In this blog, I will elaborate on the similarities between my philosophy of Hyponoetics and the Indian philosophy of Jainism.

Hyponoetics is a philosophy based on the assumption that the ultimate reality, or the universe as a whole, manifests itself in a number of different aspects, the two most known to us human beings are mind and matter. The underlying reality is not a determinate system of physical and/or mental entities but may be considered as pure potentiality out of which the entities of our world, including consciousness and self, are manifested or objectified. Because reality is p...

The Swiss writer Peter Bichsel (born 1935) wrote a short story with the title 'Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch' (A table is a table) about language and meaning. It is about an old man who feels tired and suffers from the fact that his day passes always in the same way. Frustrated with his situation that nothing ever changes, he invents his own language by re-naming the objects in his room, for example, instead of calling the bed 'bed', he calls it 'picture' and so on with all the other things. As time goes on, h...

It is not well known that Schopenhauer proposed an explanation of psychic phenomena, such as clairvoyance, ESP and telepathy, based on his metaphysics of will. His open-mindedness and intention to embrace not only scientific and physical phenomena of the world but also address mental phenomena that do not fit into academic science but have a long history in human experience since the dawn of humankind, are remarkable.

Today, there is overwhelming scientific evidence that certain psychic phenomena are real and are not inconsistent with modern science, especially quantum physics. I will discuss Scho...

Leibniz uses the term 'perception' in a technical sense and defines it as follows:

The transitory state which enfolds and represents a multiplicity in a unity, or in the simple substance, is exactly what one calls perception. One must distinguish this from apperception and from consciousness...
[Monadology, sec. 14]

So it is well to make a distinction between perception, which is the inner state of the monad representing external things, and apperception, which ...

Spinoza postulated three different kinds of knowledge in his Ethica:

Ex omnibus supra dictis clare apparet nos multa percipere et notiones universales formare I° ex singularibus nobis per sensus mutilate, confuse et sine ordine ad intellectum repræsentatis (vide corollarium propositionis 29 hujus) et ideo tales perceptiones cognitionem ab experientia vaga vocare consuevi. II° ex signis exempli gratia ex eo quod auditis aut lectis quibusdam verbis rerum recordemur et earum quasdam ideas formemus similes iis per quas res imaginamur (vide scholium propositionis 18 huju...

The term 'archetype' (from Ancient Greek ἀρχέτυπον = archetype, pattern, model, also original image or idea (Urbild)) was first used by Plato to refer to the metaphysical forms or ideas, in which the sensible and perceptible things participate.

In modern philosophy, both Locke and Descartes introduced the term as the foundation of representations in our mind:

...dass in uns keine Idee oder kein Bild einer Sache sein kann, von dem nicht irgendwo in uns selbst oder ausser uns ein Urbild (archetypus) existiert, das...

Since the ancient Greek philosophers (esp. Plato and Aristotle), the question what a universal is, whether it exists ontologically or only epistemologically, and what its relation is to particulars, has occupied the mind of philosophers. Below, I summarize the main theories.

Platonism

In Plato, the universal as an abstract entity has its own independent spiritual being. The ideas are the actual being and constitute the reason for being and knowledge for the material single things. For Plato true knowledge is only possible of something immutable. The things perceptible by the s...