William O

Definitely don't give up on trying to make friends and socialize. Even if you don't find anyone you particularly like, it's important to develop and practice good social skills as a teenager. I am not advocating conformity or giving up on your principles, just acknowledging the practical reality that you are going to have to get along with a variety of different types of people in your professional life and you need to start practicing now. For example, when your office manager is trying to decide who to give a promotion to, he is more likely to promote you if you can demonstrate that you can get along with people easily, because that will make you a more effective leader. It's not just about making friends and being popular in high school, being able to get along with people is a marketable skill, just like learning to program or balance a check book.

I may have originally intended to include a question in the OP. Thanks for moving the post.

I would recommend that people not buy the specific version of that book that you linked to. What you linked to is a cheap "reproduction" of the book, which basically means they took a PDF of the book, printed in out in poor quality, and bound it together with some cheap binding. I would recommend holding out for an actual printed copy of the book or looking for a PDF online, since it has surely passed into the public domain by now. Edit: I am referring to the Windelband book in this post. I will add that I know all this because I made the mistake of buying such a "reproduction" of John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic, which was expensive and completely illegible. I also bought a reproduction of Plato's Timaeus, which I found out later was literally just a copy and paste of the Project Gutenberg text. These "reproductions" are huge scams. Edit 2: I was right, the whole thing is available for free online. https://archive.org/stream/historyofphiloso007974mbp

I think the OP is just trying to sort out some ideas he got from Nietzsche, so there's no reason to assume he would resist requests to clarify his position.

Eioul, I think a good way to proceed would be to try to identify the most fundamental point at which you disagree with Objectivism. Objectivism is a hierarchy, so we should be able to draw a line and say "we agree about everything before this point, but beyond this point we diverge." You presumably agree with the Objectivist metaphysics and epistemology, or at least you haven't explicitly objected to either of them. You have also said that you agree that life is the standard, which means you accept Rand's solution of the is-ought problem. So, the next step is the virtues. Do you disagree with Rand's account of the virtues, or is that common ground as well?

This article has a good critique of Harris from an Objectivist point of view. https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2008-fall/mystical-ethics-new-atheists/

One point I haven't seen brought up yet is that, for a dictator like this to succeed in practice, they would need most of the population of the country to have been persuaded to accept the values of Objectivism already. If the majority of the people didn't accept the values the dictator was imposing on them, then there would be an uprising and the dictator would be overthrown.

How would you make sure that the charismatic business leader you chose to run your society didn't pass legislation favoring his own area of business? There is already a ton of corporate interference with the government, and a number of people have switched back and forth between high powered positions in business and the government.

Eiuol, would it be fair to say that you accept the Objectivist ethics, but are questioning Rand's derivation of her politics from that ethics?

Yes, well, this is a description of materialism. Materialism is the claim that everything is composed of matter, including consciousness, and that is what you wrote here nearly word for word.

This assumes that materialism is true, and as far as I know there is no evidence that Rand was a materialist. She laid down some constraints on a valid solution to the mind body problem, but she didn't take a specific position like materialism.

I read this last night, but I didn't trust myself to give a proper response because I was tired. I read it again this morning. I think you have a valuable point here, and I will try to integrate it with my understanding of Aristotle's logic. If I understand you correctly, your point is that an inductive argument has to be either simple, proceeding from the differentia of the category, or relational, proceeding from a broader genus that the category belongs to. A particularly clear illustration of what I take to be your point here might be found in geometry. I can demonstrate that a right triangle obeys the Pythagorean theorem by reference to the differentia of a right triangle, but to demonstrate that the angles of a right triangle add up to 180 degrees I need to move up to the genus "triangle" and demonstrate the point of all triangles. This insight is related to the concept of a property in Aristotle's logic. According to Aristotle, a property is a predicate that holds of all and only the subject and is not contained in its definition. If the predicate holds of all instances of the subject category but holds of other instances outside the subject category as well, it is not a property of the subject category but of some broader category that contains the subject category. For example, mortality is a property of living things, not of animals or human beings, even though all animals and human beings are mortal. Now, my suggestion about your theory is that it should be presented as a theory of deduction, not induction. This is for two reasons. First, it applies to fields that are entirely deductive, like geometry in my example above. Second, the processes of simple induction and relational induction as you describe them do not seem to involve drawing inferences from any fresh observations, since the reasoning you describe is all done within the context of a previously established conceptual framework.

When you say that you are not cut out to be an intellectual, keep in mind that Objectivist intellectuals like Yaron Brook have been studying Objectivism seriously for many years with the help of Leonard Peikoff. It's not fair to compare where you are now with where they are now.

I have read Spinoza's main work, the Ethics, and some secondary literature. I am by no means a scholar, though. I think the main difference between Spinoza and Rand is that Spinoza is a hard determinist and Rand believes in free will. The basis for this difference is how they each interpret the shared premise that everything that exists is necessary. Spinoza interprets this as meaning that everything acts according to strictly deterministic physical and mental laws, whereas Rand thinks that there is room for free will because free will follows from the nature of man. Spinoza is also a psychological egoist, or at least pretty close to it. He thinks that everything we do is done out of self preservation, which is related to his determinism. Rand would say that we can choose to act out of self denial, like when we evade or act according to false moral premises that we have accepted from the culture. James Taggart in Atlas Shrugged may be a good illustration of the difference, here, because if I recall correctly his basic premise turned out to be nihilism. Spinoza would say that such a person is as impossible as one plus one adding up to three. Spinoza and Rand agree that the goal of life is happiness, and they would agree that reason is the way to arrive at happiness. Their specific approaches are different, though, because they have different views about human psychology. Spinoza puts more emphasis on scientific and philosophical inquiry, because he thinks that they can help us achieve tranquility by grasping nature as a unified necessary system. Rand's ethics is a bit more action oriented. I apologize for any inaccuracies in this post, and I appreciate any further thoughts anyone may have.

