Ethics

My most recent epiphany is thus:

We can trace one of the fundamental screw ups in philosophy back to Plato (and yes, I do enjoy that). Plato's serach for an 'objective' foundation for Socratic ethics has left us a nightmare of a legacy. I do not consider myself an ethical relativist yet I have decided that the absolute relativity of ethics is precisely that which makes ethics objective. We do not need Plato's perfect objective forms to bring us back from the brink of barbarism. What we need is cultural and intellectual globalization.

I am now wondering what it is I still need the transcendent for?

Thoughts

I think that I may be very interested in the stuff going on at the Metaphysics Research Lab (see link on the right).

I have also started a list of the the philosophers which I think that I like:
Heraclitus
Nietzsche
Wittgenstein
(and therefore I should probably familiarize myself with Schopenhauer)
Clifford
Heidegger?
Sartre

Also, on another note, I have been thinking of my aversion to faith. The problem with 20th century philosophy is that while I consider myself more of an empiricist than a rationalist I would not consider myself particularly amicable toward analytic philosophy. This means that in some way I am still holding on to the transcendent and, depending on the system one wants to use to look at the world, 'reason' does not seem to be able to bridge the gap between the world and the transcendent and is something one must reach through faith. This leaves me feeling somewhat sick. I wonder if my resistence to faith is simply because of the common meaning attached to the word or, is it faith itself and, that I think there must be some sort of reasoned and justified way of getting to metaphysical structures.

The problem of philosophy...

The Problem of philosophy (abbreviated, somewhat recovered, version one) is the inability to critically analyze ones own ideas, sources, relations, presuppositions, goals, etc., no matter the orientation of the philosopher. This is precisely why philosophers are able to find so many holes in each others theories or systems and is also the reason why philosophy always seems to regress rather than to progress. However, it is precisely this activity that is the most fruitful despite that on the surface it seems interminable.

That said, I have now decided that THE problem of philosophy is thus: the human mind. This is not the mind-body problem but the problem of the mind 'in itself', the problem of understanding our own understanding and whether or not the way in which we understand 'the world' (presupposing that we have decided how it is that we do understand the world) is an appropriate way to try to understand the mind (that which is not tangible).