Universals Versus Particulars: The Ultimate Intellectual War (eBook)

There's a huge hole in how humanity thinks about reality. The problem is a very old one, but only a tiny group of philosophers ever took an interest in it. To the average person, it's an obscure and unfathomable issue. To the truly intelligent, it's the key to understanding existence. To clarify this issue is to get rid of so much junk in the way of humanity's ability to explain reality. If you consider yourself one of the smartest people in the world, you have to do what unintelligent people never do, and that s to become interested in the most rarefied topics, topics which seem absurd to the simple-minded, to the sort of people who aren t in the game of explaining reality and never could be. The topic of universals versus particulars is about as unlikely as it gets for understanding our existence, and yet that s exactly where we must look to find the ultimate answers. This debate allows us to makes sense of a foundational problem of science: why science is totally dependent on mathematics even though the mathematical method contradicts the scientific method in every way. Mathematics is for thinking types (rationalists), science for sensing types (empiricists). These are two totally different types of people. Never get them confused. You have to choose a side. The supreme question is whether reality is scientific (material; particular; sensible) or mathematical (mental; universal; intelligible). To put it another way, is reality dead or alive? Is it a mechanism or an organism? Is it stupid, with no purpose, as science says, or is it intelligent, and relentlessly calculating the answer to itself, and driving itself to perfect completion, as it must if it is mathematical?Are you smart enough to understand the answer? Most people aren t. According to Kurt Godel, a global conspiracy has been in place for centuries to stop humanity from studying Leibniz, the supreme rationalist, and thus, through this neglect, to make men stupid. There might as well be a global conspiracy given how far mathematical rationalism has fallen in order to create space for scientific empiricism, its philosophical opposite. Scientists, the people of the senses, even claim to be champions of reason and logic. As if!It s time for the greatest paradigm shift of all: from scientific empiricism to mathematical rationalism, from sensing to thinking, from observation to logic, from matter to mind.