The Verma Report: Why Are You Here?

“Aristotle died in the autumn of 322 BC. He was sixty-two and at the height of his powers; a scholar whose scientific explorations were as wide-ranging as his philosophical speculations were profound; a teacher who enchanted and inspired the brightest youth of Greece; a public figure who lived a turbulent life in a turbulent world. He bestrode antiquity like an intellectual colossus. No man before him had contributed so much to learning. No man after him might aspire to rival his achievements.” ~ Jonathan Barnes

“Where Plato is whimsical and ironic, and proceeds by suggestion and indirection, Aristotle is matter-of-fact, almost pedestrian. Where Plato’s writing is filled with his sense of better and more beautiful world behind, above, beyond the world of ordinary experience, illuminating that experience but transcending it, Aristotle keeps his feet firm on the ground of ordinary experience. This is Aristotle's reality, and the business of philosophy in his view is to make sense of the here and now.” ~ W. T. Jones

"Existentialism of the fifties and the sixties, held that reality is absurd and that irrational passion is the only means of knowledge. In such a world, said Sartre, man is the controller of his destiny, except that he cannot control it because his mind is helpless; so freedom is a “curse,” and man’s fate is fear, trembling, nausea—from which there s “no exit,” since thought is self-deception, system-building is self-deception, a rational ethics is self-deception. All one can do, therefore, is make a blind, activist commitment to some course, or join the Zen Buddhists in merging with a superior dimension, or praise Fidel Castro as the hero of the century, or do something else, anything else, whatever anyone chooses to feel. This is what Existentialists describe as “individualism.” ~ Leonard Peikoff

"Aristotle’s philosophy was the intellect’s Declaration of Independence. Aristotle, the father of logic, should be given the title of the world’s first intellectual, in the purest and noblest sense of that word. No matter what remnants of Platonism did exist in Aristotle’s system, his incomparable achievement lay in the fact that he defined the basic principles of a rational view of existence and of man’s consciousness: that there is only one reality, the one which man perceives—that it exists as an objective absolute (which means: independently of the consciousness, the wishes or the feelings of any perceiver)—that the task of man’s consciousness is to perceive, not to create, reality—that abstractions are man’s method of integrating his sensory material—that man’s mind is his only tool of knowledge—that A is A." ~ Ayn Rand

The Verma Report

Friday, 20 October 2017

Why Are You Here?

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