he knew nothing,he taught otherwise and would not accept skepticism of the sophists like Socrates,the evolution of new methods to support natural sciencesgrew its relevance and environmental impact.This snowball,during his life,provided graphical details about the mechanismof natural processes.He interogated himself about appropriatedescription and exact method of philosophic reflection.Apart from that,the nature ofmatter and the constitution of physical processes of nature.The soul had been commonly considered as a sort of breath of life that permeated every organism until the 17th century.The word 'breath and breathing'in their original meaning sequential refer to soul and spirit respectively.

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was invited in that winter by the Queen Of Sweden Christina.He died of pneumonia and was 54 years.The Renaisance era made concise rediscovery of nature including man but no coherent effort was made to create a complete philosophical system when it presented itself again.And it was this vacuum that he filled and he became the first mordern significant system builder.He was followed by Spinoza,Leibniz,Locke Berkeley,Hume and Kant.A philosophical system is a completely constructed philosophy from the foundation up and answers all fundamental questions concerning philosophy.From the great system constructors of the antiquity such as the likes of Plato and Aristotle down to the bridge builder of the medieval like St.Thomas Aquinas who built bridge betweenAristotle's philosophy and christian theology onward to the first mordern attempt by Descartes.It is not for nothing or for funfare that they called him the father of mordern philosophy and the first practical attempt to assemble new thoughts came in17th century.

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We shall be treating Descartes and Spinoza the two greatest philosophers of the seveetenth century in the disputed context of soul and body.We know there is a direct line of intellectual descent from Socrates,Plato via St. Augustine to Descartes,the first mordern philosopher.Having been convinced that reason was the only part to knowledge,the ideological ethnography did not go extinct until the coming of the Cartesian logic.He came to conclusion like his peers after comprehensive research that the knowledge inherited from the middle age was not reliable and doubted everything.Though he put his pen to work,we can still compare him to the Socrates of the antiquity who went to public squares at athens and criticised everything he saw.Given this dubiety then he began to think.With raptured solitary confinement after globetroting,he began to study the great world book.From Central Europe to Paris,then Holland in 1629 where he hibernated for two decades prior to his death in Sweden in 1650 a year after he was....

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In the latter movement,the most influential advocates was the English Man Thomas Hobbes who believed all phenomena including plants and animals like were made of particles of matter even the mortal soul.He agreed with Democritus about two thousand before him.Both philosophies continued to reecho throughout the life of western history.Like materialism,they were constantly nourished with new intellectual outputs and sciences.Newton a materialist was one of them with his mechanistic worldview.Both philosophers agreed there is relationship between this mechanistic world portrait and belief in God,in contrast to postulations of the materialist philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries.Some have disputed free wills and determinism and some stood in favour of the mechanistic processes,especially German materialists of the findesiecle.Many brain surgeons and astronauts claimed to have operated on human brains and traveled to space,are yet to see a single thought or soul atom to operate upon or see flying angels.

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a scandinavian,marked a transition from Baroque period to the age of enlightenment,with a play Jeppe On The Mountain,mimicking each other,borrowed their theme from old arabian tales A Thousand And One Nights.Like their contemporaries,all compared life to a dream and it reverberated as far away as India and China where the old chinese sage Chuang-tzu Once dreamt himself as a butterfly and probably flies away and never returns,also captures the idiotic brevity of life.Peter Dass (1647 - 1707 ) a baroque poet in Norway,captures the same mood and ascribed eternity to God.When he writes in the hymn about rural life in northern Norway,he captures this mood as typical of baroque poet.The same with platonic distinction of material worldand the eternal world of ideas.Atthe bottom of these diametrically opposed modes of thoughts according to some philosopherlies the spiritual factor and this philosophical viewpoint they called it Idealism.The opposite being materialism was also a striking force in the western history.

