DOES PHILOSOPHY SEEK TRUTH?

DOES PHILOSOPHY SEEK TRUTH?

D. R. Khashaba

The saying that philosophy seeks truth is commonly received as a truism. There is indeed a rare and remote sense of the word ‘truth’ in which it is natural and proper to say that philosophy seeks truth: that is the exalted sense of Truth as a moral value. But in the quotidian commonsense meaning of the word, it is highly misleading and confusing to join philosophy and truth.

In the common acceptation of the term, truth implies the agreement of a statement or belief with an objective state of affairs. This is the meaning of ‘truth’ in science, in history, in law; but in philosophy it is totally irrelevant,

For millennia philosophers in the Western tradition (but not in China or India) have been deluded into thinking that they are required and can reach factual knowledge about the objective world. It is this erroneous belief that has exposed Western philosophy to ridicule and scorn culminating in Hume’s injunction to commit all metaphysical works to the flames and in the Positivists’ equating of metaphysics with nonsense.

Philosophy as the investigation of the mind, in the mind, by the mind (Plato), as the pure exercise of pure Reason (Kant), is as unrelated to the objective world as the parables of the Nazarene. A myth of Plato’s, a parable of Jesus’, a poem of Shelley’s have the same quality of — not ‘truth’ but spiritual vision.

Thus translators err in translating Plato’s alêtheia as ‘truth’: in other contexts that would be the natural and proper translation, but in Plato alêtheia, ousia, to on, ho estin, all equally refer to reality or what is real, since for Plato the mind and the ideas in the mind are all the reality that we know.

D. R. Khashaba

September 22, 2017

Posted to https://philosophia937.wordpress.com xnd http://khashaba.blogspot.com

NINETY

NINETY

Reflections on my ninetieth birthday

D. R. Khashaba

Today I turned the last page of my ninetieth year, a long, long journey by any measure. In my youth and early manhood I never thought I would reach sixty.

What have I made of this ample gift of life that I have been given? The first stretch of 32 years (I have my reason for hitting on this odd figure) was a mixture of good fortune and constraining circumstances aggravated by wrong decisions. I was born and brought up by good, loving parents and had good, loving siblings. (I was the youngest.) I had intermittent but in the main good schooling. Basically I am an autodidact. Those first 32 years, apart from the constrained and constraining conditions, were the best. I read voraciously and formed the core of my philosophy.

I married at 32 and the marriage was blessed with a daughter but my wife soon developed a psychic condition that engulfed us (husband, wife, and daughter) in profound misery. The doctors did not give me a diagnosis but only wrote long prescriptions. There were periods of hospitalization. For some forty years I could not read, could not think, was practically not living: the only thing that kept me alive was that I could not abandon my helpless wife and daughter.

My poor wife passed away in 1990. That opened up the third stretch of my life story. My daughter had already married. I read like mad. In 1998 I self-published (with generous financial help from my employer) what I thought would be my first and last book: Let Us Philosophize, published by Avon Books, London, who went into liquidation only two years later.

The book met with the inescapable fate of self-published books. But in various ways I reached a handful of philosopher-friends who valued my work handsomely. I had articles published in Philosophy Pathways, The Examined Life Online Journal (sadly soon defunct), and other online journals. From 2005 to the present day I self-published eleven books, including a revised edition of Let Us Philosophize.

I know that every writer thinks highly of her or his work; still I think I am not deceived in believting that my work deserves more than the attention it has received, My philosophy is philosophy in the grand manner that unites epistemology, ontology, and axiology in an original consistent whole. I designate it an original version of Platonism, but I go beyond Plato at points and offer an original interpretation of important aspects of Plato’s philosophy that have been overlooked by academic and professional philosophers.

I have made all my work freely downloadable from my wordpress site, archive.org, and from the free e-books section of ArabWorldBooks.com. I dream that at some near or distant future my work will be properly valued and will have its place in mainstream philosophy side by side with the work of Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer.

I don’t know what more time I will be given beyond this my ninetieth birthday. Anyway, in the nature of things it cannot be long. I have no set plans for any future work. I will read for enjoyment and try to fill in some of the numerous and very wide gaps in my paideia. If anything writes itself I will post it on my two blogs.

Tuchê agathê .

D. R. Khashaba

September 3, 2017

Posted to https://philosophia937.wordpress.com xnd http://khashaba.blogspot.com