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Boydstun

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  1. Dipert & Seddon on Kant v. Kelley/Rand Let KrV stand for Kritik der reinen Vernunft = Critique of Pure Reason. In citations A designates the first edition (1781), and B designates the second edition (1787). ~Kelley and Rand on Kant In his excellent book The Evidence of the Senses (ES), David Kelley included some remarks on Immanuel Kant’s mature theoretical philosophy by way of contrast with the realist theory of perception which Kelley had developed within the metaphysical and epistemological framework of Ayn Rand. Dr. Kelley’s book assimilates pertinent modern cognitive science up to the year of its publication 1988. It engages contemporary philosophers and classic modern ones Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. "The theories of perception of John Locke and Immanuel Kant, of A. J. Ayer and Wilfred Sellars, derive as much from general assumptions about the nature of cognition as from any facts about perception in particular. . . . / The fundamental question in this respect is whether consciousness is metaphysically active or passive by nature. Is consciousness creative, constituting its own objects, so that the world known depends on ourselves as knowers; or is it a faculty of response to objects, one whose function is to identify things as they are independently of it? In Ayn Rand’s terms, it is a question of the primacy of consciousness versus the primacy of existence: do the contents of consciousness depend on the subject for their existence or identity, or do the contents of consciousness depend on external objects?" (ES 8 ) I’ll take it that by “contents of consciousness” it would be a poor analogy to think of the contents of my coffee mug. Surely that would be lame. The woods outside my window that I can see are out there, not inside my consciousness ticking along and located here with me at the computer; whereas, the coffee in my mug is simply in that mug. “Contents of consciousness” would be more sensibly analogized with an electronic, compact-disc recording of a song, where said song is analogue of the object of an object-tracking episode of consciousness. The song is gotten into the recording from outside the recorder and put again outside when the CD recording is played. Actions vis-a-vis the song are required to get a recording of it. Actions of ours and the CD player are required for the song to reappear. Kelley erred badly in the following representation of Kant: “Kant begins by distinguishing appearance from reality. We are directly aware, he says, only of appearances—or phenomena, as he calls them. These exist only as the representational content of experience and are thus to be contrasted with noumena, or things as they are in themselves, things as they are apart from our experience.” (ES 21) Appearance, experience, phenomena, and noumena are technical terms in Kant’s idealism, which can be variously called Critical, Formal, or Transcendental Idealism. Kant’s use of appearance in his mature philosophy (KrV and beyond) is not in contrast to reality, but to things as they are in themselves. Appearances, in Kant’s sense, are presented to us as they are in us. They are nothing unreal. They are real, though not what Kant would call objectively real in themselves or what we should call real as existents external to consciousness. Combined with consciousness of them, appearances are perceptions. There is an active power in us that synthesizes an order for appearances and makes them coherent and apprehensible for us, that is, makes them empirical experience (A120, A124). By Kant’s lights, we have also an enduring ‘I’ of pure apperception that is correlate of all presentations to us insofar as we become conscious of them. This attendant pure apperception makes apprehended appearances intellectual (A124). These contain concepts, and this pure apperception “makes possible the formal unity of experience and with it all objective validity (truth) of empirical cognition” (A125). This pure apperception bringing sensible presentations under one consciousness “precedes all cognition of the object, as the intellectual form of that cognition, and itself amounts to a formal a priori cognition of all objects as such insofar as they are thought (the categories)” (A129). Phenomena in Kant’s sense, are appearances insofar as these are thought as objects according to the unity of the categories (A249). Phenomena are nothing unreal. Contrary the implication of Kelley’s brief sketch above, things as they are in themselves are not necessarily identically noumena, though it should be stressed that, in Kant’s system, neither is knowable by us. Things in themselves and noumena can be thought, but not known. Noumena was a technical term of philosophy not original with Kant. Noumenal objects in metaphysics had been such things as God, monads, and the immortal human soul. Their access had been by intellect, and a crucial part of that process of access had been taken to be a human power of intellectual intuition. Kant denied we have that power. We have sensible intuitions alone. These are the immediately grasped singular presentations of the senses, and all our knowledge of the world is ultimately from these. Things in themselves in Kant’s meaning are the things that appearances are the appearances of. But according to Kant, we should not be looking to appearances and the phenomenal to the end of learning what are things in themselves. That is not the prize we should seek in our sound inquiries. Rand and we should agree with that last point of Kant’s, but for a radically different reason. Things in themselves did not mean for Kant and his predecessors only things as they are independently of our discernment of them. It meant more generally things as they are devoid of any relations to other things. As has been noted earlier on this forum, in Galt’s Speech, Rand booted the general notion of things in themselves and replaced it with simply things as they are. In her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, she articulated some additional metaphysics, and among these additions was the thesis that no existent is without relation to other things. A thing purported to stand in no such relations would be nothing (ITOE 39). The correct and easy inference we ought draw is that things in themselves are not things as they are. We know some of the things as they are, we aim to discover more of them, and any contention that there are any things as they are unknowable to us bears the burden of proof. That is a heavy burden, considering that there are no things as they are which do not stand in some external relations. Things “are not such that nothing that pertains to one kind is related to another, but there is some relation” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1075a16–17). I should say: Things in themselves are not things as they are independently of our discernments of them nor things as they are when we discern them. There are no things in themselves. Then too: Kant affirmed there are things in themselves, and this puts him in an untenable position of supposing that things in themselves are as in no relations to things not themselves, yet saying things in themselves stand in an undergirding-relation to appearances. Kelley makes an understandable error concerning Kant, which is partly due to the Kemp Smith translation of KrV. Of things as they are in themselves, apart from all the receptivity of our senses, we know nothing. “We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them” (A42 B59). The translation of Pluhar reads “All we know* is the way in which we perceive them. (*–More literally, ‘are acquainted with’: kennen.).” The translation of Guyer reads “We are acquainted with nothing except our way of perceiving them.” The Kemp Smith translation, now overrun by the later ones, had made Kant out to be more subject-sided than he was. To be sure, Kant flirts