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Boydstun

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Everything posted by Boydstun

  1. On Walsh on Rand on Kant – Between Metaphysics and Science That 2010 paper of mine can be read at the site linked above. I have completed the new intense paper on the paper of George Walsh and the comments on Walsh by Fred Miller at the 1992 session of the Ayn Rand Society. My 2010 paper was not bad and is one slice through the Walsh presentation of Kant's philosophy and Walsh's criticisms of Rand's understanding and representation of Kant in metaphysics and epistemology. My new paper is entirely different from the 2010 one in the new one's treatment of Walsh's paper, Rand's misunderstandings, and the real clashes between Kant and Rand. Plus the new paper treats Miller's comments on Walsh, which the old paper did not. I expect my new paper to be accepted for publication, and if that is so, I'll link to it here when that issue of the journal comes out.
  2. ReasonFirst, Descartes thought the only reason we humans err is that we let our will outrun our understanding. He and many others thought that God could not err. That was because they thought error would be an imperfection. That is foolishness, I say. Where there is no error, there is no intelligence. God was traditionally thought of as having a will (there was the choice to make the world and to make humans) and as having understanding, or intellect. Although Descartes would emphasize the extent of the divine will, whereas Leibniz would emphasize the extent of the divine understanding, all could agree that for God, Its will cannot outrun Its understanding. Its understanding, Its intellect, may be pure act, but it is not a process requiring time to obtain knowledge. This idea of divine infallibility (and omniscience) in comparison to human fallibility (and partial ignorance) might be thought analogous to a real refrigerator and a perfect refrigerator, as in thermodynamics. The Second Law says the perfect refrigerator can be compared to real refrigerators, but no real ones can attain coincidence with the perfect one. I think that analogy would be an inappropriate analogy. Although we can get better at avoiding errors (and I would say that the best outside help on that is elementary logic texts which include informal fallacies as well as formal ones; the former can be supplemented by the informal fallacies Rand formulated, or anyway rediscovered and renamed, such as the Stolen Concept Fallacy |—>The Art of Reasoning), we would rationally expect to make errors even when proceeding with the greatest care and conformance to logic. We must not suppose it is possible to make no innocent errors, even as we get more skilled in avoiding them and even with the self-correcting methods of the hard sciences. That would be an error. For comparisons of human intelligence with other intelligence, I should suggest comparison of our cognition with the cognitive powers of the great apes, and not with imagined chimera such as God. A Natural History of Human Thinking
  3. Lancet estimates of lives saved by Covid vaccines Lockdowns saved lives, but not a go-to strategy moving forward
  4. In the Asian Flu epidemic of 1957-58 in the US, vaccination of the military was the top concern of the government to get done.
  5. Boydstun

    Honesty

    Harrison, a general good will towards people might be among the reasons for not wanting to put falsehoods in anyone's head unless you've specific good reason to do so. Therefore, one might form a habit to that effect, which does not require rethinking the whole issue every time someone asks you for information. Harrison, in the link from which I quoted in the first paragraph of the OP, I was indeed disputing the correctness of Rand's egoism in its beneficiary aspect. She recognized, in the intro to VOS, that this part of her ethical egoism required argument beyond her basic theory of value and her agent-egoism (the parts of her ethical theory I agree with). I have stated many times that because ethical egoism is an essential part of Rand's philosophy Objectivism and I reject her full egoism package, I am not an Objectivist, notwithstanding all I agree with of it in many fundamental things. (If there's an essential of the philosophy you disagree with, you're not of that school; by the way, nothing conceived by Rand or her associates later that was not already in Galt's speech could possibly be an essential of the philosophy.) I have come around to a conjecture as to why so many readers, whether friends of Rand or opponents, cannot let it sink in that this writer and thinker (me) is a no-go on Rand's ethical egoism (which is the best one in the history of philosophy), and so I'm not an Objectivist in ethical theory. My conjecture is that people are so used to opponents of Rand distorting her views, which I do not. I think people who do those distortions have reached a tired stage of making dead their own minds. They don't really expect to be doing any new thinking or rethinking anything from seriously, accurately engaging with what Rand actually wrote. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This fall I needed to return to working on (a final draft of) a scholarly paper on Kant for a publication. That is why I have not yet returned to what I promised for this thread nor the thread on sacrifice. In the interim, I came across more recent thoughts from the Aristotelian scholar Richard Kraut concerning ethical egoism, more recent than I had written about in the piece "A Rejection of Egoism."* So I'll try to convey his more recent and more elaborate thoughts on that also when I can come back to serious posting.
