Boydstun

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.)

I'm going to get this book Capitalism in America – A History to join with my Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

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?

Jacob, I use the words "retarded" and "idiotic" regularly, for a lot for collective actions. For the application you used the term, I think the term now favored by the with-it folks is "mentally challenged." That is Madison-Avenue-speak for "significantly mentally subnormal" I'd say. Plato had some serious criticisms of democracy. Have you read Bastiat's The Law? Do you know if it is read at all in India? Translated into Hindu? Do you know why socialism was the top ideology in India at the time of Nehru? What do you think of the current leader in India? He seems to be terrible on religious tolerance in the view from here. It seems a stretch to think of the United Nations as a world government. I saw an article a few years ago in which a Brit was criticizing the US for not simply becoming an empire like Britain had been, instead of meting US international influence and responsibility in the way it does. Modern Americans, I'd say, would not make the sacrifice that British families made to sustain the empire. After the British failure of empire in the American colonies, the King kept a stronger military presence in other venues, such as India. Not only a bigger boot on the conquered, but an endless bigger burden on the Brits. It is my understanding that sacrifice to gods under the Rgveda is a reciprocity in which people give to gods and request things from them such as economic wellbeing and cure of disease and in which they praise past generosity of the gods. (That much in era of tribal society, although in later, chiefdom organization, sacrifice as part of rich-folk ritual to glorify and preserve life of the ruler.) Do you know if self-sacrifice per se is shown as something noble in Rgveda? In the US, the virtue of charity in both Jewish and Christian faiths, as well as virtue of self-sacrifice for others in the Christian case, has been continually planted into functions of the state. In the US, those religious values and virtues color the backgrounds of what people think the state should be doing, such as redistributing wealth, mandating conservation of energy, and serving in the military or Peace Corps. Is there a Vedic background for such functions of the state being accepted among the people in India? Is influence of Christian or Islamic religion in politics significant there?

Universals and Measurement I argue in U&M that Rand's measurement-omission analysis of concepts implies a distinctive magnitude structure for metaphysics. This is structure beyond logical structure, constraint on possibility beyond logical constraint. Yet, it is structure ranging as widely as logical structure through all the sciences and common experience. I uncover this distinctive magnitude structure, characterizing it by its automorphisms, by its location among mathematical categories, and by the types of measurements it affords. I uncover a structure to universals implicit in Rand's theory that is additional to recurrence structure. Several years after writing U&M, I developed my own metaphysics, akin to Rand's, but significantly different from hers. For the future, on the ontology side, I expect my own philosophy of mathematics to have taken for definition at the outset, as mentioned above: mathematics is the discipline studying the formalities of situation, where situation is one of my categories as presented in my fundamental paper Existence, We, and the formal is divided between the foundational formalities which in that paper I introduced as belonging-formalities (in the world regardless of our discernment) and tooling-formalities (our set-theoretic [or better, perhaps, categoric-theoretic {in the sense of categories in mathematics; sets being one such category}] characterization of belonging-formalities.) Formalities of situation would cover both of those formalities. Formalities of my other two categories that are not entity—character and passage—would belong to logic, rather than mathematics. If this allotment to these disciplines can indeed be shown appropriate, it would show a big advantage of my category-division of existence over Rand's category-division: entity, action, attribute, relationship. Although, whatever I am able to come up with for using my categories in ontology of mathematics, I could also probably mimic using Rand's categories, though that would be less tidy. It is important that I amend Rand's measurement-omission analysis of concepts, expanding it to give theory of mathematical concepts, beyond kind-concepts, in order to bring forth for her a serious epistemology of mathematics—one competitive, notably, with Kant's epistemology of mathematics.

Law of libel was the principal means of governmental censorship in England and in America. Freedom of the press was not actually attained in America until the case NYT v. Sullivan. Justice Thomas has declared he wants the legal power of libel restored for public officials, like in the good old days. That would be a square regression into the days in which criticism of government officials was punishable under libel. I think anyone reading this text you are now reading can discern that this medium is press. Emergence of a Free Press by Leonard Levy is an eye-opening history.