with the empirical idealism of Berkeley by that statement, under any of these translations, when we take the statement from its full context. Kelley quotes the text preceding the statement and italicizes the statement to emphasize it. Kelley takes the passage as supporting his view, coinciding with Rand’s, that for Kant it is because our faculties of awareness have a specific identity, we cannot know things as they are in themselves. Like Rand, having supposed that appearance is in contrast to things as they are, having slipped from things as they are in themselves to things as they are, Kelley concluded that the view of Kant implies we cannot know the real (leaving aside mathematics) because all our knowing is by specific means (ES 22). I say that in the context of Rand’s philosophy, as we have shown, one should never make the slip of taking things in themselves as things as they are. Rand, Branden, Kelley, and Peikoff all made that slip and wrongly concluded that Kant’s system entails our inability to know reality, systematically so. Kant’s statement highlighted by Kelley shifts focus from things as they are perceived by us to the mode or way of our perception. That the statement was exactly right for Kant to say, within his own treatment of perception, is belied by the text following the statement: “We are acquainted with nothing except our way of perceiving them, which is peculiar to us, and which therefore does not necessarily pertain to every being, though to be sure it pertains to every human being. We are concerned solely with this. Space and time are its pure forms, sensation in general its matter. We can cognize only the former a priori, i.e., prior to all perception, and they are therefore called pure intuition; the latter, however, is that in our cognition that is responsible for it being called a posteriori cognition, i.e., empirical intuition. The former adheres to our sensibility absolutely necessarily, whatever sort of sensations we may have; the latter can be very different. Even if we could bring this intuition of ours to the highest degree of distinctness we would not thereby come any closer to the constitution of objects in themselves. For in any case we would still completely cognize only our way of intuiting, i.e., our sensibility, and this always only under the conditions originally depending on the subject, space and time; what the objects may be in themselves would still never be known through the most enlightened cognition of their appearance, which alone is given to us.” (KrV A42–43 B59–60 [Guyer]) Kant, then, was not claiming that the “matter” of percepts, which varies with what is perceived in our different episodes of perception, are from the side of the subject; only spatial and temporal form in such percepts originates from the constitution of the subject. Yet that is not the impression one gets if one attends only to “We are acquainted with nothing except our way of perceiving them” or “We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them.” Our perceptions have a matter to them, in Kant’s full view, and this does not come from the subject. Of course, it is bad enough that Kant tried to pose space and time as orders purely from the constitution of the perceiving subject, and Rand and Kelley were surely right to challenge that doctrine. Kelley understood that Kant had not taken objects in our perceptions to be sourced in the mind. But Kelley supposed this to hold only for the phenomenal mind. Kelley took Kant to be sourcing objects of perception in the mind as it is in itself, not the mind knowable to us (ES 24). Kelley took that to be the way in which Kant’s idealism differed from Berkeley’s. I don’t think that is such a really great difference considering that that would merely displace Berkeley’s mind of God with the unknowable human mind as it is in itself. Kant argued in Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) that in his Critique he had not argued skepticism of the objects of experience; he had argued that and how we have some a priori cognition of the objects of experience. This Kant had done by arguing that space and time are not empirical presentations, but a priori forms necessary for any experience of objects. Space and time for Kant are ideal, but not because the material world is ideal. By the time of writing the Prolegomena, Kant called his type of idealism not simply transcendental. He called his idealism additionally formal, in contrast to Berkeley’s dogmatic or material idealism. Kelley wrongly represented Kant as holding that “the criterion of objectivity is universal agreement among subjects, or intersubjectivity” (ES 26). In Prolegomena Kant had observed “there would be no reason why other judgments necessarily would have to agree with mine, if there were not the unity of the object—an object to which they all refer, with which they all agree, and, for that reason, also must harmonize among themselves” (1783, 298; see also A820–23 B848–51; 1786, 144–46). In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant reiterates that “universality of assent does not prove the objective validity of a judgment (i.e. its validity as cognition) but only that, even if universal assent should happen to be correct, it could still not yield a proof of agreement with the object; on the contrary, only objective validity constitutes the ground of a necessary universal agreement” (1788, 13). Prof. Randall R. Dipert (1951–2019) criticized Dr. Kelley’s representations of Kant in ES in a Review Essay in Reason Papers (1987). In the sequel, I shall examine Dipert’s criticisms as well as the later criticisms of Kelley’s Kant by Prof. Fred Seddon, who bannered quite a bit of distinctive common ground between Kant and Rand, quite more than should win assent by her or Kelley or by me (or Hill 2005). (To be continued.) References Aristotle, c. 348–322 B.C.E. Metaphysics. Joe Sachs, translator. 1999. Santa Fe: Green Lion Press. Hill, K. 2005. Seddon on Rand. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 7(1):203–7. Kant, I. 1781, 1787. Critique of Pure Reason. Werner Pluhar, translator. 1996. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. ——. Paul Guyer, translator. 1998. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 1783. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science. Gary Hatfield, translator. 2001. In Immanuel Kant – Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 1788. Critique of Practical Reason. Mary Gregor, translator. In Immanuel Kant – Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelley, D. 1986. The Evidence of the Senses – A Realist Theory of Perception. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
  2. Tad, I was unable to understand their methods. I don't know what weight to give the circumstance that the organization has a variety of social aspirations. Strictly speaking, it would seem falling into the circumstantial ad hominem fallacy to give that any weight not zero. Be that as it may, I think what could have most bearing on any slanting in this particular data would be a desire that people get vaccinated for this contagious disease and for contagious diseases more generally. Or anyway, that leaders not try to sabotage this effort. As far as the merit of THAT social aspiration goes, I think it is fine. When I was a child in the 1950's, we got various vaccinations in school, including vaccination against polio. I don't recall my folks having any objection to it. As an adult, were I a parent of a schoolchild, I'd want them to have any vaccination our doctor thought good. Were there some sort of legal requirement (at what penalty?) to have schoolchildren vaccinated, I would not count it as a compulsion since I would want it to happen anyway. With respect to the Covid vaccines, I've not felt under any legal compulsion to get vaccinations, and I've not invested any time to learn whether there is any legal requirement for me to do so, because I simply wanted the vaccination, the sooner the better.