  6. My method of travel is train if I don't want to drive. Any of these suffice for Amtrak: State or provincial driver's license Passport Official government-issued identification (federal, state, city or county government or foreign government) Canadian provincial health card ID card with photo Military photo ID Student identification (university, college or high school photo ID) Job Corps photo ID
  7. France produces 70% of its electricity from nuclear, and it exports electricity to other countries. It can help other parts of Europe fulfill energy needs acutely in short supply for this winter, due to cutback of natural gas from Russia. At present 26 of France’s 56 nuclear reactors are off-line for maintenance and repairs. A huge scramble is underway to get that work buttoned up and get back on-line. President Macron’s administration has submitted a plan to Parliament to build six new enormous reactors in France starting in 2028. —from NYT 11/15/22
  8. Delta Situational Awareness System SkyWiper
  9. Additionally, concerning Rand in Russia and her family: Pavel Solovyev and Chris Sciabarra. 1912 Father Student
  10. The purpose of the land-alliance is for perfection of property rights in land among would-be land-owners in the alliance. Indirectly that purpose serves the sustenance of life, and place for liberty, because land in its unperfected-rights status, as I detailed in the essay, leaves parcels of land titles open to endless contestation including by force. There is no reason inherent to the land alliance function that a member of the alliance cannot invite someone from outside to stay on the alliance member's private property, to work for them, rent from them, buy the land (thence pay alliance dues for the alliance maintenance) or to engage in other cooperative projects with the present land owner. Then too, the right of a land owner in the alliance would have the right to exclude other people from their property regardless of where they came from. There is a difference between having a right and perfection of that right, regardless of whether the right is against violence against one's person or against one's power to use some land. Locke, as I recall, has you still having a right even if there is no law to protect it, because you can still appeal to heaven. That might be seen as an extension to infinity concerning correct judgment on the validity of one's rights-claim. That is a dubious extension, and I demonstrated in the essay by example that the idea that there is always only one correctly just claim is false. Do not neglect my definition of having a right in terms of being right at the outset of the essay. I had formulated that definition very shortly after having become read in Rand's works up to the late 1960's. I happened to jot it down on a slip of paper, which got preserved through the couple of decades before I had begun writing and came to this paper in which it could finally be shared. Some have doubted whether my definition applies to any but claim-rights, that-is, it might not apply to liberty-rights. I was familiar with that distinction, but never checked out my presumption that the latter sort of rights are reducible to the former. And I'm not going to think about it now or study those old pertinent books anew concerning that distinction, or do anything else new in political philosophy. I regularly take talk for a moral right, whether in everyday talk or scholarly expression, as merely whatever ought to be recognized as a legal right. I suppose a legally unrecognized right could be called a merely moral right, though that does not mean that every utterance claiming a moral right is within the ball park of reasonable consideration. I'd be reluctant to call an an entirely unrecognized right an imperfect right, which should be reserved for rights-claims at least getting close to getting over the legally needed goal-line. So, if my romantic sexual behaviors are criminalized by the state, it would sound sensible to say I have a moral right against such proscription, but not sensible to say I have an imperfect right against such proscription. (Since 2003 I've had a legal right against such proscription anywhere in the US, but if it is rescinded by the present Supreme Court, I simply lose that legal right; it does not go into status of an imperfect right, only into the status of a merely moral right.) I know there are other times we use the idea of having a right when the alteration of rightness of the use of force is not the sort of response in view. But tribes, chiefdoms, and states, archaic or modern, are wielders of deliberate force, and the state and near-state and rights is what I was addressing. Although I'm not going to develop my political philosophy further, I am going to maintain our own land for our purposes, and for this afternoon, that means I'm going out to pull weeds, starting right now.
