That which comes to light does so for a reason. The purpose for which everything was created defies complete understanding. But in faith we come to accept that there is no useless thing. Everything that is - being - is teleological. We know this because Aristotle said so. That should be enough. We explore the meaning of reality in various ways, but we come back to the threshold of probable science - especially when our exploration is conducted by sense perception. Where Berkeley has denied material substances and Kant has demarcated the world into noumena and phenomena, we come to realize that the best reality we get is in the mind, and our reason creates our reality. This is the modern philosophy project.
It is only with phenomenology that we begin to retrace our steps back to the old days, when we allowed for there to exist an epistemological realism, a relationship between the ideas we conceive in the mind and the extramental material substances that we believe cause the ideas. These substances have sides, aspects and profiles, and are manifold in their possession of all three. Through phenomenology, we can confidently say that we appreciate reality as that: reality. We are able to have an intentional grasp of it.
For Kant, there is need to examine consciousness, especially a consciousness of the self, in such a fashion that we examine our memories and see how they form a logical representation of the reality that we accept in manifold, but which we synthesize in order to make sense of a complex world. This Kantian paradigm is different from the Berkelian model, but I think they both point to the reality of the limitedness of science, especially when it is lower than math. Descartes and the moderns would let us have math; but they would wash their hands off the possible crime of letting us have physical sciences as well. They would like Pilate ask us to bear the risk of believing what our senses tell us.
No one in any case has yet explained in full what the relationship between the mind and the body is, or how it is that we can will and spontaneously behold the product in the body of the effect of willing in the mind. For if the mind and the body are supposedly separate, how can they seem to be so fluidly one and the same as per effects? This precludes modern understanding. Philosophy continues to search for the ultimate causes of things, metaphysics continues to swim in murky waters. They continue to carry us along the current of our human understanding, bearing us along the tides as far as we can and may go. And no farther.
For Kant, there is need to examine consciousness, especially a consciousness of the self, in such a fashion that we examine our memories and see how they form a logical representation of the reality that we accept in manifold, but which we synthesize in order to make sense of a complex world. This Kantian paradigm is different from the Berkelian model, but I think they both point to the reality of the limitedness of science, especially when it is lower than math. Descartes and the moderns would let us have math; but they would wash their hands off the possible crime of letting us have physical sciences as well. They would like Pilate ask us to bear the risk of believing what our senses tell us.
No one in any case has yet explained in full what the relationship between the mind and the body is, or how it is that we can will and spontaneously behold the product in the body of the effect of willing in the mind. For if the mind and the body are supposedly separate, how can they seem to be so fluidly one and the same as per effects? This precludes modern understanding. Philosophy continues to search for the ultimate causes of things, metaphysics continues to swim in murky waters. They continue to carry us along the current of our human understanding, bearing us along the tides as far as we can and may go. And no farther.
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