  3. Here is another estimate from another group on lives saved and hospitalizations avoided by development and use of these vaccines.
  4. Learn from Dr. Touchstone's paper, I should say, in the following way: Take her springboard from my old papers as opposite the conclusion I drew in those papers. Take it as Touchstone's conclusion drawn from material presented in those papers. Then learn from her of new research and thought that further elaborates the conclusion she had incorrectly drawn (i.e., take the conclusion for true while reading her paper, even though it can't really be inferred from my works), such newer works from these two, for notable example: http://www.aracneeditrice.it/ara.../index.php/autori.html... https://www.jennystanford.com/author/andrei-khrennikov/
  5. The issue of THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES recently issued (December 2022 – https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/…/ayn…/issue/22/2… ) includes a paper by Dr. Kathleen Touchstone titled “Error, Free Will, and Freedom.” It engages importantly with earlier writings of mine, and because the next issue of JARS will be its final issue, and it is already at the printer, I’m making a reply to Touchstone’s paper simply in online posts. Kathleen Touchstone’s main-stage representation of what I wrote in OBJECTIVITY in the 1990’s about internal indeterminism is incorrect. I rejected the idea that quantum indeterminism could play a role in these organic processes. The classical Boltzmann-regime and chaos processes in the classical regime are the only plausible candidates for micro indeterminism in neuronal process as far as I knew or know even now. I do NOT accede “the source of volition is errors.” I argued that error occurs, contra Descartes, in animal capabilities not requiring free will. But the circumstance that error arises without conceptual intelligence and free will does not entail that error Is the source of free will. Although, it suggests that cognitive error, conceptual or more primitive, is a necessary attendant of intelligence and free will. I do NOT accede “this error [thence free will] is due to indeterminism that is associated with quantum probability” or “credit error—specifically as it relates to quantum probability—with being the root of free will.” I did NOT conclude: “Of the three sorts of chance, quantum probability offers the only possible physical source for volition because of the presence of indeterminism.” Rather, classical processes can be the physical bases of neuronal indeterminism once one rejects the illicit projection of regular classical isolated, independent, determined process-streams onto wider physical reality. A softening of the picture of determinism in ordinary physical reality is required (V2N4, pp. 183–86; also "Reply to Eilon" in V2N5 Remarks): a keeping true to actual physical process before us everyday, which leaves a possibility for neuronal processing systems, so far as I know, that yields free will. Everything else in Touchstone’s representations of my old papers is accurate. I thank Dr. Touchstone for her deep dive into and recognition of the significance of those papers: Boydstun, S., Chaos, OBJECTIVITY V2N1:31–46. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number1.html#31 ——. Volitional Synapses: Part 1. OBJECTIVITY V2N1:109–38. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number1.html#109 ——. Volitional Synapses: Part 2. OBJECTIVITY V2N2:105–29. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number2.html#105 ——. Volitional Synapses: Part 3. OBJECTIVITY V2N4:183–204. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number4.html#183
  6. ~Additional comments on Kathleen Touchstone’s “Error, Free Will, and Freedom”~ The first full paragraph in Gibson, p. 147, which Touchstone relies on, is dubious history of quantum mechanics, at least in the impression it gives, and its ascription to Schrödinger of the idea that a photon’s position does not exist until it is observed is very unlikely to be a correct ascription; that sounds more like Bohr and von Neumann. Touchstone got right as preludes to QM the wave character of light and the Planck/Einstein new reasons for a particle character of light. But the building order of QM, in the 1920’s, went like this: DeBroglie’s wave, Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics. Schrödinger’s wave mechanics, Born’s statistical interpretation of the wave (as recounted in my V2N2, pp. 121–25). (Warren Gibson, “Modern Physics versus Objectivism,” THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES, 2013, V13N2, pp. 140–59.) I think it is important to hold forth, as Touchstone did in this paper, the idea that rights violations occur not only because of willful evil, but from innocent errors, including errors in identifying what rights there are. But I think it true also that rights are abridged by willful evil. As I understand her, Rand would agree that willful evil is a reality (contra Socrates), and she had it that that was possible through the power of evasion and irrationality. I don’t think the Randian Benevolent Universe Principle (BUP) should be taken as Touchstone did, as an ideal situation in which all people act morally by their own lights. It is, rather, the standing condition that the human as rationally acting animal is in a physical world suited to the human. (Which really is due to the evolution of our wing of primates evolving into rational animals, which was due to the adaptive advantage of joint intentionality, which would chagrin Rand were she still around to see this work: A Natural History of Human Thinking by Michael Tomasello, 2014.) Unfortunately, Rand left out of the fundamental stance of BUP that one is in company of other rational animals with whom to cooperate. Touchstone represented Rand as holding: “Since man’s life is his ultimate value, rights are necessary.” Left there, that’s a big leap. Touchstone follows up with Rand’s connection of instrumental rationality with moral virtue and the need of rights for operation of that rationality. But besides Rand’s life-as-ultimate-value-and-necessity-of-rights, there is also in Rand the argument: Life is an end in itself. Individual human life is an end in itself. Rationality includes recognition that the lives of others are ends in themselves and should be treated as such. That too is a line of Rand’s reasoning to rightness of respecting rights of others. Because of this second way of basing rights under Rand’s ethical theory, I decline the tout court conclusion that Rand’s case entails that “rights are based (secondarily) on errors . . . . . .”