  11. ET, I'd say that a person standing outside of territory under the land state alliance to which I belong would still have rights that should be respected by persons under that alliance. It would be a violation of that outside person's rights were I to go across to him, pull a gun, and stick him up or to go across and force him back to my place and force him to help me with the work around the place. So no. Your concluding principle in the preceding post is not a correct one under this theory.
  12. ET, ownership rights are a bundle of specific rights of control over a single property. So for example, I have a right to cut down any timber I please on my acreage and to exclude by force of law anyone coming on my land to spray paint words on the house or set fire to my woods. But in the bundle of specific rights making up my property rights is not a right of mine to burn leaves under all wind conditions. There was no claim of some collective right to land within some boundaries encompassing all the individual land ownerships. There is only a mutual alliance concerning the process for recognitions and enforcements of private property rights in lands owned (or would-like-to-be owned) by alliance members. (Rights to "airwave" bands for radio broadcasting are rights to land in the economic sense of land, contrasting with other factors of production such as labor. These rights too require alliance of potential frequency-band owners who have their rights perfected [backed by effective force, might]. But these exclusivities of the transmission medium for its exploitation get their property rights perfection by piggy-back on the social mechanism for perfecting property claims in land and transmission facilities built on that land. If air waves over that land can be usurped (or made useless, speaking more practically) by contesters from offshore, then the alliance will have a decision of response to take to best secure their own perfections of property rights of broadcasters based within the alliances' boundaries of perfected property rights in land.) The rights to private ownership of a land property are not something conferred by the alliance, but by claimants in their exploitations of that land. But the mutual alliance confers recognitions, backed up with force, supported by alliance dues, for what processes submitted by claimants for why something is their property are valid within the alliance. Rothbard's rules for coming to own previously unowned land are not the same as Epstein's, etc. To neglect to mention any conventions in such purported property rights acquisition, to pretend that such is all settled by natural law, and to paint a picture in which only one or the other—say Rothbard's or Epstein's—is a just acquisition process, is more plausibly deceptiveness of the salesperson (notably Rothbard) than reflection of stupidity. But all this and more can be learned by carefully studying my old article of some thirty years ago. It is probably not that no one besides me and the editor carefully studied the article, but because the readership was not large and I was a nobody, that no public notice of it was made until its reappearance, on the website Rebirth of Reason early in this century. In truth by now it is such old hat to me, and my intellectual work has since been no longer in political philosophy, theory of rights, and theory of strategic games, that it's not exciting to me any more, and it is a distraction from what I should be working on the remainder of this year, a topic in history of metaphysics and epistemology. I have lately had other reason to dig into the latest anthropology on pre-state organizations of society in their religions and collective violence powers—tribes of hunter-gathers, then chiefdoms—and on to subsequent archaic states and more recent states in those respects, for the sake of my long-term ethical theorizing and not for ever returning to the cutting edge of political philosophy. But I wanted to show you the window on financing and the topic within which that proposal arose, at least for me. I had not set out, those decades ago, to find a solution to the just financing problem. But once I had the theory of the land state in the earlier part of the text, well, I was driving on a Sunday on the Stevenson southwest out of Chicago to put in some needed overtime commercial work. It was morning. I was traveling to a nuclear plant (the last built in America) where I worked and which was in its pre-operational testing phase. Thinking, as most always in a moment to do so, a shadow went by in the back of my mind, I followed it and thought: "Well I'll be damned. That's it." Given the analysis and conception of the land state, the natural attendant method of financing fell out as natural as an apple. That I still remember that scene is an indication that it was a very fine moment in that stage of my life. (I doubt this is the case, but I hope in your remarks, you were not and will not be looking about for a wedge into discussing anarcho-capitalism v. minarchy. It bores me a long time now. It remains a mystery to me that there are people, even professional philosophers as a side-interest of theirs, who are so old that they could be my own children and yet they remain interested in that sub-sub-sub-department of political philosophy and take an interest in persuading the young folks for whom the world was born this morning of the correctness of anarcho-capitalism, instead of persuading and inspiring the young people to get out and make some money, incur no debts, and be the serious business that is happiness. Top priority. No excuses. I'm fine to just leave that pretty-old-folk behavior as one of those mysteries of life not worth solving, and at any rate, I'll not be discussing the issue, beyond what I wrote decades ago.) By the way, as you will see in wider study of the article text, it is not that only land owners have rights. It was only the need of perfecting the claims to ownerships in land in the economic sense that was needed to also perfect the exclusivity rights individuals have in their labor and bodies, where as you also noticed or repeated, those boundaries are given by nature, not drafted by our coordinated behaviors.