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who wrote a play Life Is A Dream,born in 1600,says:" What is life? A madness. what is life? An illusion,a shadow,a story and the greatest good is little"just "enough for all life is a dream......" In the same vein, Shakespeare agreed with him and was not wrong or near accurate when he says in As You Like It that : All the world's a stage, And all men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts." He closes it up well with good conclusion when he says in Macbeth that" Life's but a walking shadow a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more ; it is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing." So,indeed life is a dream as he captures the brevity of life.What about Hamlet to be or not to be thatone day we are walking around on the earth and next day we are dead and gone."It is clear all Baroque Poets compared life to a dream and barely ignored its brevity.Both Barca and Ludvig Holberg

May 17, 2019

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Proud and pompous palaces,remote monastries and extremely luxurious lifestyles adorned the period characterised by affection and vanity.In a political sense,the period was also an age of conflict,when Europe was ravaged by wars especially the thirty years war that wasted the continent between 1618 to 1648.It extremely affected Germany and France profited immensely and became dominant power on the continent. The wars waged between Roman Catholic and protestant and driven by political power.This period of huge class differences displayed the pompous wealth of French Aristocrazy and the court of versailes standing side by side with poverty stricken populace.So,the political situation of the baroque was like its arts and architecture.The politicalsituation was stricken with betrayal,intrigue,plottingand assasination.The periodgave birth to mordern theater and Shakespeare wrote his best play in 1600,standing one footin the renaisance and other foot in the baroque period.Calderon de la Barca a spanish dramatist

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Now we move onto mordern philosophy beginning from the first edition ofhis works and philosophical essays published in 1617 in which appeared his most famous works"Discourse On Method."Descartes became the first mordern philosopher of the period. Polisher of Lenses Baruch Spinoza Dutch philosopher the duo were extremely influential in the rationalistschool of the mordern time.We shall be talking of the 17th century or what historians generallyregarded as Baroque period.Basically the word Baroque comes from a pearl of irregular shape andthat was typical of the period thatfollowed Renaisance period earlier discussed.The typical Baroque arts,a much opulent form incontrast tomuch plainer and harmonious version of Renaisance Arts.Art and practical life witnessed flamboyant and pompous expression during the period when monastic movement turned the secular away.Various Latin expressions such as 'carpe diem-seize the day'then 'memento mori-remember you must die' are some favourite sayings that boldly seized the day.

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English political institutions.Fox and the Quakers opposed church authority and the educational system and Winstaley and the Diggers took them to the cleaner and threatened social order.Their exagerated ideas frightened the parliamentary stubborn conservative reformers,who later moved humble men with best ideal and optimistic spirit to inspire british democracy.Inspite of contemporary failure,radical zealots made an enduring mark on English ideals of freedom,justice,right and democracy.Though religious controversies raged as well in the 17th century like elsewhere on the continent,England did not bother herself with continental wars of the period.It was due to the mordernisation of government and the settlement of religious challengesbefore the end of the century.Thesolution they achieved in this regardwas to all intents and purpose verydurable.The new Cromwellian model Army was composed of yeoman and chaplains were prophets.The downright religious radicals who becamedischanted with leadership for a change.

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dogmatism.Religious sects such as anabaptists and independents,were influential behind the most notable spiritual types such as Diggers and Quakers acted on divine revelations.Prebysterian program was the most influential in the house of common.The sect type dominated the army independents or congregationalists to which Oliver Cromwell belong.The influential sect Levellers was led by the most eloquent orator John Lilburne who translated Christian doctrine into political terms.He also advocated parliamentary reform and suffrage extension and organised them as a party with mass membership meetings and periodical press coverage.The Society Of Friends or Quaker a looser entity was led by George Fox and they sought God based on personal relationship.He taught that education was not necessary for spiritual well being and contemptuously referred to Cambridge as a place where prentice learn the trade of preaching.That every man could come to understand the bible.The Lillburne and the levellers attacked traditional

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Not all reformers agreed with him and the holistic purgatory.Infact Erasmus opposed about his excessive negative view of mankind,still he claimed that man was totally depraved after fall from grace.We could not be disputed if we say his lifetime contributed immensely to the reformation of later years.Moreover,the political revolution like scientific,social and commercial revolutions of the period also had considerable influence on religious revolution.For instance,the modes of radical thoughts in England prior to and after the glorious revolution of 1689 at the same time absolutism to supremacy of vengeful spite across the channel in France.The abortive aristocractic revolt Fronde took over France,in England there was succesful national revolution. The religious bigotry was impressive with massive impact and infact produced political and social revisionism in religious vocabulary with editorial captions and sobriquets such as"the levellers,Diggers,Ranters and Quakers"in referrence to their drastic religious