  7. The issue of THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES recently issued (December 2022 – https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/…/ayn…/issue/22/2… ) includes a paper by Dr. Kathleen Touchstone titled “Error, Free Will, and Freedom.” It engages importantly with earlier writings of mine, and because the next issue of JARS will be its final issue, and it is already at the printer, I’m making a reply to Touchstone’s paper simply in online posts. Kathleen Touchstone’s main-stage representation of what I wrote in OBJECTIVITY in the 1990’s about internal indeterminism is incorrect. I rejected the idea that quantum indeterminism could play a role in these organic processes. The classical Boltzmann-regime and chaos processes in the classical regime are the only plausible candidates for micro indeterminism in neuronal process as far as I knew or know even now. I do NOT accede “the source of volition is errors.” I argued that error occurs, contra Descartes, in animal capabilities not requiring free will. But the circumstance that error arises without conceptual intelligence and free will does not entail that error Is the source of free will. Although, it suggests that cognitive error, conceptual or more primitive, is a necessary attendant of intelligence and free will. I do NOT accede “this error [thence free will] is due to indeterminism that is associated with quantum probability” or “credit error—specifically as it relates to quantum probability—with being the root of free will.” I did NOT conclude: “Of the three sorts of chance, quantum probability offers the only possible physical source for volition because of the presence of indeterminism.” Rather, classical processes can be the physical bases of neuronal indeterminism once one rejects the illicit projection of regular classical isolated, independent, determined process-streams onto wider physical reality. A softening of the picture of determinism in ordinary physical reality is required (V2N4, pp. 183–86; also "Reply to Eilon" in V2N5 Remarks): a keeping true to actual physical process before us everyday, which leaves a possibility for neuronal processing systems, so far as I know, that yields free will. Everything else in Touchstone’s representations of my old papers is accurate. I thank Dr. Touchstone for her deep dive into and recognition of the significance of those papers: Boydstun, S., Chaos, OBJECTIVITY V2N1:31–46. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number1.html#31 ——. Volitional Synapses: Part 1. OBJECTIVITY V2N1:109–38. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number1.html#109 ——. Volitional Synapses: Part 2. OBJECTIVITY V2N2:105–29. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number2.html#105 ——. Volitional Synapses: Part 3. OBJECTIVITY V2N4:183–204. Online at: http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number4.html#183
  8. D, I hadn't thought of the connection to Rearden before. There would be two parallels, one just between oneself and one's lover. Although my first learning my gay capacity for joy (with my best and esteemed friend) entailed no sense of guilt; there was simply truth and making our own way without map or positive models. (That was 1968, in Oklahoma). As parallel, Rearden with Dagny seemed to be learning some truths about himself and his values. (If, at the end of the novel, he and Francisco were to enter into a romantic relationship, that would be a slighter learning about himself than the earlier one, I'd say.) The second parallel I notice is with coming out and Dagny's radio interview. Coming out was gradual, as I suppose it is for most gays and lesbians, since there are a number of different social arenas in which it takes place. But in our case, it was slow overall, from the sheer terror of the social surroundings at the time. D and K, with just the two of us alone, I guess the validation was just what intense preciousness we found was possible and the conviction, in the light of Roark, that one should live by one's own first-hand rational values, notwithstanding that Rand/Branden had at the time been saying derogatory things about you. You had the truth of the human goodness of what you were doing in your own experience. There was a further sort of validation of the "you are not alone sort" later on for us. In Oklahoma we were illegal, and one reason we headed for Chicago was that there we were legal. In the big city, it turned out, there were gay bars, and it was there we first were in one. They were hotbeds of social organization and mobilization, in addition to company of other same-sex couples and same-sex searchers and dancers. We joined in demonstrations and in the Gay Pride Parade, which was new then. As the years went by, the size of the parade grew and our straight friends marched with us. Eventually, in this century, gays and lesbians were squarely accepted into the military, the old illegality of same-sex relations was over-ruled throughout the land (2003), we attained the legal power to marry (2015), and an American President said he word "gay" while he was in office (he also had made an executive order that hospitals receiving Medicare monies had to have a policy of allowing same-sex partners to visit the hospitalized partner, which was important in our case, where a lot of students indoctrinated by Liberty University go into nursing here, and there, as in any workplace, they try to do their great commission of holding back the humanistic revolution concerning treatment of gays and lesbians. (There is a picture of us in our 30's here. He died when we were both 41. Love is love.)
