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Template Thinking: The ever narrowing border of human reason

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'Enlightnement is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere Aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!' - that is the motto of the enlightenment. - Immanuel Kant in 'What is the enlightenment'  Kant, who Rudolf  Steiner described as 'the guardian of the threshold', is not one among the philosophers of ancient thought, and reducing him to the same is a grievous error. While we might analyse a number of philosophers up to Descartes, and perhaps even Leibniz as corollaries for ancient wisdom, for a Nyaya-type or a Madhyamika-type philosopher, Kant, and all of Kant, and not just the COPR, are in my reading of modern times the last stand against the darkness of human thought.  But we have forgotten Ka...
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The stories animals tell us about ourselves

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The puny mahout, let him pull chains On the pillar like legs and lean his sharp goad. None of these the great tusker considered in the Dark recess of his crazed, loony, majestic brain. This adventurer is travelling in his imagination Waving the great ears of speckled deed of freedom In the playgrounds of his youth, in the valleys Of Sahya ranges, made dense by springtime. - from ‘Son of the Sahyadri’ by Vyloppilli Sreedhara Menon Introduction: Why Animals are ‘good to think’ Vyloppilli Sreedhara Menon a Malayalam poet from the middle of the 20th century wrote in a style that is perhaps best described as hyper-realistic. The details in his poems are very fine-grained. Many of his poems paint vivid pictures of village life through the two world wars, in Kerala, India. In the Malayalam poem quoted above, Sahyaente Makan, (Son of the Sahyadris) Menon tells the story of an elephant having a violent fit (literally going wild or ‘mast’ as the Hindi term has it) and eventually being shot by a ...
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