May 16, 2019

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ecclesiastical reformer.Luther explained that people did not need church intercession or its priest to receive God's forgiveness.God's forgiveness was not based also on the church sale of indulgences.In the middle of 16th century,the sale of the indulgence was forbidden by Roman Catholic Church.He avoided unpalatable religious dogmas and customs rooted in the priesthood history during medieval and desired return to early christianity of the New testament.He simply reflected the notion or logic of Renaisance humanists or artists that turned to ancient sources of art and culture.He was known to have translated into German the Bible and believed every man should read bible in their local tongues.So,like other Renaisance artists emphasised on individualism of mankind.He taught himself at the age of 35 years and started to translate bible into German language,an arduous task.This allowed people's language to take precedence over latin. Unlike Ficino or Leonardo da vinci or Erasmus,he was not a humanist per say.

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movements;first when the solar system was formed,they had rectilinear movements and now through gravitation revolved round the sun.He abolished the notion that one set of laws was applicable to the heavens and another one on earth and contended both segments of the universe applied the same physical laws.During the same Renaisance era,church or theology and science and philosophy broke apart.There was so much attempt to open up the flagship multiplicand of the great charters of liberty basically intellectual freedom.For instance in the medieval Catholic Church,its liturgy was written in latin and church's ritual prayers been backbone of service.Infact the bible itself too was written in latin.It was during the era that it was translated from Greek and Hebrew,into national languages.This intellectual freedom led to the Reformation.During the period there were many reformers from Martin Luther who broke away from the church,because he resisted indulgence to Erasmus of Rotterdam a Roman Catholic quentessential,

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idea came when he was under the apple tree.He saw apple tree fall from the tree and thus began to ask himself,whether the moon was drawn to the earth with similar force.Perhaps,could be the reason for the moon's continuous orbit of the earth for eternity.To demonstrate few natural laws apply to the universe,he started with laws propounded by contemporaries and for the calculation of planetary orbits,he applied two natural laws that the Italian provided and proposed.First,the law of inertia,in which Cambridge scholar expressed: A body remains in its state of rest or rectilinear motion until it is compelled to change that state by a force impressed on it"then again"when two forces work on a body simultaneously the body will move on an elliptical path."the two laws were to portray how planets go round the sun-heliocentric world machine and the second law was demonstrated by Galileo on an inclined plane.He explain that all planets move and travel in elliptical orbits around the sun being outcome of two inequal

May 15, 2019

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and the solar system and also provided graphical analysis of how the planets moved round the sun.He partly refers to Galileo's Dynamics and kepler pointed out there has to be a solar force that caused them to be attracted to each other.Newton called the force gravity.kepler noted this force moved more slowly in their orbit farther away travelled in their orbit from the sun.That lunar force was also a critical factor in the rise and fall in sea level.Galileo mocked kepler and rejected this theory that the forces of gravity could work over long distance,let alone be magic forces pulling the heavenly bodies together.The universal law of gravitation states that every object attracts every other objects with proportional growth in force in relation to the size of the objects and also decreases in proportion to distance between these objects.He was also able to prove this attraction is universal including operating in space between heavenly bodies,a view that Italian Galileo brazenly rejected.The idea came while..

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and the solar system and also provided graphical analysis of how the planets moved round the sun.He partly refers to Galileo's Dynamics and kepler pointed out there has to be a solar force that caused them to be attracted to each other.Newton called the force gravity.kepler noted this force moved more slowly in their orbit farther away travelled in their orbit from the sun.That lunar force was also a critical factor in the rise and fall in sea level.Galileo mocked kepler and rejected this theory that the forces of gravity could not work over long distance

