Kant is an extremely underrated philosopher. He had some absolutely great ideas. Some of them are similar to principles of my own philosophy, such as his “categorical imperative” and stance as a nondeterminist, while others are similar to principles of Panidealism (which I guess is another facet of my own philosophy), such as the absolute inability to know what the nature of free will is and thus the lack of ability to make an objective moral judgment based on this inability. If you replace morals and free will with a general concept of an “idea”, you have a central Panidealist tenet. Actually, a quick review of his main works indicates that Kant may have hit on this in his “Critique of Pure Reason” (which, in my defense, took him 10 years to write) – the resulting philosophy is called “transcendental idealism”. However, it’s only one Panidealist principle, although an important one, and so my philosophy chugs onward.

Even where his ideas differ from mine, they remain intriguing.

So far I’ve been told my developing philosophy has similarities with Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Berkeley, and Russel, and, aside from the Republic, I’ve never studied any of their philosophy. I don’t study philosophy as a subject, as I believe that it’s foolish to let your own philosophy be influenced by the thoughts of others. I simply think, and the philosophy of others just… emerges.

Even if it bears similarities with other philosophers, my philosophy remains new at least in how I combine these principles. The best way to forge ahead in philosophy is to simply ignore everything that came before and think. Maybe you’ll reinvent many things. Maybe you’ll say the same thing in different ways. But somewhere in there, there will be novelty.