Freedom and Determinism

 Questions to consider: Am I a creature of fate, of gigantic forces beyond my control? Am I a mysterious mixture of body and spirit, part determined and part free? Am I an electronic computer programmed by my environment? Is my feeling of being free to shape my future just an illusion? Is it fair to punish a boy for stealing […]

Natural behaviour & Social behaviour

…Yet on closer examination, one can recognize a significant difference between laws regulating natural behaviour and those regulating social behaviour. The difference between the natural and social orders lies in the fact that  while the former is subject to laws of necessity, the latter is affected by laws of freedom. Things behave in accordance with […]

Language, Mind , and Reality (Expression, Reference, and Referent)

…Expressions are used here to denote linguistic symbols or words. Expressions meditate between the objects of the existential world and their image in the human mind, thereby making social communication possible. Language therefore plays a dual role. It first serves as a means of communication, thereby making social interaction possible.

John Locke and Revelation

Locke is among very few Western thinkers who confronted the question of revelation directly. Toward the end of his book Locke examines the significance of revelation as a source of knowledge. While considering Divine revelation to be, in principle, a source of certain knowledge, he defines its authority in such a manner that it is […]

Contrasting ideas on “Causality” (Ghazzali, David Hume, and Ibn Rushd)

 Ibn Rushd’s refutation of Ghazzali, is not confined to the mode of argument they employed in the study of divinity, but also to the one that used for understanding nature. In the book Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), Ghazzali, though accepting natural sciences studied by philosophers, rejects four notions the philosophers utilized in […]

Zen: Taste the food, not your tongue!

 Human mind consists primarily and originally in action — in living in the concrete world of “suchness.” But we have the power to control action by reflection, that is, by thinking, by comparing the actual world with memories or “reflections.” Memories are organized in terms of more or less abstract images — words, signs, simplified […]

Zen: Eternal Present and Timeless Mind

Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and future are abstractions without any concrete reality. Until this has become clear, it seems that our life is all past and future, and […]