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that the earth moves,.."...,.considering the fact that in the past"learned men .....have proved that the earth rests immovable in the middle of the heavens as the center of the universe.For a long time therefore i hesitated whether i should publish my comments."..,.considering the"scorn which i had to fear on account of the newness and absurdity....." " But my friends made me change my course inspite of my long continued hesitation and resistance.First,among them was Nicholas Schonberg,Cardinal of Capua,a man distinguished in all branches of learning."The audacity of hope was responsible in the midst of resistance from irrational flocks that dominated the surface of the earth for this survivalism,an uncommon bravery over doubts thatsaved theearth the squandering of another two thousand years of intellectual wilderness.At the same time religious revolution wasperpetrated the scientific revolution reached its zenith with the emergence of Isaac Newton(1642-1727).He provided final description of planetaryorbits

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ebulient Roger Bacon who was a laboratory scientist at Oxford,studied lenses and mirrors with great care.He was speculated to have probably be the first to deploy telescope for laboratory research including a burning glass,that was later ordered to be destroyed by university authority for students'distraction.We shall not fail to talk about Thomas Aquinas,a speculated translator,taught by his teacher Albert Magnus,also contributed immensely the christianisation of the converted works in mainstream European philosophy.Above all the medieval was an age tormented by double.No wonder a Frenchman Taine described the period as an age tortured by doubt.Infact,Copernicus himself was tormented by doubt for many years and did not himself believed in his works until his polymath friend Nicholas Schonberg, Cardinal Of Capua,was able to convince to publish the little book.Hear him:" For i amnot so pleased by my own works that i do not care what others will say about them....i have had to consider how absurd my conclusion

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compilers including magic stones'collection and lists,medieval herbs and bestiaries,curious learned men like Fredrick 11's anatomical dissections and other later dissectors.The converted works of the antiquity and translations such as the works of Aristotle later debated and disputed and the thoughts of other ancient scholars like Galen,Euclid and Ptolemy,great Arabs such Avicenna,Lycurgus and Hammurabi,were extremely influential.They were handled by western translators that perhaps came from Levant,none of the translations were the works of crusaders or the Italian merchants nor any groups related to them.This influential translation in most cases from aramaic texts converged to kickstart the era we earlier noted.Their low scientific contribution which was discovered earlier were bridged by the same western scholars.They include three original geniuses such St. Albert,Peter Peregrine,a picard that flourished in 1270.Very practically little had survived on his treatise on magnet and compass.Then there is the

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that despite retarded intellectual output,borrowed from the medieval such as rudimental propositions of the prepythagorean geometry;the use of counting frame or abacus and some decimal fractions,so that by the end of 13th century,the mathematicians were tackling problems with advanced pythagorean theorem,approached cubic equations'solution by cones' intersection,extensively discussed spherical trigonometry and approacheddifferential calculus on the verge.Then the absorption of the ptolemaic astronomy of the ancients,the mastery of the maps of the skies,courses of planets and stars,by astrologists during the same period,was instrumental to the success of Copernican Revolution of the period possible.What the middle ages took over from the Greeks or the ancient they did not very much enrich.With this discovery,they were to change the situation with Renaisance as the magical response.Still,the accomplishment of the medieval alchemists,stumbled upon new facts,about gases and metals'properties,medieval lapidaries'

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The same with Johannes Kepler German Astronomer in 1600s both extensively utilised telescope to pointblank observe the heavenly bodies.While Galileo became the first scientist to formulate the law of inertia and noted the moon had mountains and valleys similar to planet earth,extensively studied the moon's craters;kepler presented a comprehensive evidence that planets move in eliptical or in oval orbin with sun at the center,and that each planet move faster when closer to the sun.It was in kepler's time that the earth was a planet like other planets with his laws of planetary motion and that the same physical laws govern the universe.Galileo says:"A body remains in the state which it is in,at rest or in motion as long as no external force compels it to change its state".It is interesting to note that the laws of planetary motion and terrestrial motion propounded each by the two scientists were instrumental when combined to make Newtonian World Machine of the latter age possible.It should also be noted vividly

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The book by Copernicus a small pamphlet entitled On The Revolution Of The Celestial Spheres and died a day after the book was published.In the little book,he ridiculed the notion about the geocentric principles of the universe propounded by Aristotle that dominated the scientific thinking for more than twenty centuries prior to the Copernican critique that gave the world a new direction.He says that the earth was not the center of the universe but rather it was the sun,a view popularly regarded as heliocentric principle.This Heliocentric world picture simply means the sun is the center and everything centers around the sun.That instead the earth and other planets move round the sun.Today,we know that the sun is just one of the infinite population of stars and all stars round mankind comprise of only one of many billions of galaxies created.The planets all of them move in circular orbits around the sun.That is heliocentrism and the mathematical models that came with the emergence of Galileo proved this logics.