  9. She would say: "You guys who voted for Reagan and the so-called Moral Majority, may you be damned!" "Boydstun, from Kant to Dewey, for cryin' out loud, get off my back!" "Here is what I have to say about presidential candidate Donald Trump. . . . No wait, I wrote the same stuff about candidate George Wallace in 1968." "Given what I said about the Russian soul, it's not surprising the mystics came back into fashion and power there." "That this is Putin's philosopher is hardly surprising." "What did I say needed to be done concerning the moral ideal of altruism and self-sacrifice and scarcity of understanding and esteem for the concept of individual rights? Today the consequences of failure in that philosophical revolution among the people are all around." "What did I say about the growing fashion of anti-man worship of nature? About holding up one's sores for nobility, about tribalism? I need not repeat. Read what I wrote." Real Revolution
  10. Jon, I clicked on your link. This is the first I've seen writings by Q. They are mysterian, as in "the meek shall inherit the earth." Loose enough to lay your own meaning on them if you care to. Some of my poems are pretty mysterian, such as the following one (2012). None of my poems of any sort has ever been about public affairs, because that is not what is of greatest importance to me or anywhere near it. I touch something deeper, and some people really appreciate it, even just the feel of the more mysterian ones. Thankfully, these words will never be a reason for politics or social movements. Still One Only it, other it is. Given it is and taken. Other it is in token. Spoken it is, other is. Round itself sailing itself, taking, making its token, breath-sail flies and dies, broken. Rounding ruin, round sails itself. In, still one, out, rushing roar, kill after kill, still is still. Touch and word, still ever will. One, still one. For say, sail, oar.
  11. Part of the star map of Hipparchus(+) has been found.
  12. California foolishly shuttered its San Onofre nuclear power plant after the Fukushima wreck. Although San Onofre was the same sort of reactor as Fukushima, the design basis for the San Onofre plant had been such that it would not have been breached by a tidal wave the size of the one that hit Fukushima. And the emergency diesel generators were elevated at the CA plant and would not have become inoperable, unlike at the Japanese facility. Recently, the anti-nuclear movement in CA to close also Diablo Canyon, the state' last nuke, was blocked, with the governor's decision to keep it running and putting megawatts on the grid.
  13. That kind of analysis seems awfully speculative to me. It is plausible that if Dagny likes Hank to command her in sex and likes to comply and likes him to bind her, and as seems likely, is even more excited if restraints incorporate some Rearden metal, she is not going against who she is. But that is plausible already, just because we know from real persons that submissive in bed does not entail submissive in life. I'd say we don't need to figure out why she is turned on by her submissiveness in sex and do not need to find some sort of justifying explanation of how her sexual slant squares with her independent self-directing productive life. Or why it is necessary to burden understanding of either with Rand's notion "sense of life." True, Rand and N. Branden would try for the squaring and try to buckle on that particular burden. But that was a mistaken mental excursion, ambition, and responsibility.
  14. An ample review of Richard Salsman's book Where Have All the Capitalists Gone? (2021) is in the latest issue of REASON PAPERS here.
  15. KyaryPamvu, I should not have said that Rand took the form of a building to be a possible work of art, only that it was a possible artistic work. I myself think it to be a possible work of art for the reasons stated in the earlier post. Rand was not alone in finding metaphysical, cognitive, and evaluative linkages in art. Her final characterization of their assembly was under her concept of a metaphysical value-judgment. Rand’s explications of sense of life and metaphysical value-judgments are in terms of metaphysics that bears on human life and the role and character of values in it. She said that a sense of life sums up one’s view of man’s relationship to existence. That suggests that when she said this subconsciously integrated appraisal that is sense of life includes appraisal of the nature of reality, she was confining the metaphysical appraisal to implications for moral, human life. That would include some notion of the intelligibility or lack thereof in existence in general and in living existence in particular. Rand had used the phrase sense of life once in Fountainhead, twice in Atlas, and evidently routinely in conversation before beginning to write about the meaning of the phrase in 1965. The phrase and concept “tragic sense of life” was title of Unamuno’s book of 1913 (Spanish; translated into English 1921) In Atlas Rand once used the phrase sense of life tied to a sense of beauty and to the love of human existence. During Dagny’s tour of Atlantis, she visits the composer Richard Halley, who plays some of his piano pieces for her. She was thinking of the years when the works he had just played for her were being written, here, in his small cottage on the ledge of the valley, when all the prodigal magnificence of sound was being shaped by him as a flowing monument to a concept which equates the sense of life with the sense of beauty—while she had walked through the streets of New York in a hopeless quest for some form of enjoyment, with the screeches of a modern symphony running after her, as if spit by the infected throat of a loud-speaker coughing its malicious hatred of existence. (AS 781) In this passage, beauty and a sense of life saturated with it are aligned with life and the love of it. This is a use of the phrase sense of life consistent with Rand’s later definition of it. Rand’s theory of esthetics is too restrictive in two ways. Firstly, the cognitive and emotional function of art is, I say, a family of end-in-itself integrations, among which Rand’s function is an important one, but only one. In “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” Rand wrote that art fulfills a need for end-in-itself concretization of metaphysical value-judgments. That is consonant with her idea, stated earlier in “The Goal of My Writing,” that the function of art is to supply moments of sensing as complete the life-long struggle for achievement of values. In the later essay “Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” Rand was not broadening her view of what is “the” function of art; she was only articulating more of the means by which it fulfills that function. In Rand’s view, there are other