  13. Boydstun

    Honesty

    Yes and Yes. Those affirmations have been strongly argued. However, here the questions become the couple of corresponding questions: Is voluntarily not treating someone rottenly properly only on account of one's self-interest? Is voluntary concern for the interests of others properly only on account of one's self-interest? My thesis has been No and No. If those negatives can be sustained against all counters to them, then an ethical theory upholding honesty as among the virtues it defends is not a theory in which honesty is successfully defended purely from self-interest. Failure at defending all the virtues upheld in an ethical theory purely by resort to self-interest is then, strictly speaking, failure to have an ethical theory that succeeds in being one of pure ethical egoism. I'll not be able to deliver this year any of the productions I listed at the end of the initial post in this thread. That is because I need now to revise that paper I submitted for journal publication next April, in response to fine substantive comments now back to me from the editor. I'll be back.
  14. ET, the proper way to fund the proper government is here and here.
  15. Boydstun

    Honesty

    Oh, it was definitely not motivated by or most basically about truth-telling to others. It was about refocussing honesty onto rational self-interest and from those considerations having truth-telling to others as part of what such a refocussed conception of honesty requires. So it was part of the program of rational-egoism replacement of right treatment of others as most basic concern of ethics.
  16. Boydstun

    Honesty

    In July 2006, I had written: "Rand thought that the justification for the virtue of honesty was only that it is in one's rational self-interest to be honest. That is false and psychologically inauthentic. When I tell someone the truth, it is not typically only because it is in my rational self-interest to do so. It is first and foremost because lying to someone is prima facie a rotten way to treat a person. Moreover, my concern for another's self-interest (e.g., not filling their mind with falsehoods) is not firstly a matter of being concerned for my rational self-interest, but of being concerned for theirs." I've come across a striking parallel in Michael Tomasello's A Natural History of Human Thinking: "And so, while there is still some way to go to get to truth as an 'objective' feature of human utterances (see chapter 4), if we want to explain the origins of humans' commitment to characterize the world accurately independent of any selfish purpose, then being committed to informing others of things honestly, for their not our benefit, is the starting point. The notion of truth thus entered the human psyche not with the advent of individual intentionality and its focus on accuracy in information acquisition but, rather, with the advent of joint intentionality and its focus on communicating cooperatively with others." (51–52) In this thread, I'll be examining all that Rand wrote concerning honesty and the coverage by Tara Smith of Rand's picture of the virtue of honesty. And I want to examine the book Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (2021) by Christian B. Miller. There is another book I began to discuss, last spring, here at Objectivism Online, whose title is On Sacrifice (2012), by Moshe Halbertal. I'll complete discussion of this book first. I came to open Tomasello's book, from which I quoted above, by way of completing the study of On Sacrifice. Halbertal concentrates on development of the idea(s) of sacrifice in the history of Judaism, from those ancient religious rituals to modern sacrifice for the state. It occurred to me that in my discussion I should situate Halbertal's coverage into the wider and farther-past account of human religious rituals set out in Religion in Human Evolution – From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (2011), by Robert N. Bellah, which covers tribal religions (and production of meaning), subsequent archaic religions (meaning and power, god and king), and four cases of religion in the subsequent axial age: Israel, ancient Greece, China [late first millennium BCE], and ancient India. But halfway through that book, I thought of my books by Tomasello, which can fill out the scientific picture of human nature and its origins even farther back, back to separation of our lineage from the lineage of the great apes of today and join comparative capabilities of those two lineages (include Neanderthals with ours) with latest results in early childhood cognitive development. So, the order of productions will be: On Sacrifice (completion of that thread) Honesty (completion of this thread) Thirdly, an essay I plan to compose titled "A Passage to Reason" comparing Rand's conception from "The Missing Link" ("A certain hypothesis has haunted me for years. . . .") with the picture set out in the preceding readings. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ After those, I'll complete the long study "Dewey and Peikoff on Kant's Responsibility" (next year)—I haven't forgotten.