There is some work by Objectivists that attempts to relate Objectivism to academic philosophy. http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Their-Role-Knowledge-Philosophical/dp/0822944243

I apologize for that. In my defense, the forums I usually post on aren't Objectivist forums, so saying that someone is acting as a rationalist is not taken as the deadly insult there that it is here. I need to get used to the social norms on this forum.

One way to get a lot of the same information and probably retain it better would be to take some classes at a university.

This is a useful criticism, thanks.

There is a concept in psychology called the "prototype." Basically, the idea is that people form ideas about what an "ideal" instance of a category would be and then use that ideal to help classify instances of the category. For example, most people would say that the "ideal" dog has four legs, not three. There's not necessarily anything in reality that our prototype of a category directly corresponds to, it's just the "ideal" that we form due to our experiences. Prototypes are different from concepts, as I understand it. Concepts are objective classifications of things, whereas prototypes are more subjective and can vary from person to person. They are more like heuristics. Now, I would like to put forward a guess, which is that a person's concept of God probably maps pretty closely to their prototype of a human being. You can almost deduce that from the definition of God, actually. God is allegedly a morally perfect being, so if Bob thinks an ideal human would have a certain trait, like bravery, then we would expect Bob to think that God does in fact have that trait. This is a testable hypothesis, and it is likely that an experiment has already been done on it somewhere (I can't be the first person this has occurred to). I would appreciate any input from people here who know more about psychology than I do. Edit: I should add that obviously there are going to be certain differences between a person's concept of God and their prototype of a human being. For example, people obviously don't conclude that God has two legs because the ideal human does. The correspondence would only be in specific respects, and it would be interesting to see what those respects are exactly. I suspect that character traits like bravery are one such respect, as I mentioned above.

The misunderstanding that the OP had about Objectivism has been clarified, so I'm going to add a point that I think more people need to realize about interpreting philosophers correctly: In general, don't trust any claim about what a philosopher believed that you find on the internet, on radio talk shows, etc., unless it is backed up by textual evidence from the philosopher or you know that it is true on independent grounds. If you have the opportunity, then you should also ask the person who made the claim for concrete evidence that that is what the philosopher believed. People are way too quick to accept claims about what a philosopher believed given how hard it is to interpret a philosopher correctly, and there are misconceptions in circulation about most philosophers. Usually these are just honest misreadings, but there are also more serious misconceptions about Ayn Rand and other philosophers who said very controversial things, like Nietzsche, that could be malicious. Here is the rule I use: You know that a philosopher thought X if and only if (1) you have read something they wrote in context and know of specific passages that support the claim that they believed X, or (2) you have read a reputable secondary source and confirmed that the secondary source says that they believed X.

Welcome.

I just had an interesting exchange with my mother. We were discussing a work on the history of American political philosophy when she said (roughly, I'm repeating this from memory) "Of course, there would be no way to present that material objectively. They would have to bring some sort of bias into it." I asked, "why?" She said, "well, you would have to present it from the perspective of someone's assumptions." I said, "if the assumptions it's based on are justified, then it's not biased." She looked at me blankly and said, "it's either neutral or it's biased." At this point I changed the subject. I should add that my mother is a rational person with respect to practical things - she is a successful doctor, hard working, and very conscientious. She is also willing to change her beliefs about an issue when presented with a good argument. She is not philosophical, though, which is probably the reason she absorbed this idea from the culture.

It seems like your concern about skepticism is drawing you towards rationalism. At least, that explanation is consistent with your last couple of posts, which demonstrate that you accept the axioms as AAA knowledge but are careful about taking inductive scientific reasoning as AAA knowledge even if it is supported by thousands of observations like the theory of evolution. The acceptance of axioms but not observational evidence as certain is a hallmark of rationalism. This is just a tentative diagnosis based on your last couple of posts, of course. You have to decide whether it is actually representative of what is going on in your mind.

As an aside, I have found that studying the evidence for the theory of evolution is a good way to get a sense for how an inductive proof of a scientific theory works. It doesn't require much mathematics to understand and the reasoning is very clear and powerful. For example, take the biogeographical evidence. Animals on islands near a continent tend to resemble animals on the mainland, but they are adapted to the specific niches available on the island. In addition, the animals found on these islands tend to be small creatures that could easily be blown by the wind or carried to the island on driftwood, like birds, insects, and small lizards. Each of these generalizations is supported by countless observations, and the only possible conclusion to draw from them is that the animals on the islands arrived there by chance and evolved to fill the niches available. I recommend Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True if you want to study this more. It's aimed at creationists, but there is a lot to learn in there about philosophy of science if you know how to analyze the examples he gives.

Congratulations! This is quite an accomplishment.