For unknown reason, the link did not hold up. I'll try again: Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny The title of that first book should have been: A Natural History of Human Thinking From the publisher: "Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. In this much-anticipated book, Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Once our ancestors learned to put their heads together with others to pursue shared goals, humankind was on an evolutionary path all its own."

by Michael Tomasello Books by which I learned of his important work: A Natural History of Human History of Human Thinking (2014) A Natural History of Human Morality (2016) Becoming Human – A Theory of Ontogeny (2019)

Germany hanging onto some nuclear generation a while.

The links in the root post did not hold firm. That's no fun. Academy The Joy of Abstraction Robert Geroch

When my father started to college, his roommate had brought with him a dairy cow. They had a deal in which if you brought your cow, tended it, and supplied milk for the cafeteria, you got waiver of some charges. That would be about 1936. By the time I went to college in the late 1960's, a student could not make enough to pay for college (and the cow deals were off). The in-state tuition would have been feasible, but not the required staying in dorms and meals in them. I was not eligible for those government-backed loans because my father made too much money. Apparently some of the society had decided that parents should pay for their children's college if they could afford to, although my father was of the older view: not. My mother, who I barely knew at that time, offered to pay for my college. (I paid for the first semester, depleting my life savings, and I took advantage of the work-study program to make a little money while in school. Also I worked a private night job.) She would take out a loan at their regular small-town bank and repay it each term. She was a second-grade school teacher. I don't think those government-backed loan programs were such a good idea, as they encouraged too many people to go to college. I don't think it is right for repayment of some of those loans to now be the burden of citizens who did not make those loans. (That does NOT mean one should vote against candidates this fall who favor such "forgiveness" of those loans if the opponent is an anti-abortionist [such as Gov. Abbott]. Maybe just don't vote, if that is the opponent.)

SL, I listened to the first 15 minutes (a big listen for me—reading is a lot faster). I doubt the influence among new professors heading a certain way on account of the American War in Vietnam and the upheaval on college campuses over that War. The long-term effect of the students and others protesting that war and changing minds about it was more plausibly and importantly that GW Bush had to go with call up of the Guard to make his aggression in Iraq, because the public has remained suspicious of foreign wars in which we were not attacked to this day, ever since the American War in Vietnam, and they were not going to allow return of the draft, notwithstanding the registration system the old military interventionists succeeded in getting back in place in around 1980. This I'm sure of: No scholar landing a job as professor in the hard sciences or mathematics at my alma mater got their position on account of political/cultural agendas. They had to succeed so far as they did by the same old hard competition in their subject matters of research, same as it ever was. One thing is very different in the culture generally and in what is subject in college classes since back in my time, and that is talk of sexuality. That was not something that would be mentioned when I was in school, just like in the wider culture back then. I do think it is ridiculous to have toleration classes and fields of study in that area. It is not that difficult for students, even before college, to be respectful of other people not like themselves, and to not beat them up physically or verbally. Where were there parents on this before college? I am suspicious of any talk favoring anti-wokeness, however. Racial prejudice, especially white against black has continued without any gap since I was a child in this country. Things are enormously better legally on that score today, thanks to the activism in the 1960's mainly. But the racism continues significantly, even if not so acute as in my parents when I was growing up. I don't mean that special courses should be imposed to try to nip racists in the bud; that is futile and is not how we made the revolution on racial equality and integration that we did make. And of course, white students should not be made to feel guilty because their ancestors were not slaves in America. That campaign toward making people feel guilty over things like Original Sin has a source in white tradition we readily recognize; it is not coming from black leaders, I've noticed; Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example, wrote against that guilt-push a decade ago in connection with any rational notion of 'white privilege'. I don't think there is anything wrong with a teacher or, later, a professor, calling out a disrespectful student concerning race. When I was in sixth grade, we got a new teacher at our school (1960) mainly to be the school's music teacher, but she also taught our class some main subjects. One day a boy used the word "niggers". I don't think I'd have been using that, as from church I knew that racial prejudice was wrong and as we knew, notwithstanding the continual hateful usage by our folks at home, that you should say "coloreds" or "negroes" (in those days), in the reference (negative for sure) the boy was making. The new teacher said: "What did you say?! Don't you ever use that word in this class again!" (This was a school all white at that time, I should have said.) It stuck. At college, in an English lit class, there was this one young man who was some sort of conservative, apparently, and he would denigrate this young woman student who was known to be socialist. He would refer to her as "spook," which was apparently a derogatory coinage at the time, and the professor put a stop to that. She later tried (but failed, as I recall) to commit suicide because it seemed everyone was against her. I don't think it is really all that difficult to be respectful towards other sorts of people, and anyone not yet getting that by college surely should be woken up. I suppose the Lewis and Clark college in the video is private, so they can have their dumb-ass sociological efforts if they want. I did not like the focus of the speaker in the video on importance or value of open discussion of public affairs on college campuses. I rated such activities as appropriate for our late-night student bull sessions; as far as outsiders coming on campuses for such presentations or discussions, I'd class it with having football at the university (I never attended a game). By the way, Milton Friedman could not speak on campuses in the 1960's because of being shouted away by leftists. So things are not so different as the man in the video would like to represent them, although, the trash going on by some administrators at some campuses he flags are indeed appalling and not like what was going on in my era.