  17. Kyary, my impression is that there are some who classify themselves as Objectivists who complain that the only practical merit of the philosophy is politics (and although none of Rand's fictional protagonists spend their lives in political advocacy, and those Objectivists do), complain that we are all not up for joining them in their political advocacy and their mental preoccupation with politics. There has to be a bottom ten percent of the class. They are wrong in thinking the only or most valuable practical use of the philosophy is political activism and political reform. The most important is its effect on one's own life and mind. Blaming the present social derangements for one not venturing into new education and better employment or for not venturing to have children is feeble excuse-making for not reaching for greater and better making of one's own life or it is cover-up of one's authentic interests and mental capture having nothing to do with real possibility of and desperate need for affecting the course of politics and world affairs. I was a political activist for the first fifteen years after college. In those days, that did not mean electronic communications, but writing surface-mail letters to the editor and to one's Senators and Representative. It meant talking to members of the general public in person, and it meant marching in demonstrations for which you had made your own picket sign. And it meant some study of what you were pushing. "I'll know my song well before I start singing." –Dylan. But when I talked to my fellow-activists in those days while we were stuffing envelopes, it was pretty stunning how easy it was to get our conversation to swerve into discussion of additional, non-political areas of philosophy, especially Rand's philosophy. I concluded that most of those activists were additionally interested in philosophy and read some in philosophy beyond political philosophy. I think it is sad that so many Objectivist-types spout public assessments of philosophers not Rand (or her crew of intellectual descendants become professional philosophers) without themselves making independent serious study of those philosophers or trajectories of thought in the history of philosophy. I do not say things like "Atlas Shrugged is the greatest novel ever written" because the number of novels I've read is only a smidgen of the great literature out there. Yet you see all over Facebook, by unlearned Objectivists, that "Ayn Rand is the greatest philosopher ever" or that she is revolutionary so far that (conveniently) there is no need to read any other philosophy. And, of course, being that ignorant, they do not get to see as such what is truly original, true, and important about Ayn Rand in the history of philosophy, and they end up spouting stupid pat assessments that for every particular social problem there is, it has a philosophic source, namely, Immanuel Kant and/or Postmodernism.
  18. Kyary, I've an additional piece about Rand and Schelling 1800 here. I think it most interesting to explore affinities philosophers A and B have that are positions not widely shared by other philosophers. Even then, A and B's reasons can be quite different and interesting. The case I'm still not finished with, but will probably finish in the first half of 2023, is both Dewey and Peikoff holding Kant and subsequent German Idealists as philosophers most to blame for making the culture in which the Nazis ascended to power and carried out their heinous deeds. This is a minority position; even Sidney Hook, who was Dewey's bulldog (and Piekoff's dissertation advisor) disputed Dewey on this idea. Right or wrong in the conclusion, the reasons for it from Dewey and from Peikoff, from Pragmatism and from Objectivism, are different. (I'll also dispose the correctness of the conclusion by the end of this study.) Always, anyway, precision of representation is everything. If we are too coarse-grained or use A and B's shared words with double meaning not drawn out, we'd not be saying much. I've noticed that it takes a lot of study and rehearsal of thinkers to be able to state the difference between them off the top of one's head. Most of my non-professional philosophy friends cannot tell me the difference between Kant and Berkeley or between Kant and Descartes off the top of the head. (As I recall, your first language is not English; do you know phrases like "off the top of the head"?) And many Objectivist friends of mine have not read much of the classical philosophers (or Freud, . . .) themselves and know only Rand's or Peikoff's representations and criticisms of them. Those criticisms do not generally get to the really deep differences between Kant and Rand because some of their understanding of Kant goes off the rails and some of the pertinent Kant is never sufficiently grappled with and understood at all. (Do you read Kant, Fichte, and Schelling in German or English?) I take the remarks of 2046 to heart for my own sort of writing. I listen carefully and at least kick myself when I've decided to sacrifice writing advice I've gotten from my philosophy professors and professional-philosopher friends for some special concern I have for a particular audience. One reason I've always (since I began to write papers in 1984) tried to cite specific places in writings of thinkers when I represent their thought is for me to be able to easily get back to the source of my claim about them when I need to refresh my learning years later. The other reason is to give readers, with a contrary view of a thinker, that cited text for imagining how I might be led to my representation of the thinker and for such a reader, in reply, to analyze the specific text differently or bring in other countervailing text of the thinker being represented.
