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Syamasundara dasa: Alexander is the philosopher of emergent evolution. For him, external objects have an existence independent of consciousness. Unlike many other philosophies, Alexander’s neorealism contends that something may exist even though it is not perceived. Srila Prabhupada: Yes, that is so. God exists whether we perceive Him or not. God is the original creator, […]
Hayagriva dasa: Bergson maintained that God’s reality can be intuited only by mystical experience. The creative effort “is of God if it is not God Himself. ” This knowledge of God leads to activity, not passivity. Srila Prabhupada: Yes, knowledge of God certainly leads to activity. For instance, in bhakti-yoga we are engaged twenty-four hours […]
Hayagriva dasa: Huxley felt that the main difference between man and the animals is the ability to speak. In his essay “Man and the Lower Animals,” he writes: “Man alone possesses the marvelous endowment of intelligible rational speech, whereby … he has slowly accumulated and organized the experience which is almost lost with the cessation […]
Hayagriva dasa: Darwin’s conception of evolution rests on the premise that there is a real genetic change from generation to generation. In other words, he rejects the Platonic eidos (idea, type, or essence) for a species. Whereas Krsna says that He is the generating seed of all existences, Darwin would reject the existence of a […]
Hayagriva dasa: For Schopenhauer, happiness is inactive satisfaction, inactivity, nirvarya. Since the will to live is the irrational urge that brings about all suffering, he advocates the extinction of this world. In The World As Idea, he writes: “The Vedas and Pural)as have no better simile than a dream for the whole knowledge of the […]
Syamasundara dasa: Hegel sought to synthesize other philosophies to arrive at the truth, and in so doing, he concluded that everything that exists is reason; what is real is rational, and what is rational is real. Srila Prabhupada: This means that he wanted to arrive at the Absolute in whom there is no duality. That […]
Hayagriva dasa: Fichte is not as important as Kant or Hegel, but he is in the same tradition. He followed pretty much in the footsteps of Kant. In his first work, entitled Our Belief in a Divine Government of the Universe, he writes: “Our belief in a moral world order must be based on the […]
Syamasundara dasa: In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant asks the fundamental question, “How are a priori synthetic judgments possible?” How can we apprehend the relationship between cause and effect? Where does this facility come from? What is the source of knowledge? He proposes that one knowledge-acquiring process, the transcendental aesthetic, synthesizes sense experience through the […]
Hayagriva dasa: Abstract objects, relations, space, time, and matter are all considered by Hume to be mind-dependent perceptions. For him, perceptions or impressions are all there is. He rejected revealed religion, which he considered dogmatic, and accepted “natural religion” instead, a religion wherein the existence of God can be proved or even shown to be […]
Hayagriva dasa: Berkeley seems to argue against objective reality. For instance, three men standing in a field looking at a tree could all have different impressions or ideas of the tree. The problem is that although there are three different impressions of the tree, there is no tree as such. Now, how does the tree […]
