Patanjali’s Yoga Darsana – The Hatha Yoga Tradition

A Comparative Study of Their Means, Goals and Correspondences Introduction If atman is brahman in a pot (the body), then one need merely break the pot to fully realize the primordial unity of the individual soul with the plentitude of Being that was the Absolute.[1] In the above quote, which paraphrases the Chandogya Upanisad (6.8.7),…

Sartre’s Critique of the Freudian Explanation of Bad Faith

Sartre believes that a Freudian conception of consciousness is inadequate to explain the phenomenon of “bad faith” basically because of the fundamental differences between his construction of consciousness and Freud’s. Sartre believes that these differences, taken to their logical extremes, are enough to disprove Freud’s conception of consciousness. Sigmund Freud, unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, had a…

Free Will and the Ability to do Otherwise

Intuitively it seems that for an action to be free and for the agent performing the action to be held responsible for it, that agent must have the ability to do otherwise. In other words, to satisfy an assertion of freedom of action and agent responsibility the agent must be able to perform the action…

Schopenhauer’s Aesthetic System

Schopenhauer attempts to provide us with an explanation of ourselves and our place in the world, and how we should act in response to that world in order to escape its inherent suffering. But I feel that his description of the world and his prescription for living in it are conflicting and misguided. I have…

The Speechwriter

There are three types of men in the world, the men who follow, the men who lead, and the men who write the speeches of the men who lead. These types of men, these social strata and societal roles, differentiate man from man, as one is nobler than another, higher than another. And yet, despite…

Religious and Scientific Philosophy

For starters, before I go any further, do you believe in free will or do you believe in fate? Do we really have control over our own destiny or is freewill simply just a matter of illusion. I guess we could put it this way, if the divine supreme creator knows everything and I do mean everything including past, present, and future. That must apparently mean that we he first created the universe he wrote the entire universe on a divine determined plan, which is what philosophers know as the theory of determination.

Theories of Arete: Aristotle Meets Plato

The relationship between teacher and student is a complex one. The exchange of knowledge that occurs not only benefits the individual, but hopefully changes them as well. The relationship between Plato and Aristotle is uniquely complex in that they came to explore similar spaces of thought, though often through very different tints. Oftentimes, the places in which they disagree give greater depth to the places they actually overlap, and reveal a great deal about them each as intellectuals.