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Global Warming: Ecology And The Human Spirit."Growth of the market and population,skyrocketed the increase in overcrowded houses and urban slums,as people flocked to cities and metropolis with the growth of industrial revolution.The treacherous maladjustment to the state of nature altered into the state of material comfort absolutely testified to the escalated burden of technological setback and fury of payback time.With the unprecedented growth in astronomicalrevolutions,man thus began to question age old doctrines andscientific prejudices of the antiquity.In this context,besidesthe reform launched by the anticlericals,beginning by John Wycliffe,a professor of theology at univesity of oxford,and his later disciples includingMartin Luther that led to religious revolution of the 16th century,popularly known as Reformation,the scientific revolutionwas begun in earnest when Nicolaus Corpenicus in 1543,became the first that challenged Aristotellian metaphysics,basically the geocentric principles of the universe.

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They discovered a new method called scientific method in the first phase and made technical revolution possible.This pioneered several inventions.Just like Francis Bacon says"Knowledge is power",they now laid more ephasis on pragmatic value of knowledge through the evolution of knowledge mass production,dominated the forces of nature for the first time that once controlled them.Man began to truly intervene in his own destiny,using selfcontrol and social control system respectively.Although technical revolution that led to wealth enhancement and technological growth of Renaisance like spinning jenny also spiraled unemployment and mass poverty,led to discovery of new medicines and corresponding increase in new diseases,and from growth in the agricultural improvement rose new challenge of environmental problems.From the growth of practical appliances including washing mashine,refrigerator,and other electronics to the problem of pollution and waste as noted in my treatise on global warming entitled;Global Warming

May 12, 2019

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The view that God is present in his creation known as pantheism was developed during the period.Giordano Bruno in Rome's flower market was burned at stake's in 1600.Humanists like the league of anticlericals and other artists put an end to the antihumanism of the church and state.The period also thrived with witches and witchcraft,magic,sorcery and other religious taboos including bloody wars that led to conquest of New World.The Renaisance flourished also with new scientific method,an innovation that began the process of investigating nature with human senses.Beginning from 14th century,the great scientific thinkersthat opposed blind faith in old authority began to emerge.They drew inspiration from religiousdoctrine and natural philosophy of Aristotle.They laid emphasison the empirical method,inwhich knowledge is guided by experience,rather than pigments or parchments of imagination.They even went beyond empirical science that was already known in antiquity,but the evolution of systematic experiencewas new.

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The ancient city sometimes called 'hub of the universe' and 'city of cities later declined during the middle ages.The decline was such deplorable so that by 1417,this old metropolis had a mere seventeen thousand citizens and it was the duty of Renaisance humanists to restore its lost glory.Hence,critical attempt were made with the construction of the great St. Peter's Church built over the grave of apostle peter in a way that defied moderation and restraint.The construction as at the time was the largest in the world and engaged the best of Renaisance artists of the period.The construction started in 1506 and took about a hundred and twenty years to finish.Moreso,as it took another fifty years for the great huge St. Peter Square to be finished.Technology had improved from this primitiveness and it took just a decade to be taught.It is more than 200 meters and about 130meters high and covers area of 16th square meters.So,the era brought a new view about the concept of humanism and high worth of individualism.

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It was simply a rebirth of antiquity's humanism and much more to a greater extent driven by individualism.It is the notion that every man is unique,and unrestricted worship of heroes and genius is allowed,that was the ideal Renaisance Man.There was also so much interest in human anatomy and dissection of the body as in the ancient times especially the dead to gain knowledge about the shape of the internal body structure.A necessity for the growth of medical science and practice.The concept of universal genius later embraced every aspect of life,arts and science.Works of arts also extends to canvass painting of the nude.Man's freedom to explore the posibilities was limitless and exceed all boundaries.There was no more emphasis on the significance of moderation,restraint and tranquility,guarranteed by the humanists of antiquity.There was unrestricted revolution in all spheres ranging from art,architecture,music,literature,philosophy and science.We have heard about Rome once the great cultural center of Europe.