SL, did you attend public schools? Did your daughter attend public schools?

John Dewey was born in 1859 in Burlington, Vermont. The youth worked in the lumber yards there. His father was in the Union army during the Civil War, quartermaster for a regiment of Vermont cavalry in Virginia. The father afterwards, in Burlington, was a grocer and tobacconist. He was from an old farming family, and John regularly visited and did chores on his grandfather’s farm. I did not live on a farm, but my folks had grown up on farms in Oklahoma in the 1920’s and 1930’s. We lived on a two-acre lot outside OKC, where our family built our house during the 1950’s. Our folks raised us about like they had been raised on the farms. We did not have livestock, no fowls or milk cow. We had fruit trees, a row of grapes, dewberries, fruit trees, and a vegetable garden large enough to supply our family of six for the entire year by canning and freezing. I raised bees and sold the honey in the neighborhood. We children fed the dogs before our breakfast, and in the winter, I would start a fire in the fireplace. We cut firewood with our father out on the farms and brought it in the trailor our father had built to our acreage (via the old Route 66, later via I40). We butchered cow and hog on the farms. We children were right in on it. Children had little freedom, no allowance, and no pay for work for the family work projects. Whenever we could make money, we were encouraged to do so, and we each put half of whatever we earned into an individual savings account for college someday. My brother and I made money doing yard work in the neighborhood of mostly well-to-do folks such as lawyers, doctors, and architects. We caddied at the nearby country club, where our family could not afford to be members. (We had privileges, however, at the Officers’ Club at the AFB where our father worked as a civilian.) We children worked most all the time in home hours in those years. I recall the period in which we were laying the stone forming the outside wall of our house. Lydia, my stepmother would have selected and stacked up stones to be laid in the next segment. She cut and faced them too with hammer and chisel, as did we children on days not for school. After our father got home from work he would lay the stones, and my brother and I would mix the mortar, which we colored with a black powder. The next morning, that mortar needs to be scraped out in front so the stones have maybe an 3/4 inch overhang. This we did with 1 x 2 wood with a flathead nail, about 8 penny, protruding from one end just the right amount beyond the wood. We children would scrape the mortar before going to school. Our grammar school was only about 3/4 mile away, and we could walk. When our father went to school as a child, it was far, and they got there by horse, four children on a horse. (I don’t know if the horse had to wait all day till school was out or what.) We children knew that we were being raised much differently than our classmates and that our situation was more like our cousins growing up in the country and those living next door to us.

