Aside about Facades

Some good philosophers mentioned in this blog are:

From the Ancient Period
Aristotle
Socrates
Pyrrho

From the Modern Period
Three Key Rationalists
Descartes
Spinoza
Leibniz

Three Key Empiricists
Locke
Berkeley
Hume

From the Romantic Period
German Idealists
Kant

Existentialists
Nietzche


20th Century
From Contemporary, Analytic, and British-American Schools
Goldman
Kenneth Burke
Bertrand Russell
Mikhail Bahktin
Gilbert Ryle
Harry G. Frankfurt


New Age, Spirituality, Popular "Pop" Philosophy
Gretchen Rubin
Eckhart Tolle


Other
John Updike
William Shakespeare
Rainer Maria Rilke
Dylan Thomas
Aronson and Tavris
Starsky and Cox
Margaret Gullan-Whur
Jonathan Kozol
John Hope Franklin

Of these philosophers, I've basically added my musings, written personal entries, and I've posted some of my papers. I've also commented on poetry, written two basic book reports, and I submitted most of my portfolio of newspaper articles.

A lot of times we'll just take a sentence and just extrapolate and extrapolate. I hereby acknowledge that this isn't really the way that these guys wanted to be read, most of the time, with the exception of Nietzche. In fact, the German Idealists and Spinoza wanted people to consider the whole picture, this belief is called holism.

Philosophers this blog went over in slightly more depth:

Kant
Spinoza


Every 10 or 20 posts, I usually re-declare that this is a Kantian blog because facadesaside means to evaluate appearances. This means to literally put the face of things away from the main parts of things. In other words, this blog is about Truth. Kant's philosophy was the necessary division between appearances and things in themselves. The difference for Kant was essentially a moral one. Once he realized the division between what is phenomenal and can be known, there was a necessary question of how to deal with what cannot be known.

So far, one of the theses of this blog is the answer to the question: Why Kant and not Spinoza? Marjorie Grene remarks in her anthology of critical essays that Kant said we would all be Spinozists if not for the differences between things and things-in-themselves. This blog has wondered out loud why Spinoza's Ethics is not as good as The Critique of Pure Reason. Both are morally motivated works which seek to morally motivate their readers toward truth and better lives. I think the answer is at least a little bit clearer to me now. Simply, Spinoza's solutions were too deterministic and too extreme so as to be superstitious. Kant's thesis is logically truer to what can be known (hence, the Critique in the Critique of Pure Reason is a series of agreed upon limitations of what can be known or potentially known through worldly experience).

Now, I think it's both incredibly freeing to have a couple of theses, Truth and Why Kant and not Spinoza, because sometimes freedom can feel like a prison (We'll get to some of the people who felt like this, the Existentialists, soon), but I don't think that I'm going to really stop the free flow of any ideas that I have. Part of the point of a blog is that I should be able to say what ever I want anyway. These are more like sign posts to tell us which way is up and down on this crazy blog.

Some things to work on and look forward to in this blog:

More talk about Kant
More talk about Spinoza

More, new, and different exciting philosophers:


Susan Haack
Blavotsky
Voltaire
Bacon
Hobbes
Henry James
William James
Karl Marx
Religious Apologists
Religious doubters
Scientists
Fichte
Schuler
Hegel
John Rawls
John Stuart Mill
Ayn Rand

Kierkegaard
various musicians and artists with Philosophical Bents