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  1. ppw, Any relationship, aside from marriage, is a limited one. Your relationship with your boss is based on exchanging trustworthy and valuable labor for money; that's the primary standard by which he should be impressed with you. Of course, it's not all about results: character plays a role, too, but only what the job requires. Cultivate good virtues, and let others think of you what they will; keep close to you those that are impressed by you, and let the others go on their way. You mentioned not being able to know that they're rational people. That's okay - they only have to be rational enough within the context of the relationship; anything else is theirs to deal with "off the clock". Leave out things that don't matter. Who cares if your boss is a Christian, or a bass fishing enthusiast, or Celine Dion fan, or anything else (rational or not) that doesn't matter at work? What matters is: does he treat you well, pay you fairly, and acknowledge your work? Or is he a micromanaging buffoon who sabotages your efforts? Leave out what doesn't matter, and you'll not only be able to focus on the values that will get you ahead in life, but you won't be distracted by your judgments of the unimportant aspects of the lives of those "higher up the chain".
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  2. To hold contradictory ideas simply means that you hold two beliefs about how the world works, and if the world did simultaneously work according to both of those beliefs, a contradiction would exist. Reason is not automatic, so there is nothing preventing you from holding ideas about the world that contradict eachother - i.e., ideas about reality that would result in a contradiction if they were simultaneously true. Any misunderstanding you have about this is simply due to equivocation - we use the same word ("contradiction") to refer to a) a state of reality (which cannot exist), and to ideas we hold about the state of reality (which can exist).
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  3. Publishing a Kindle Book 1) Inspired by The New York Times article about Kindle publishing (October 24, 2011), I prepared the third edition of my "Tyranny to Freedom ..." book, submitted the manuscript and the book was on the market in less than 24 hours. It costs only $0.99, the lowest permissible price. By the way, there are no shipping charges for Kindle books, delivered via Wi-Fi. 2) Those who want to learn from my limited technical experience producing a Kindle book are invited to visit this website: http://csam.montclai...indle/toc1.html 3) Will kindle devices replace traditional books? I do not think so. But many people say that I am wrong. Ludwik Kowalski (see Wikopedia) .
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  4. Never saw a final word with chapters in it before. And I still haven't read one.
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  5. Change does not imply negation of anything. This is a VERY old error, going all the way back to Heraclitus. He was the first known philosopher to attack what Aristotle later identified as the basic laws of logic. Specifically he attacked the Law of Identity and Contradiction. He stated change necessarily involves contradiction. He said, after change we have the SAME thing which is not the same (as opposed to substitution where we have a different thing from what existed before). A changing thing is an identity of opposites – it both IS and is NOT what it was and what it will be. This is a contradiction. Since all the world involves change, his view was that existence itself is contradictory. From this, he drew the conclusion that the "world stuff" - what the greeks considered the fundamental essence of everything - was change itself. He believed that there are no entities - no THINGS - at all. His famous aphorism was: “Nothing is. Everything is becoming.” “Everything flows and nothing abides.” This type of philosophy is called a process philosophy because it holds the change AS reality. Specifically, it is refered to as the "Heraclitian flux". Of course, Aristotle blew this view out of the water a few hundred years later. As he aptly pointed out, the concept change already presupposes non-contradictory identity. It assumes change FROM something TO something - from one identity TO another identity (without identity, there can be NO change). As he put it, change is "matter" taking on new "form". It is fully real, not Plato's mix of "being" and "non-being". Each particular – each primary substance is comprised of two elements: Forms - a universalizing element which constitutes the basis for putting it into a particular class and ascribing to it a certain nature Matter – an individualizing element which constitutes the basis of its uniqueness – that which makes it a ‘this’. In other words, matter is the stuff or material comprising a thing. Form is its structure or organization. And change is merely the process of this matter taking on a new form. Specifically, change is passage of matter from 'potentiality' to 'actuality', which occur in orderly, predictable ways. Put simply - no contradiction. Now, objectivism refines this formulation. However, this discussion has already gone FAR beyond the bounds of what can rationally be handled by a forum. As I have repeated multiple times, you CANNOT be taught a philosophy here (let alone an entire HISTORY of philosophy). As such, at this point, I can now ONLY advise you to get the book. Period. PS You ask where you would have implied anything outside the material world. You didnt imply it at all. You stated it EXPLICITLY. "The infinity of time, however, is within itself a contradiction, and is full of contradictions, since FROM THE OUTSIDE the infinity is solely consisting of finite measures, and yet that is the case."
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