Doug, this is an excellent topic. An informed critical assessment of the views put forth by Rand and Peikoff in this area is long overdue. Education – Dewey In his 1915 Schools of Tomorrow, John Dewey describes various new types of schools in various parts of America and beyond reflecting the influences of Rousseau, Froebel, Pestalozzi, and Montessori. “On the basis of their results and his own philosophical and psychological analysis, Dewey indicates what reforms are required if the promise of equal educational opportunity in a democracy is to be achieved. These are merely sketched in outline. The philosophical foundations of Dewey’s theory of education developed in a more systematic way were published subsequently in his Democracy and Education.” (From Sidney Hook’s Introduction to volume 8 of John Dewey – Middle Works, 1899–1924. Hook was Peikoff’s Ph.D. dissertation director.) Against common misconceptions of Dewey’s views on schooling, Hook remarks that Dewey did not advocate voiding of authority of method or “the discipline of things.” He did not advocate leaving the student free to learn or not learn anything at any time. He did not advocate having an unstructured curriculum, he opposed only curriculum imposed on the child without any relationship to her psychological nature and the stages of her development. He opposed the common past methods of imparting learning designed to make it easy for adults and having the consequence that virtues stressed for the child are obedience, docility, and uncritical acceptance of the adult’s views. Dewey did not oppose the teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic. “Reading, writing, arithmetic and geography will always be needed”, Dewey writes. Although, he would have them taught in their relations and application to each other. He was a champion of vocational education, and he kept in view that most students would become under obligation to earn a living. An individual’s choice of vocation is profound and far-reaching. “Each individual should be capable of self-respecting, self-supporting and intelligent work,” Dewey writes, and education should equip individuals for making an intelligent choice of vocation. Education in Dewey’s time and ours is no longer confined to the cultivation of gentlemen of leisure. Dewey urged reconstruction of education to provide individuals with more opportunities for personal growth and enrichment of personal life, but also for intelligent participation in the democratic process. Dewey spells out and praises highly Montessori schooling as described in her book The Montessori Method (his treatment is on pages 302–13 of the cited volume of Dewey’s works). Evidently, there were few if any such schools in America at that time. He notes a difference with aims between Montessori and his American progressive approach. Like Montessori he recognizes the value of liberty of the child in educating her. But he looks also to the larger freedom of using intelligence in situations typical of life, which are social. Children need to have the experience of some working together in common pursuits. It is not enough, in social training, to learn not to interfere with others as they execute their own ends. But overall, Dewey applauded the rise of Montessori education method, which had gone into effect in Italy. At the time Dewey was writing this, I suspect that almost universally, children were engaged in working together with family on work projects before and after school, starting before breakfast, really. He would have experienced that as a child also. My childhood was like that, which was in the 1950’s. So it is a puzzle to me why he thought that was a skill and interest to be invested in school. Perhaps he had come to know of children (of professors?) who did not have childhood home life like his or mine. Perhaps he was interested in children learning and becoming friendly toward joint work with people not family for common ends. That is important for employment in the real world, I’ve noticed. Then too, America at the time was swelling up for the decision to make war on the Kaiser.

Frederick Cookinham has given the following notice on Facebook today: I just got an email with some sad news. My friend Anne C. Heller has died of cancer at 71. She was the author of AYN RAND AND THE WORLD SHE MADE (2009), the second biography of Rand after THE PASSION OF AYN RAND (1986), by Barbara Branden. The email came from Anne's husband, David De Weese. I first met Anne in 2003. She came to one of my Ayn Rand-themed walking tours. She said that she was thinking of writing a biography of Rand; she had not made up her mind. She took all five of my Rand tours, and we had a lot of fun for the next six years, sharing information on Rand. She said when we met that she did not know much about Rand. I said that this was a good thing. Barbara's strength was also her weakness as a biographer: she had been close to Rand for 18 years, and then had a rather explosive parting of the ways. So you couldn't beat Barbara for access and knowledge of her subject, but she had her own agenda. She was too close to her subject. Anne would be coming to the subject with a fresh pair of eyes, as we proofreaders say. No ax of her own to grind. In 2009, Anne published a fair and objective biography. I like to say that in a world of Rand idolators and Rand bashers, some of us aspire to be Rand scholars, and present the public with accurate and complete information on the life and thought of a world-famous writer. Anne next wrote a biography called HANNAH ARENDT: A LIFE IN DARK TIMES. I heard Anne being interviewed on the radio about her new book. The interviewer said that Rand and Arendt had nothing in common. Anne set him straight. Rand and Arendt were both world-famous twentieth century Jewish women writers. They both came to America as European refugees from totalitarianism.

