Zain's Guide to Overthinking Everything

Spinoza: Secret Stoic Philosopher?         I was reading about Baruch Spinoza, a 17th-century philosopher who proposed a philosophy known as Spinozism or pantheism, and I found a lot of parallels between his philosophy and Stoicism that I wanted to share. For more information about the Stoic philosophy read my blog post for necessary background context: https://zainphilosophy.blogspot.com/2023/11/notes-on-basics-of-stoicism.html Spinoza argued for a monistic view of reality where God and nature are ontologically synonymous. Spinoza’s main work titled, “Ethics” explores concepts like substance, modes, and the interconnectedness of all existent things. He argued for a deterministic universe i.e. that there is no free will and emphasized the importance of reason and understanding emotions to achieve intellectual freedom. There are similarities between Spinoza’s philosophy and the Stoic concept of the logos. In Stoicism, the logos represents a rational and di...

Hylomorphism vs. Cartesian Dualism: Exploring the Mind and Body with Thomas Aquinas                      Hylomorphism, a theory proposed by Aristotle and appropriated into Christian philosophy by Thomas Aquinas, entails that entities, including the mind and body, are a combination of matter ( hyle ) and form ( morphe ). Dualism, in contrast to monism, posits a fundamental distinction between mind and body as separate substances. Aristotle’s hylomorphism, on the other hand, emphasizes the unity of form and matter in entities, proposing an interconnected relationship rather than strict separation. So, I began to ponder the differences between Aristotle’s hylomorphism and Cartesian dualism. Cartesian dualism, proposed by René Descartes, posits a strict separation between the mind ( res cogitans ) and the body ( res extensa ). Descartes viewed the mind as non-material and distinct from the mater...

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...