On Philosophy

From my Honors Colloquium II mid-term exam, part 2:

1.         In his key piece, Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant posits the idea that all human knowledge falls into two categories: a priori, meaning 'from before', and a posteriori, meaning 'from later'. A priori knowledge is gained independently from experience, is obvious, and requires no real effort to discern. A posteriori knowledge, on the contrary, is gained by experience or empirical evidence. Kant then categorizes our ability to know into two categories: noumena, which are things that can be perceived empirically, and phenomena, which can be discerned only through intuition. 'Real' things, or noumena, are merely representations of unknowns, or phenomena, which are interpreted through our a priori or a posteriori knowledge to reach an understanding, inasmuch as we can understand the universe.

On Interdependence

From my weekly comments for Honors Colloquium:

“The first [interpretation] is "this arises because that is," which comes down to saying that things do exist in some way, but nothing exists on its own. The second is "this, having been produced, produces that," which means that nothing can be its own cause. Or we could say that everything is in some way interdependent with the world..” –Matthieu Ricard, The Quantum and the Lotus

The postulate of interdependence in Universe in a Grain of Sand strikes me as sort of the ultimate religious syllogism; if a then b. It is, then, a logical idea; and one of words and language. It is also a religious idea, present in Christianity, in Buddhism, in Unitarian Universalism, and others. It is an economic idea and a scientific one, because all of our actions affect the world, as a butterfly might cause a hurricane vis-à-vis chaos theory. The idea of interdependence, then, is interdependent. I find this idea delightful.