Lazariun

Interesting that we are going over this in my History of Modern Philosophy class currently. Although we are reading the Critique of Pure Reason, the instructor will occasionally touch on Kant's view of morality. In his explanation, Kant regards moral law as on a higher order than happiness. Happiness is just the fulfillment of baser natural desires. The self is tied to the body and it's humors, the knowable, causal connections that have been brought about via nature and nurture. Moral duty is of the noumenal world, i.e. the intelligible but unknowable realm. The ideal, the kingdom of heaven is to have both, but, if you cannot have both it is far greater to do your duty than be happy. As my instructor put it, when I asked for further clarification, "The moral man would rather burn in the fires of hell if it meant doing his duty."

Sweet. More Kentuckians. Welcome. :>

From what I recall, I heard a clip of this radio show and a nurse called in telling the DJs of the danger involved. They joked openly about it on air.

Basically it is a balancing game. You fight and it immediately tells you your results for the battle. Your rank, strength and quality of weapon determine how much damage you do. I am not certain on the slot machine rotation thing, but I think it is basically luck of the draw on who you end up fighting. I speculate that if you are unlucky you could end up getting hurt pretty bad (in terms of damage). I do not know what the difference between damage and wellness is. Either way, in my experience you typically lose about 10 to 15 wellness per fight, and you can't even fight if you are below 40 wellness. They idea is to fight in a battle and then use the hospital to increase your wellness beyond where it was. Example: You have 45 wellness, you fight in the USA vs. Russian war in the Alabama battle. There is a quality 3 hospital. You fight and lose 10 wellness, you are now down to 35 wellness. You click "go back to battlefield" and there will be a "use hospital button". Since it is a quality 3 hospital, you will get 30 wellness, so now you are at 65 wellness. For this reason it is generally best to avoid fighting multiple times per day unless you know that you can make your way back up to fighting condition for the next day (via food). Juxtys and I bought gifts and traded several with one another in generally equal amounts. This helped us heal back up for the next day. So I think eventually we should have professional soldiers that fight, train, and buy gifts of equal value for one another and then trade 1 for 1 to help heal each other up into fighting form. It seems there are even organizations in the game that gather in IRC channels and organize their strikes in mass. For instance, read the site's wiki on the eUS Marine Corps. They are all general rank, 14 strength and attack at once. Pretty cool.

Yes, this is my interest. I am strongly interested in it at this point. I love philosophy, and I think Rand is correct. I would like to help further Objectivism as the prevalent position in academia, as I believe that will have a trickle-down effect into the sciences and culture as a whole.

I think I have a decent understanding. It helps that I came to many of the same conclusions as Rand before I encountered her, but she helped me untangle my mixed premises and discard some bad ideas. I've read AS, VoS and OPAR. My grasp is strong, although in discussion with a philosophy professor it can be a chore to explain. I haven't completely integrated it to the point I can seamlessly debate and refute every claim thrown at me. But no worries, I have no intention of becoming an intrinsicist anytime soon. I did think it was interesting that this professor's favorite philosopher was Hegel. I don't know much about him, but I gather that he was an influence on Marx. Most of the time as I described Objectivism's take on the topics we were discussing he would interject and say, "Oh, well, that's Locke." or "Well, that's Hobbes." or "That sounds like Kant's Categorical Imperative sloppily mashed with Nietszche." His general complaint seemed to be that she didn't come up with anything new. That immediately seemed niggling to me though. From what I can see, very few philosophers have come up with any completely original ideas since Plato and Aristotle. They all seem like variations on the same ideas. Rand seems original in that she argues from the validity of the senses, accepts only what reason dictates and doesn't accept the mixed results of other philosopher's packaged ideas. Sure, there are some similarities, and maybe she was influenced, but that didn't strike me as the kind of damning dismissal he couched it as. Besides, if we were dismissing people's ideas on the grounds of influence I think he'd be on much shakier legs. There is one thing I do like about this man though. He didn't immediately dismiss me or my positions. He seemed interested in learning, and regarding Relativism he said: "Relativism disgusts me also. I think it should disgust anyone who loves truth."

Today I sat with one of my philosophy professors in his office discussing some of our course material and tangential subjects that came up. One of these was Rand, and my influence to become a philosophy major due to her work. My professor was quite surprised by this, and I responded that that didn't surprise -me-, as many Philosophers claim that her philosophy isn't very rigorous. I myself am beginning to get some inkling of why they say this. Much of Rand's work seems scattered over several different writings, and a concise dialectic hasn't really been written. Even Peikoff's OPAR doesn't seem that in depth when compared to the Cogito. Admittedly, my professor labored under some of the very common misunderstandings about Rand and Objectivism. I explained some of these that I understood, and he seemed opened to listening to them, but what this whole conversation has left me with is a desire to integrate Rand into the education I will receive in University. So how do Objectivist philosophers answer the claim that Rand's philosophy isn't rigorous?

The poster presumes that life is a zero-sum game and that human history is nothing but a war of different collectives, whether tribal, racial or social, all out to strangle one another for the lead. It is a false sum of the whole of human history, but it is what many collectivists believe: We're just a bunch of animals unknowingly marching to the tune of our genes or social zeitgeist, beating one another with clubs to get the most resources, to breed the most. It's a pretty sick, malevolent view of humankind.

Just joined and made Level 2 today. I'm Lazariun on there as well.

Your position is self-refuting. If you will not accept axioms because they are "something that exists in our minds", then you will accept no argument whether based on logic or not. So what is the point of you even taking a position? Why post here? Why ask a question at all and expect any answer? It is all something that exists in your mind.

Tabula Rasa means that you have no inborn ideas. Man still has a particular nature according to his biology, his genetics, his cognitive faculty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVChNmN9y7E...player_embedded "How can a President speak the kind of poetry that President Obama does about the Rule of Law, and call for the power to indefinitely, preventively, inprision people because they might commit crimes in the future?" How can those two things coexist in the same man.. even in the same speech?" Easy answer there Rachel: Blank out. Or Doublethink, if you prefer. Or, to put it simply, philosophical Pragmatism. Is it just me or is this the Left getting a glimpse at it's own reflection?

I have gone from being a bitter, communist-sympathizing youth, to a standard nihilist, to finally awakening to reason. It was because of the webcomic artist Jay Naylor and his blog that I first became aware of Ayn Rand and later learned as much as I could about her via the internet. The first book of her's that I read was For the New Intellectual on a plane flight to California and became so absorbed in the book that I hardly put it down all vacation. All my adult life I had been coming to the conclusions that Rand had outlined one at a time and here they seemed laid out. Her logic was impeccable. The reasoned measure of her writing impossible to hold a consistent argument against. Since then, I've had a fondness for her nonfiction.

I read Better Days, Order of the Stick, Lackadaisy, Penny Arcade, XKCD and Keychain of Creation.

It is interesting to recognize the heroic in even animals. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x88o46_what-a-dog_animals