enjoyments in art besides fulfillment of that function, but no other function. About psycho-epistemology: Rand and her circle had been using the term to refer to an individual’s characteristic method of awareness. Is the time scope of his outlook brief or long? Is his concern only with what is physically present? Does he recoil into his emotions in the face of his physical life and need for action? How far does he integrate his perceptions into conceptions? Is his thinking a means of perceiving reality or justifying escape from reality? Chris Sciabarra reports that Barbara Branden was the one who originated the concept (and, I presume, the word) psycho-epistemology. In her lecture series Principles of Efficient Thinking, Ms. Branden defined psycho-epistemology as “the study of the mental operations that characterize a man’s method of dealing with reality”. Nathaniel Branden further specified the compass of psycho-epistemology in an essay with that title in 1964. Art performs the psycho-epistemological function, in Rand’s view, of converting metaphysical abstractions “into the equivalent of concretes, into specific entities open to man’s direct perception.” She held art to be a need of human consciousness. This stands in need of anthropological corroboration and crucial testing. Secondly too restrictive, importance as Rand’s criterion of esthetic abstraction is a salient criterion in such abstraction, but the broader criteria of significance and meaningfulness also sort the esthetic from the purely cognitive and normative types of abstraction. Importance is the concept Rand took to be key in formation of a sense of life. She then restricted importance to a fundamental view of human nature. A sense of life becomes an emotional summation reflecting answers on basic questions of human nature read as applying to oneself. Such questions would be whether the universe is knowable, whether man has the power of choice, and whether man can achieve his goals. The fundamental importance-questions whose emotional answers are vested in a sense of life were the same as Rand had listed the previous year in spelling out what are metaphysical value-judgments. Those questions had been: Is the universe intelligible to man, or unintelligible and unknowable? Can man find happiness on earth, or is he doomed to frustration and despair? Does man have the power of choice, the power to choose his goals and to achieve them, the power to direct the course of his life—or is he the helpless plaything of forces beyond his control, which determine his fate? Is man, by nature, to be valued as good, or to be despised as evil? That last question would seem at first blush to be a normative question, rather than a metaphysical one. I suggest, however, that it is a question for (i) the metaphysics of life and value in general, to which, as metaphysical fact, man is no alien and (ii) for the metaphysics of mind joining (i) (see also Peikoff OPAR, 189–93). Rand’s writings in the 1960’s and 70’s on esthetics were something of a hodgepodge. One should keep in perspective her esthetics as part of her philosophy. They are a part of it, but not an essential of it; for the essentials of Rand’s philosophy had already been set out within Galt’s Speech in Atlas Shrugged, and esthetics was not dealt with therein.
  16. KyaryPamvu, Rand expressed the view that the form of a building can be a work of art, and if it is, its theme is integral with the building’s purpose and its site (Fountainhead PK I 18, X 127, HR I 544–45, III 568, IX 633). Such a work takes function and site as constituents of its esthetic theme, which theme is the uniting principle of its specific form. The ornamentation of the building is integral with the function and theme of the structure. Ornamentation in the building that is a work of art rides on the method of construction; it is an emphasis of the building’s physical structural principles. Ornamentation must not choke the building’s sense, must not destroy its esthetic integrity, she remarked (PK XI 141, XII 171, XV 205). The ornamentation inside the Stoddard Temple of the Human Spirit, designed by Roark, consists of the graded projections of its gray limestone walls and its vast windows. The temple is “open to the earth around it, to the trees, the river, the sun—and to the skyline of the city in the distance” (ET XI 356). Before that skyline, stands one ornament, true to the idea of this temple: one statue of a naked human body. There is another temple, one in real life, that is a work of art and is (partly) a capture in form of the theme, in Christian context, of its name: Thorncrown. Roark’s buildings are characterized by Rand as analogous in their integrity and beauty to that of a living thing and the idea-plan of that living thing. Peter Reidy has written about this. As well, she characterized Roark’s buildings as analogous to a soul with integrity and as statements in form, statements of the life of men in their minds (PK I 18, X 129, XI 140, XV 205, ET X 327, HR II 558). As you know, in Rand’s take, as with some earlier theories of art, the importance to man of a work as art “is not in what he learns from it, but in that he experiences it” (Rand 1963, 41). An art work as such, “an art work, as distinguished from a utilitarian object, serves no practical purpose other than that of contemplation” (37). I should point out, however, that a vase, a chair, or a building can be an artwork alongside its utilitarian function, and any expression of that function in the art is not the same as the function itself. As you've likely noticed, the way in which Rand assimilated music (absolute music particularly) into her definition of art took some doing, and that is somewhat analogous to what she said about esthetics of architecture in The Fountainhead. In classic modern thought, analogies between music and architecture have often been made. Rand's requirement that drawing and painting be figurative, and that artistic literature have a story and plot seem a contrived foisting of correct metaphysics in which there are no attributes or actions without objects or entities bearing them onto definition of art. The visual figure, such as a human body, or a story in a fiction might well be preferred by some of us because we have that corresponding sort of metaphysics, although such a 'because' stands in need of argument. Be that as it may, it is cheap to just avoid more and deep thinking about what is art by simply defining competitor conceptions of it out of contention at the outset, and for such a handy superficial reason at that. In the case of literature, in her dismissal of mood scenes as literary art because they have no plot, she ends up implicitly (without acknowledging it and perhaps not realizing it) kicking out such a poem as "Silent Noon" as an instance of literary art.
