Thursday, March 24, 2011

In philosophy there have been two schools of thought running counter to each other, one side looks at the material world and from the uniqueness of physical truths(reality) deduces that morality and other value judgments are also of this nature. These abstractions too have eternal veracity like laws of nature. Thus a bad action is a bad action inherently, regardless of its consequences. This is a basic element of Aristotelian thought. On the contrary there goes another school of thought, it looks at the multiplicity of sense-perceptions and variety of moral values and concludes that all facts of the material world have similar multiplicity. There is no single truth(reality), sense perceptions are subjective so are the truths of material world perceived through senses. No this is not exactly like solipsism or anything of that short, because though these schools base their theory on the variety of sense perceptions, they believe that ultimate truth is one and unchangeable. Whereas here it is admitted that truths themselves have multiplicity, for example its possible that two mutually contradictory theories may be true. This I think is distinctively a Hindu philosophy(if that's a proper term), i don't remember to have come across anything like this in western philosophy(in my very limited amount of knowledge). Though this philosophy seems very innovative at first, i think it suffers from a careless metaphysical treatment, it's not well explained or not well understood if explained.

To a modern scientific mindset none of these schools may appeal, however they are very interesting and enlightening.

P.F: written a bit carelessly, may not be a very accurate classification.

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