May 11, 2019

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Then came the discovery of telescope that transformed astronomy and other inventions like space research and rockets came later.It led to people going to the moon and such bombing like Hiroshima and then Chernobyl.They started with little changes on cultural and economic framework.There was transition from subsistence economy to monetary economy and towards end of middle ages,cities and foreign commerce escalated.This was faster than the way Greek civilisation flourished more than two thousand years earlier in view of banking,macroeconomics and money that exit barter trade.The Renaisance view was entirely new with its concept of humanism,brought a new aproach in human development and total worth of mankind in striking contrast to medieval primitiveness with emphasis on sinful nature of man.Marsilio Ficino exclaimed:'know thyself o divine lineage in mortal guise'.' Oration On The Dignity Of Man'was written by Pico Della Mirandola which was unthinkable in the dark ages.Man became their center of focus.

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Apart from Cyril of Athanasius,there is Thomas Aquinas who was instrumental in the late medieval and aided conversion of ancien Greek and Aramaic literature into Christian literature and with the help of other conversion in Northern Italy led to Renaisance Era.We mean rich cultural development that was begun in the late 14th century and spread northward in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.Its humanism erupted after the long dark ages.The period made important discoveries that transformed mordern civilisation and they included the discoveries of fire arms,compass and printing press and one of the most popular books published by Guthenberg's Press the incunabulum prior to 1500.Obviously it catapulted Renaisance new ideas and led to religious,political,commercial,cultural,economic and social revolutions at unprecedented feat.Compass made it easier to navigate worldwide.The firearms gave European military superiority.Printing forced the church to abandon its responbility as sole custodian of knowledge.

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Quoting Paul's Epistle to the Romans: O man who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it;why hast thou made me thus?or Hath not the potter power over the clay,of the same lump to make one vessel unto honor and another unto dishonour?" So,according Man has no right to criticise God.That God sits above playing games with man's life as soon as he is dissatisfied with his work throws it away.No man deserves his redemption,inspite that he chose some to be saved from damnation.His humanism or theology is completely departed from the humanism of Athens.In a learned work entitled "the City Of God",he expounded the biblical doctrine of salvation and perdition.The black scholar noted for all history there has be struggle between the city of God or kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world.The age saw that chaos He was conscious ofthe fact that divine foresight direct his linear view of history from adam to the end of time,like the story of a child evolving into old age. THOMAS HOBBESThomas Hobbes

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Some have said he christianised plato,and though he believed that there are limits to what reason can go,or ho awa, hardly believed neglecting his philosophical thoughts on becoming christianised.That christianity or a divine mystery was a religion that can be believed by faith and not by reason.Like Kant,he noted there was a limitto how far,a philosophy could go and wanted peace with God When he said' Our heart is not quietuntil it rests in thee".Like Plato,hesaid before God created the world,the ideas were first in divine mind and in that view preservedplatonic view of eternal idea.And then the Greek and Jewish like many church fathers and Augustine brought those thoughts together to influence christianity.Like Plotinus,he also believed evil is the absence of God and linked it to mankind disobedience and not a divine creation."Goodwill is God's Work; the evil will is the falling away from God's work."He emphasised that man was a spiritual being and with material body,that is he has a soul that knows God.

May 10, 2019

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They existed in late antiquity,they believed in the dualistic forces of the universe,operated ecclectic doctrine,with half religion and half philosophy.That mankind could ensure the salvation of his soul,through preparedness with his spirit,and then mankind could rise above material universe.He had no peace of mind with this brutal division between forces of good and evil because he was preocupied with the problem of evil,as called it the origin of evil.He was by the Stoic who disbelieve sharp divion between good and evil.He tried other philosophy of the late antiquity.First, Neoplatonism in which he first said that made him discovered all existence have divine sources and so became a neoplatonic bishop.In other words,his hagiology was largely influenced by platonic ideas. Or you could say halfneoplatonist halfchristianity evenhe claimed otherwise a full christianity.Noticing the similarity between plato's ideas and christian doctrine,he was able to form conclusion that plato must have read the old testament.