[MiklosHollender]

1. Seems to me Paul partly rediscovered Buddhism: great Buddhist philosophers of the Great Middle Way school use philosophy to demonstrate philosophy does not work. There is a great analysis of it:

http://www.bahai-library.org/personal/jw/other.pubs/nagarjun...

(This is where the Great Middle Way comes from: the middle way between existence and non-existence. We can prove Berkeley wrong just by kicking stone: it would be wrong to assert that that the phenomena don't exist in the casual, everyday sense. However, they don't exist in that sense that if we look deep into it the entity we casually define as a "stone" does not actually have a true and lasting essence, or identity.)

2. However, I believe philosophy, even though usually it is a bluff, is a necessary evil. How can we talk about politics without philosophy? How can one have any political opinion without at least having some ideas of what "good", esp. "a good life" is? (OK you can be an anarcho-capitalist without it but otherwise basically both Liberalism and Conservativism requires some definition of "good".)

Miklos Hollender