My own philosophy is a curious blend of Eastern and Western thought. Among my favorite philosophers are Nagarjuna, Lao Zi, Chuang Zi, Shankara, Huang Po, Soren Kierkegaard, David Hume, and Ludwig Feuerbach.
Logic. I taught logic when I first returned to Hamilton and came to appreciate its intricacies. The problems I find with logical reasoning are two:
Logical argument, then, is only as dependable as the words and generalizations that are used in it and they are, to my mind, always questionable.
Epistemology. What we know (or think we know) comes to us largely through our five senses or their extensions, but such knowledge of the senses exists in the mind and not in the world. In others words, what we know as color, smell, taste, hardness, etc. is the creation of our minds. Moreover, what we sense is radically shaped by our language and culture so that what we consciously sense is filtered by all those cultural assumptions that we have absorbed. Thus, we live in a world of our own and our culture’s making. The only reason why your world and mine are alike is because we have (I think) similar sense organs and, perhaps, a similar culture. How our world compares to that of an ant I have no idea.
Our world is created by sensory response to certain phenomena, but other phenomena (such as cosmic rays) do not affect our senses. If we sensed these other phenomena, we would live in a very different world. Moreover, we do not even know of the existence of many of the so-called phenomena out there because we cannot sense them. Nor should we think that the scientific extensions of our senses can know everything outside us either. It would appear that to explain the cosmos as it is, science must postulate dark energy and dark matter that constitute a large percentage of the universe and are called “dark” precisely because we cannot sense them. If we ever do develop mechanisms to “sense” them, one can be sure that there will be more darkness beyond them.
What science has done is to demonstrate that our own sensory world is illusion. The world of science is largely colorless, odorless empty space with subatomic particles acting in weird ways. The problem, however, is that this new world is just as mental as the ordinary world. It is a world of things because it is what scientists think. (Notice that mathematics, a purely mental structure, dominates physics.)
Moreover, science has not yet quite accepted the obvious truth that it is the “Here and Now” of consciousness that makes time and space appear real. If there were no here, there could be no there. If there were no now, past and future would have no meaning. Time and space, as Kant pointed out long ago, are structures of the mind.
Ultimately reality is NOT what we think and hence is no thing. We can create worlds through our senses and through our scientific extensions, but what we create will always be mental (whatever that means). It is true that we then can use what we have created to do all sorts of things. We can grow crops and split atoms and fly to the moon, but that takes place within the realm of human conception. I am always reminded of Ptolemy, the ancient astronomer who could predict eclipses and other heavenly phenomena. He became the authority for understanding the heavens even though, it was later discovered, he was dead wrong about his understanding of the universe. He thought the sun went around the earth. It is more than likely that in the future we will discover that many of the great scientific breakthroughs were successful even though they were based upon what will be later thought of as misunderstandings.
Metaphysics. He who speaks does not know. He who knows does not speak. Metaphysics as thought is no more. Nagarjuna long ago offered the destruction of all views. The light that enlightens every person is no thing. Ultimately whatever we think we know is based upon unproven assumptions that appear self-evident but in fact are not.
Ethics. Unlike ants and bees, we humans do not have the knowledge of how to form communities built into us. Nor is there any easy way to determine what the correct way of organizing and living in a community is or even whether there is a correct way. Thus many societies have relied upon “revealed” commandments to provide absolute moral certainty. If God said it, it must be true. The trouble is other Gods have said other things and so there is no certainty as to what is correct. Once one has settled upon basic principles, then logic can play its role, but arriving at basic principles is very difficult. Despite what Thomas Jefferson wrote, there are no self-evident truths. My own principles, therefore, are my own. For me, agape is what matters. Remember the light that is the root of every human being and treat each person, particularly your enemy, with infinite respect and compassion.
In sum then, I am what I call an absolute skeptic. I call it skepticism because an analysis of our thinking implies that there is no certain knowledge. All of our knowledge and our values are bounded by our personal and cultural assumptions. I call it absolute because this skepticism is not based, as some skepticism is, upon some other sure and certain truth (as scientists might well be skeptical of astrology). Moreover, since there may be someone somewhere who knows. I must be skeptical about absolute skepticism too.