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2046

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  1. If you’re not familiar with it, you should probably not completely make something up about it. Agent is from the Latin agens which just refers to the subject of action. Agent causation refers to change caused by an agent rather than event. Agents can be rocks, birds, a match being lit, ice melting, or people acting. Some theorists use agent for humans specifically, or for any particular substance that persists through time.
  2. I think this is good. I am a big fan of the priority of understanding the problem over any specific solution. And I am a big opponent of what I take to be a hand-wavy and strawman-y way of doing philosophy. The connection between appearance and reality is a basic starting point and leads us to these themes of realism vs idealism, thus the accessibility of reality becomes a question. Once we start taking about perception, another basic theme that emerges is the question about the active or passive nature of the mind. If there is a mind-independent reality, one possible way of coming into contact with it is by being a passive recipient of information originating outside of it. If we look at our best physiology and optics and so forth, and we start seeing that the mind is more more active, then we get the pushback against the passive model. It is now easy to caricature the view. And if then, on the other hand, minds have a much more active role, it’s easy to say that reality is then in some sense dependent on them. Then we extend that to saying our perceptual apparatus is not the only way that mind conditions reality, but our conceptual schemes as well. It’s not far to full blown idealism from there. The question is partially whether any of that really follows from the initial premise. The question of primacy is a different, but related one that follows the accessibility issue. If there is no way to hook onto a mind-independent reality, in what way can it hold any prime significance in our schemes? And if we have to jettison our active picture of mind in the process, why hold onto an inaccessible something that can’t be checked? Defeating direct realism becomes a matter of simply pointing to the activity of the mind and perception. Pointing out that direct realism does not imply the passive “bucket theory” of perception becomes important. But, it is to be stressed, that isn’t the same thing as saying direct realism is a product of some proof or deduction. It becomes more a question of how and how not to defend direct realism.
  3. Is this a good way of processing philosophical arguments? Only if this parallel piece of reasoning is also good: Idealist arguments against the primacy of existence can be divided into … Idealists say… Some idealists appeal to So-and-so’s authority but we all know that’s a stupid fallacy… idealists often argue… Where the ellipses are you can substitute some apparently dumb thing. Note how I never cite any idealist specifically, and never name anyone specific. If pressed I can just say “well that’s what I’ve heard them say” in conversations or online or something. What a great philosopher I am, it’s tough being such a good philosopher like me! Note I don’t think there’s not a point to be made about Rand or Peikoff’s depth of treatment of any of these specific issues. Or of the “average objectivist” talk about idealism vs realism. But this isn’t anything more than blowing off steam and huffing about it.
  4. That is not at all what that section of OPAR (45-6) is saying. He doesn’t say anything about anything’s being outlandish, that is not what “meta puffs” refer to, but a stand-in for whatever the fundamental particle or building blocks of matter is supposed to be. And the point he’s trying to make isn’t that whatever the fundamental particle turns out to be, it “doesn’t refute Objectivism,” he says it doesn’t have any philosophical significance. I think this is false if taken in the literal sense, because whether or not there even can be a fundamental building block of matter, and what matter is, is itself a question for philosophy of nature. But anyways, that’s not the point of that section “sensory qualities as real.” But more to your question: what if the scientific consensus were such and such, would that be a problem, well only if you assume scientism were true. Scientism here meaning something in the neighborhood of “truth is just what the scientific consensus says it is.” If that’s not true, then it’s not a problem for any philosophy necessarily, not just Objectivism. Anyways, in general what science even is and what methods it employs and question it should be addressed is also itself discussed in philosophy. So without answering those questions, the further downstream question of what is objectivism’s relationship to scientific consensus is not really helpful.
  5. Hey hey no technical jargon here you elitist! By the way, since this was a point under contention in this thread, I'd like to post ARs comments on this, from a letter to John Hospers:
  6. Most objectivists are like most amateur philosophy hobbyists in general: they're roleplayers.
  7. I do appreciate a good book summary. But as you may have guessed, I have different thoughts. I'm glad you brought up dogmatic philosophy as a technical term because that's part of what I mean here. You say at once that you don't care for such academic claptrap as using strict technical terms for things (my words.) You only are interested in philosophy insofar as it contributes lessons to living your life. But also your main thesis is what Objectivists think about Kant. They get him wrong! I wanna fix that! I'm sorry but I do see a tension between those things. Don't get me wrong, pursue whatever your interested in. I think I get the motivation: suppose two people you're friends with are fighting. If only they realized how much they have in common. You want Randians to like German philosophers because that's what you like. But if what you're interested in is what we call a reputational rehabilitation of Kant in a very specific philosophical circle, then precisely using specific technical terms (and in ways that appeal into that circle's framework) is going to be a huge part of that. I think this list is great. Any one of them could be its own fullblown topic. But we need references to the text, and explanations of the terms into mutual language, and argument as to how they are similar or different. Do they reach the same conclusions from different premises? If so why? Etc. Here are some examples of his type of thing being done well. (And some are just blog posts.) "Rand, Kant, and the Objectivity of Colour" Roderick T. Long "Rand on Kant: Let’s Use This as a Teaching Moment" Jason Brennan "Conceptualism in Abelard and Rand" Peter Saint-Andre "Ayn Rand and Friedrich A. Hayek: A Side-by-Side Comparison" Edward W. Younkins
  8. Thank you, I was unsure what was going on there. My comments will be limited to matters of interpretation (until the very end.) When you're doing something like this, there is always the danger of stretching things out too much. There is also the danger of verbal agreement or disagreement when people are using words out of historical context and applying them to different people. In other words, of a sort of anachronism and equivocation. Example: Suppose set myself to claiming Aristotle was a libertarian on the issue of free will. And I just claim that in passing in a paper about some different topic. Is that okay? Well, is he a libertarian? It's hard to say. The controversies over free will and determinism postdate his writings, and he doesn't ever address that question. It's more accurate to talk about the various parts of the soul and the role they play in choosing, and what counts as a voluntary action to Aristotle. It might be possible to do a text search for everything he said and using surrounding context, that I might make a thesis about whether or not he was a libertarian, if I converted the language over, but that takes work and space of its own. If I want to gain that point, I have to put in the honest toil, I can't just beg the question in passing. At best I would have to say, grant me this extremely controversial point passing, for the purpose of the point I'm trying to make. That makes my work a lot weaker. Kant's thesis was aimed at the proposal that there are certain a priori conditions of experience. This was meant to answer questions raised much earlier by Hume that brought about deep skepticism about causation, self, and the relationship of mind to reality. The philosophy of mind emerged later in the late 19th and early 20th century as a distinct sub-discipline dealing with the relationship of mind to body and reality in general. In the second half of the 20th century, it developed its own unique technical language to answer questions brought up earlier. Rand and Peikoff weren't a part of these debates. Nor were these debates or their technical terms aimed specifically at answering "how does conscious arise" or "what causes change in consciousness." So is Peikoff a physicalist? I doubt it. He's not answer the questions you are asking and he's not using the terms you use. Nowhere does he say those things ("it arises out of just physical objects impinging.") The only time he talks about impinging in OPAR is talking about sense perception, and he distinguishes that from consciousness per se. Is he a physicalist in the sense of the contemporary use of the technical term? Absolutely not. The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy entry on physicalism states: The Oxford Companion to Philosophy entry on physicalism states: To me, paradigmatic physicalists are the ancient atomists, Hobbes, Marx, and people like Smart, Donald Davidson, and the Churchlands. Peikoff definitely isn't saying anything like that, or even remotely near that, and explicitly argues against materialism. So, in other words, for me, I'm saying 'no, that point is controversial, if you want to gain it by honest toil, I'm going to need a lot more.' As to your main thesis: you started off making a really controversial claim about Rand and Kant, then shifted it to Schelling, then started asking and answering other questions without tying it back to the main thesis, or motivating it or signposting it. The whole thing just seems scatterbrained to me.
  9. What, in your words, do you take physicalism to be?
  10. That is a good example of why Objectivism needed the concept of substantial form.
  11. Plus the fact that freedom (and the main issue is about what political rights are at play) means I do what I want and I don't have to explain the reason to anyone.
  12. When you are this much of a miserable old man, your ridicule is of no value. It's similar to knowing Bill O'Reilly is out there shaking his fist at you on TV.
  13. People find it hard often to hold two different things in their mind. They don't often see when they are shifting the goalposts or moving one criticism to cover up another. The best advocates will say "yes we are forcing you to labor because we think it's murder." That's quite a different thing than "you're not taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions" or "no one's forcing you to undergo some sort of labor." But it is common to retreat from one criticism into another.
  14. I voluntarily had a person on bike relationship which sometimes can result in breaking ones arm. Damn it I guess I can't go to the doctor and get a splint now because who am I to skirt the consequences of my actions. They're either this dumb or they think you are.
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