  17. What is the proof that there is such a thing as a sense of life in Rand's meaning given to that phrase? Persuasion that there is such a thing seems dependent on pointing to examples of it. I don't think that pointing to one's reactions to things are very persuasive that one has a sense of life in Rand's meaning of the term (cf.). I find the idea plausible only by considering my artistic creations, which is to say, the poetry I create. I don't think that one's responsiveness to a type of writing—say Rand's literature or Victor Hugo's—shows you that you have a sense of life and what it is. It shows at best that you can participate in the sort of sense of life the author exhibited of themselves. One should not be persuaded that one even has such a thing as a sense of life, in Rand's meaning of it, let alone what one's particular sense of life is, unless one has oneself created some art instances over some time and seen or begun to see how one is unable to get out of one's own creative skin and what that skin is.
  18. THE OXFORD COMPANION TO PHILOSOPHY (1995, 2005) is an encyclopedia of issues and philosophers. It is 1056 pages long. It does not have an entry for Ayn Rand, although she is mentioned within an entry for Popular Philosophy. The entry begins by setting forth three sorts of popular philosophy: general guidance about the conduct of life; amateur consideration of the standard, technical problems of philosophy; and philosophical popularization. There was movement called “popular philosophy” in eighteenth-century Germany. It included various definite philosophies, but criticized obscure technicalities and systematic elaborations, in an attempt to stay close to experience and usefulness for life. Frankly, general educated readers today, would find those writings quite technical philosophy. And frankly, the German Rationalist before them Christian Wolff held to the Enlightenment value of concern for the welfare and betterment of humanity (and he found a method for increasing the yield of grains). Then too, all the systematic, technical philosophers before them held forth practical philosophies, which is to say ethical systems. So I don’t give much weight to the claims of uniqueness in this self-declared popular-philosophy movement. The movement was eventually displaced by Kantianism. Beside those guys, the entry mentions under philosophers giving general guidance about the conduct of life: Socrates, Aristotle, Stoics, Epicureans, Christian dicta (not really philosophy), Erasmus, Montaigne, F. Bacon, La Rochefoucauld, Samuel Johnson, and Benjamin Franklin. “By the end of the eighteenth century, prudence, and the idea of rational management of life, had been obscured by the clouds of romanticism.” That is to say, the allure of this sort of practical philosophy was outdone and displaced by the allure of philosophical romanticism, including Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Emerson and Shaw should be counted among this sort of practical philosopher. Others mentioned, from the twentieth century: Émile Chartier, Havelock Ellis, John Cowper Powys, Aldous Huxley, and Sydney Harris. In the last three decades of the twentieth century (and to the present), “professional philosophers, after a long period of absenteeism from anything but the most abstract and uncommitted attention to the problems of conduct and practice, have resumed a measure of direct involvement, mainly at the political or collective level, but to some extent more personally, as in Richard Robinson’s AN ATHEIST’S VALUES and Robert Nozick’s unkindly treated THE EXAMINED LIFE.” Skipping the second kind for a moment, the third kind of popular philosophy in this entry is popularization of philosophy. Among this kind are mentioned: Paulsen, Windelband, Benn, and Russell in his PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY, Hospers in his INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS and HUMAN CONDUCT, and Scruton’s MODERN PHILOSOPHY. T. Nagel, Blackburn, Midgley, Glover, and Singer are professional philosophers who have been lured into press in the popularization genre. The second kind of popular philosophy is in contrast to institutional philosophy, which today means in contrast to academic philosophy. This kind of popular philosophy, though amateur, tackles the standard, technical problems of philosophy. Notwithstanding all their influence, the author of the entry puts Descartes and Hume in this category. I should add Spinoza. This sort of philosophizing flourished at presses in the nineteenth century, but languished in the twentieth century. Exceptions in the twentieth: C. G. Stone, L. L. Whyte, and George Melhuish, “and, in the United States, Ayn Rand, strenuous exponent of objectivism and self-interest.” I’d say that Leonard Peikoff greatly contributed to expanding the range of standard philosophy problems that can be addressed by Rand’s philosophy in metaphysics and epistemology. His essay, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” was a big expansion, even if only a short overview. In his History of Philosophy lectures in the early 1970’s, he gave square, competent presentations of the big guys through the ages and followed each with what Objectivism could say precisely of what was amiss or right in the particular philosophy. Appearance of the Blackburn A COMPANION TO AYN RAND is a milestone breach of the silence on and snubbing of Rand by academic philosophers. This breach was made possible by the renowned Aristotle scholar and Objectivist Allan Gotthelf. Another breach is the Ayn Rand Society within The American Philosophical Association and the books issued by that Society under an academic press. Another: Chris Sciabarra’s AYN RAND: THE RUSSIAN RANDICAL and his JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES. The thesis of his book on local Russian influences on Rand’s philosophy were contested by James Lennox, Barbara Branden, and others knowledgeable of Rand and her development, but in the course of his book, Sciabarra exposes to a wider scholarly audience a very detailed view of Rand’s philosophy itself. I should mention that the professional philosopher Robert Nozick preserved his early challenge to Rand’s ethics by including it among his papers in his book SOCRATIC PUZZLES. Academic presses have issued other books on Objectivism or putting it into technical philosophical work: three books by Tara Smith and one by David Kelley. Although Nietzsche after 1890 was widely read among people outside academia, and a cult of Nietzsche burned brightly until WWI, he was shunned by the academy there and here until after WWII. That would be about five decades after his death (really ten for full blaze). Rand has been deceased about four decades. The question of how far Rand’s philosophy might become a stable and large topic of academic philosophers in the coming decades remains entirely impenetrable to me. By now though, it appears Rand’s philosophy will for a long time to come continue as a help to some people in making a life for themselves and as, for some, an entryway to philosophy more generally. This is a picture of Ayn Rand in 1951 being read by a college student maybe 15 years later.
