Zain's Guide to Overthinking Everything

Exploring Monism in Kantian Philosophy and Schopenhauer’s Will Through Advaita Vedanta     This blog post explores monism within Kantian philosophy and Schopenhauer’s concept of the “Will” through drawing parallels with Advaita Vedanta, a school of thought in Hinduism, as the title suggests. In Kant's philosophy, the noumena, or the “thing-in-itself” represents the ultimate reality of objects independent of our perceptions. Kant argued that we can never have direct knowledge of the noumenal realm because our knowledge is necessarily mediated by the structure of our minds and senses. This is explored much more in-depth in my other blog posts on the basics of Kant. While we can perceive and understand phenomena—how things appear to us—the nature of the noumena remains inaccessible. Kant posited that our experiences are shaped by the 12 categories of the understanding and the forms of intuition, and these mental structures impose limitations on what we can know about the underl...

Qualified Non-Dualism       There are many schools of thought in Hinduism regarding the relationship of the Ātman , jiva , and Brahman . These three terms can be loosely translated to the self-existent essence of humanity, the worldly self or soul, and the underlying reality of everything, respectively. In nondualist schools of Hinduism, particularly in Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta or nondualism and Ramanuja’s Vishishtadvaita Vedanta or qualified nondualism, the Ātman is equated with Brahman . They derive this understanding primarily from the Hindu scripture, the Upanishads , which are the last part of a larger corpus of texts known as the Vedas . There are differences between these two schools of thought and the primary focus of this essay will be the school of Ramanuja.  According to both these schools of thought, although more explicit with Shankara, this world is an illusion or māyā and to be under this illusion is the ignorance that keeps the individ...

      Buddhism and Platonism      While Buddhism and Platonism are two philosophies that emerged around the same period, they fundamentally disagree on the concepts of the self, human nature, and the reality of existence. Buddhism posits that everything, including humans, is impermanent and constantly changing. Whilst the Platonic view is the opposite as it asserts that there is an eternal and unchanging self beyond the physical world.       Due to everything being in a state of flux, this would entail that there is no atman or greater permanent soul or self either. In Hinduism, the atman is associated with the Brahman or God and since Buddhism does not affirm the atman, there would be no God either. Included in this belief is that the self is composed of five aggregates: form, sense, perception, consciousness, and mental formations. The form refers to one’s body, sense refers to one’s ability to feel sensations, perception is the abilit...