  19. Kyary, you mentioned among affinity between Kant and Rand, "the 'subjugation' of nature (production) as central to morality." I'd think the word for the relation between Kant and Rand on this would be "dissonance", not a harmony or an affinity. Do you know of some place in which Kant praised human alteration of external nature to serve the interests of humans? Kant salutes F. Bacon famously in his Preface to the second edition of KrV, but that is a salute to experimental methods in physical sciences (of heat and chemistry). It is no notice of Bacon in his saying that was so noticed by Rand and her intellectual kin: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." I don't recall Kant taking any interest in commanding physical nature by getting better knowledge of it. Indeed, compared to his Enlightenment predecessor Christian Wolff, I have not found Kant concerned with the Enlightenment project of improving the physical lot of humanity. Correct me, if I'm neglecting something in Kant. Wolff, in addition to being a distinguished and influential German Rationalist formalizing the system of Leibniz, tried and succeeded in increasing the yields of grains in agriculture. As for subjugation of nature and its place in morality, Rand and Kant are opposed. Productivity in the empirical world could not be morally significant for Kant, certainly not be so morally central as in Rand. In Kant's view, reason is given us “as a practical faculty, that is, as one that is to influence the will. . . . This will need not . . . be the sole and complete good, but it must be the highest good and the condition for every other, even of all demands for happiness” (Groundwork 4:395; similarly, KrV, A841–42 B869–70). Rand did not entirely neglect the making of a good will,* along with other character traits, in production bettering human life. Successful life, with its expression in happiness, is the centerpiece of Rand's morality, not crafting of a good will or (4:393) the making of oneself worthy of happiness in a world in which happiness seldom attains and anyway would be an improper central moral aim. The subjugation of nature in the moral realm for Kant, as for many others, is subjugation of natural impulses for life and joy. Rand would have a subjugation of irrationality to the purpose of life, including one's life in its interactions with others. For Rand the moral notion of duty—that subjugator is out the window. In his secular construction of morality, Kant would give to good will the role Luther had given to right faith. Kant wants to keep with individual necessary reward and penalty for individual condition of will, and he thinks he can find this necessary connection right here in the constitution of human will and reason. Beyond the sure sanctions for a good will is the hope of happiness in this life and hereafter. At Collegium Fredericianum, Kant had excelled in Latin. Among the Latin works he read there was Cicero’s On Duties (De Officiis). Cicero sees virtue in terms of duty. It is no controversy to say, as anyone should, that moral virtue is a performance of or disposition towards what one ought to do. But when a philosopher such as Cicero or Kant undertakes to cast all occasions of doing the morally right thing as performances of duties, he is giving a systematic and controversial slant to the entire moral plane. Duties are various things owed, usually in various social relationships. In all things, Cicero is on the lookout for bearings on duties. “No part of life, neither public affairs nor private, neither in the forum nor at home, neither when acting on your own nor in dealings with another, can be free from duty. Everything that is honorable in a life depends upon its cultivation, and everything dishonorable upon its neglect” (O 1.4). Kant’s ethics, like Cicero’s, is an ethics of duty. For Cicero the source of duties is honorableness, which is in contrast to personal advantage. “There are some teachings that undermine all duty by the ends of good and evil things that they propound. The man who defines the highest good in such a way that it has no connection with virtue, measuring it by his own advantages rather than by honorableness, cannot . . . cultivate either friendship or justice or liberality. There can certainly be no brave man who judges that pain is the greatest evil, nor a man of restraint who defines pleasure as the highest good” (O 1.5). As the source of duties, Kant will replace honorableness with the nature of pure reason and a good will. That replacement understood, the following formula of Cicero will agree with Kant. Ethical systems in which the highest good is personal advantage “say nothing about duty; nor can any advice on duty that is steady, stable, and joined to nature be handed down except by those who believe that what is sought for its own sake is honorableness alone . . .” (O 1.6). I do not see any affinity between Kant and Rand where there is affinity between Rand and F. Bacon. I do not see any affinity between Kant and Rand where there is affinity between Kant and Cicero. There is no distinctive affinity between Kant and Rand in the realm of morality. Kant's organic structure of reason too, fails to link, unlike Rand's reason, to the situation of reason within human physical life, which is the larger structure and process for the moral value of reason in Rand's morality.