  19. Mini-Series of Atlas Shrugged from Daily Wire+ (November 2022 announcement) Jeremy Boreing, Ben Shapiro and Caleb Robinson are producing for DailyWire+. Dallas Sonnier and Amanda Presmyk are producing for Bonfire Legend. Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow are producing for Atlas Distribution Company. Scott DeSapio, Joan Carter and Danielle Cox are executive producers. The deal was negotiated by Dallas Sonnier and general counsel Joshua Herr on behalf of DailyWire+, Roger Arar and Kaslow on behalf of Atlas Distribution Company, and Tim Knowlton of Curtis Brown Ltd. on behalf of the Peikoff Family Partnership and the Estate of Ayn Rand.
  20. Let's try to get that link out of that do-loop it slips into on initial posts. Creating Christ
  21. You should share some of these other sources; their bottom line numbers and how they got them would be nice. I had been simply curious how many lives were estimated to have been saved by preventative measures that were taken against this contagious disease. And the links I shared here were simply what came up in the google. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I should mention that information provided for our own community here in Lynchburg—tracking the number of new cases, new deaths, and available ICU at our hospital—were useful to us in the decisions we made to protect ourselves during the pandemic. We are old and retired. We stopped going to the gym for many months. Many members did not renew their membership during that time. My husband did not leave home, as he has severe COPD. The Governor came around to closing gyms for several months. We have returned now, and we follow the routine of wiping down the contact points, even though we all know it was found that spread of that virus was mainly airborne, not contact. We continue that simply because it's a good habit, for other disease transmission, protective of self and others. The "individualist" refusal to wear masks in our local grocery store during the pandemic reminded me of back when the AIDS pandemic was going on. Within the libertarian political press there was promotion of Dr. Duesberg's conjecture that AIDS was not caused by HIV (but by other factors such as poor diet, partying all night, running oneself down by taking "recreational" drugs, and assault of AZT [the only anti-HIV med at the time] on the body; stop doing those things and the whole problem will go away). This press was plainly not motivated by providing me with good advice on what I should do. It was motivated by politics, especially government-research expense. It was implausible to the educated on its face and morally obscene. People who could have had an eventual chance of being rescued died on regular schedule from taking such advice. I did not take that advice. I spat on it. I followed the information in my Scientific American and the advice of my doctor (a scientific guy) and Dr. Fauci and his agency. Those researches and drug developments saved my life and preserve it to the present. (By the way, a vaccine has never been found for that virus; nature is a giant.) I doubt there is any government program whatever that cannot be twisted into part of a design to control the lives of the citizens and curtail their freedom—from providing for the common defense to building interstate highways. I have property rights in my acreage. That is a bundle of specific rights. I have a right to fell any timber on our place that I please. I have a right against others felling them without my consent. I do not have a right to burn leaves under all wind conditions. That last is not an attempt by law to become master of my life. That thought is ridiculous, and if one believes that sort of thing, one needs to get a grip. Neither is it plausible that some despot in the future is going to come along and use the leaf-burning constraints to snuff my free life. "Man—every man—is an end in himself . . . ." That is not, logically, in Rand's ethical system only the pylon for the moral rightness of self-interested action, but for respecting ends-in-themselves that are other people. Jackassery "individualism" is not helpful to the cause of constraining government in the big ways it infringes the rights of individuals. Providing for the common defense has passed, starting at least with FDR, on to protecting people from hurricanes and epidemics. And there is a regularization of the extensions as time goes by: Goldwater denounced Medicare and Social Security as socialism; Trump said no, only the Obama-Care addition was socialism. I suggest that what is horribly wrong are the massive outlays without adequate revenues and the ways in which government can take over particular lives seriously such as was done by the military draft or, less drastically, by wage and price controls or by denying people the right to go to work or keep the firm open during the pandemic—rather than letting our citizens volunteer to save their country or save others against totalitarianism in the war or letting them make their own decision on whether to stop going to work or school during the pandemic (thereby putting the blames for untoward consequences on nature, rather than on government). The idea put about these days that every ill impact of government action on one's cherished freedoms is the main and evil objective of people behind the policy action is egocentric, subjectivist, and false. All over our acreage every year all the plants and all the animals are behaving as if their species was trying to take over the world, but there is no such intention; they have no such broad intentions or any intentions at all. Personifying cumulative bad results from our organized collective action that is the US government and writing a fiction of that evil personage is intellectually lazy and does not help in tuning to reality.
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