Reply To: Smart people and the marketplace of ideas

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#943135
Logician
Participant

OK, I re-read your posts.

You agree we don’t have to know everything through logic. You question how one can be intellectually honest and not listen to other opinions which may contradict what he may believe, if logic trumps all.

This is precisely the point of the Rambam. Our decisions our all through our logic. But we VERY LOGICALLY understand that we very often overestimate our logical abilities, and so we curtail our own studies – according to the guidelines of Chazal, of course.

My other post wasn’t addressing you, but others who seemed to be going along this path. In any event:

I did not mean that there does not exist absolute truth. I meant that it is not the definition of truth we believe in. Something can be true, and not “absolute truth” in the usual sense.

Have you ever studied any work along the lines of, say, Nefesh haChaim ? The existence of this world is an (humanly) unsolvable paradox, for there cannot be any true existence except for G-d. A careful reading of these seforim show that they do not resolve this paradox, but show how we deal with each of these dual realities respectively. And the same for many other philosophical dilemmas.