  20. I should have added that talk and thought of possibility should be bounded. How is it possible that Existence exists? is out of rational bounds. The Principle of Sufficient Reason, before Kant, was being applied way out of rational bounds. Kant reined it in from above the atmosphere and replaced it with his bounded principle of causality. Rand also reined it in and replaced it with her very different principle of causality. Also, contra Descartes, Kant and Rand agreed that the certainty of the existence of one's mind is not greater than the certainty of the existence of one's body (A366–80, B274–79). But Kant's reining in of speculative metaphysics to the point that we cannot know whether God exists or whether the soul is immortal is constraining inappropriate for existence and our minds among it, by the lights of Rand (and me).
  21. I hope Mr. Desai is fairly young with likely much life before him. Do not try to make a living from political activism or political education of the public. It is not a feasible way of making a living, and in the end it leaves one in the embarrassing position of advocating capitalism and not making a profit by that advocacy work and asking for charity to continue. You must do that sort of work as an extra to making a living. Making a living has to follow where (ultimately) there is consumer demand at a non-zero price. I have known many brilliant people who are thinkers and writers or who are artists such as playwrights, painters, or novelists who have had to find a job or make a business at something totally different in the marketplace, and then do what you can on the craft you love in the hours not at work. I was myself such a person in learning and writing philosophy. Now that I am retired from commercial work and have the good fortune of a pension and the good fortune of remaining horsepower in thinking ability, I can buy any book I want hot off the press and, full time, write philosophy for posting and sometimes for academic publications. To repeat, do not try to make a living off of political philosophy or any high-intellect field. Do not expect anything you publish to turn a profit. Either you have a way of making a living on that in academia or not. If not, then don't do the run-around ploy and expect to make a living from it. I have seen nothing but failure after failure from responding to one's circumstance in that way. Make money, and do not incur debt. I found also useful to wake a few hours before needing to go to the job, and do your study and writing in the best part of the day for high horsepower mind work. Take pleasure in providing for your life. Don't give up your dream, just keep at it on the side. If you have finished your formal education, never ask your fellows for money. That is plain unbecoming in America, and does not fit the positive models in Rand's fiction. And now I mention that last point, I've noticed that the protagonists in Rand's fiction do not spend their lives on political advocacy. There are other exciting and important things to learn and advance. Love too the fact that people have found your production at a job in the stream of commerce in what consumers buy worth paying for. In America, at least, one can get a job and get good at it without first remaking the social system. I wouldn't be surprised but what that is also the case in India. Talk of charities being investments in the future is routine sales talk by charities and by politicians. And it is junk. Charitable giving is just giving, and that is fine.
