Sublime

Most philosophers since Descartes have attached importance to the theory of knowledge, and their doing so is largely due to him. “I think, therefore I am” makes mind more certain than matter, and my mind (for me) more certain than the minds of others.

Jews are one quarter of 1 percent of the world population. Yet they make up almost 30 percent of the world’s Nobel Prize winners. Such achievement is not bred in the genes. It is a product of centuries of insistence on the gift of the human mind. The great heroes of Jewish spirituality always include scholars and sages.

Past philosophers have taken this observation and run with it, arguing that minds and brains are fundamentally distinct and separate phenomena. This is the view the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.”1 But modern scientists and philosophers who have rejected dualism haven’t necessarily replaced it with a better

To disentangle what can be accepted from what must be rejected in this argument against the identification of knowledge with perception is by no means easy. There are three inter-connected theses that Plato discusses, namely: (1) Knowledge is perception; (2) Man is the measure of all things; (3) Everything is in a state of flux.

And yet across its long and messy history, philosophy also houses all kinds of other possibilities for thinking differently—possibilities that surfaced here and there, but never got codified into paradigms or sedimented into theories; possibilities that still lie dormant.