  22. Physicalism Kyary, thank you for sharing this serious reflection. I don't think the concept 'possible' is licit except as a recognition of potentials of actuals. However, 'potentials' is applicable only to actuals that are concrete. So it is not applicable to vector spaces, for example, in pure mathematics. And it is not applicable to morphisms in the category of vector spaces, and so forth. I submit we must walk before we do geometry. The possibility-relations between purely mathematical structures and their transformations are analogues of the possibility-relations reflecting poteniality-relations among concretes, such as relations engaged in walking. Kant, of course, was presuming Euclidean geometry (as I recall, he does not engage the link between that geometry and algebra from Descartes and Fermat giving us analytic geometry) as something that is instantiated in the physical concrete world. His reason for Euclidean space being most fundamentally mental rather than physical is that he rightly saw that the results we arrive at when in geometry class working the proofs in Euclid yield perfect, absolute universality of the resulting truths. And that is of a different character (he thought) than the sort of results we arrive at in empirical science. He was right on that and right in rejecting the doctrine of Wolff that the high necessity of the truths of geometry come from capacity of Euclidean geometry to be put into the form of a sequence of syllogisms (which was probably also the way Aristotle looked at it, but without the attempt of full-blown showing of it as in Wolff's geometry text, from which Kant lectured). He was wrong in thinking we had no other cognitive access to features in the physical world to make into geometry that are not the methods of empirical science. So to ask such questions as how is synthetic a priori knowledge possible is a legitimate use of 'possible', supposing your interlocutor accepts that the knowledge you are characterizing as synthetic a priori knowledge is rightly so characterized. Philip Kitcher in his book The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge is one of our contemporaries who rejects that characterization and would have to regard that particular possibility-question of Kant's as fallacy of complex question. That some spatial knowledge can be condition of much or all of our knowledge does not entail that that condition of knowledge cannot be physical. I do not think we should join philosophers in their old arm-chairing of the evolution of consciousness or self-consciousness. We should rather overrule them or congratulate them with findings of modern developmental cognitive psychology* and anthropology. For example, Michael Tomasello's A Natural History of Human Thinking should be used to grade the arm-chair folk. One sorry blindness of philosophers from Descartes to Schelling is their failure to notice the fundamental social requirements for human consciousness. I agree with your conclusion, Kyary, that Rand/Peikoff erred in thinking Kant closed the possibility of cognition of things as they are independently of consciousness on account of consciousness taking a specific form and having specific means of operation. I argue against this Rand/Peikoff conclusion in a paper currently at press. It should be published next April, and since there will be an online version of that journal, I'll be linking it at this site when they publish. I attach an excerpt from my fundamental paper "Existence, We" in which I oppose Rand's approach to the idea of physical existence. Rand should have treated the concept "physical existence" in the way she had treated the developmental course of the concept "man". (Click on image for ease of reading.)
  23. I'm going to get this book Capitalism in America – A History to join with my Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
  24. Jacob, is the Nitin Desai of the Facebook link the same person written about here? I like the priority he gives to federal budgets getting out of the red, as well as his not neglecting the deficit spending by either the Left welfare boosters and the Right war boosters (and delighted I'm not the only one who remembers VP Cheney's statement to G.W. Bush that Reagan had shown that deficits don't matter). The author Desai at his FB page takes for granted that the American Founding Fathers knew what was capitalism and approved of it. I think that moves too fast. From the fact that WE know private property and freedom leads to capitalism it does not follow that because the FF supported private property and freedom, they would have supported what we call laissez-faire capitalism. Historical developments should not, I think, be seen as driven by logical implications, even when the logic is not the Hegelian silliness. Consider. I appreciate he author's holding high religious tolerance and the Enlightenment. Greek states became more democratic during the era of classical efflorescence. I am not aware of any scholarship showing that democracy brought on the fall of classical Greece.* A good book on the long history culminating in the concept of individual rights protected in the US constitution is: (Click on image for ease of reading.) It is not illegal in the US to refer to the retarded as "retarded." In the US, also, there are not any laws against hate speech. As for the rules on this forum, hate speech might be treading near the cliff, but I doubt writing "retarded person" is precarious with the rules. When you wrote "illiterate", did you mean literally that they did not learn to read or that they learned to read, but choose not to read, or that they read only junk, or that any reading they do conveying ideas, they do not learn from such reading?
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