Oh yes. I think we should insert interval measurement between ordinal and ratio measurement. Thanks. Suppes et al. discuss this in chapter 4 of FOUNDATIONS OF MEASUREMENT(vol.1), which is what Suppes is presenting in lecture in the video. He covers representation of different measurement structures, more briefly than in FM, in 3.4 of his final book REPRESENTATION AND INVARIANCE OF SCIENTIFIC STRUCTURES (2002). Patrick Suppes was a wonder. In the American Philosophical Association meetings in the Pacific division, I had the great experience of hearing Suppes both in lecture and as an audience participant in presentations by others. By then his hair was all white. His mind and knowledge and memory still fantastic. Robert Nozick wades into this sort of measurement in his paper "Interpersonal Utility Theory" which I heard him read at the University of Chicago in 1982. The large room was packed. This paper is in his book SOCRATIC PUZZLES (1997).

Yes. I did not think that book (2014) successfully advanced philosophy of mathematics or what Rand's epistemology might contribute to philosophy of mathematics. However, it is a good entry place that makes some areas of mathematics accessible, and for that, it can be added to the list above of places to get some grasp of those areas. As far as a philosophy of mathematics tied to a more general philosopher goes, I think the book that same year by James Franklin (2014) AN ARISTOTELIAN REALIST PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS – Mathematics as the science of Quantity and Structure is better. (On the ontology side, I expect my own philosophy of mathematics to have taken for definition at the outset: mathematics is the discipline studying the formalities of situation, where situation is one of my categories as presented in my fundamental paper "Existence, We", and the formal is divided between the foundational formalities which in that paper I introduced as belonging-formalities (in the world regardless of our discernment) and tooling-formalities (our set-theoretic [or better, perhaps, categoric-theoretic {in the sense of categories in mathematics, as in some of the books in my list above}]; formalities of situation would cover both of those formalities. Formalities of my other two categories that are not entity—character and passage—would belong to logic, rather than mathematics. If this allotment to these disciplines can indeed be shown appropriate, it would show a big advantage of my category-division of existence over Rand's category-division: entity, action, attribute, relationship. Although, whatever I am able to come up with for using my catergories in ontology of mathematics, I could also probably mimic using Rand's categories, though that would be less tidy. It is important that I amend Rand's measurement-omission analysis of concepts, expanding it to give theory of mathematical concepts beyond kind-concepts in order to bring forth for her a serious epistemology of mathematics.)

At the entrance of Plato’s Academy was the inscription: LET NO ONE IGNORANT OF GEOMETRY ENTER HERE! I quite agree. No general epistemology having no competent epistemology of mathematics is a real competitor in general epistemology. Mathematical knowledge is crucial in the conceptual power of humans. These books are some of those I study in my quest for formulating a competent epistemology of mathematics, and some may be excellent for interest of some readers here. THE JOY OF ABSTRACTION Eugenia Cheng CATEGORIES FOR THE WORKING PHILOSOPHER Elaine Landry, editor MATHEMATICS: FORM AND FUNCTION Saunders MacLane THE FOUNDATIONS OF GEOMETRY AND THE NON-EUCLIDEAN PLANE George E. Martin ALGEBRA Saunders MacLane and Garrett Birkhoff MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS Robert Geroch

The results of the orbiting MICROSCOPE test of the equivalence principle—the equivalence of inertial mass to gravitational mass—which is the fundamental proposition necessary for Einstein's geometric theory of gravity General Relativity are the most accurate we have yet attained. They affirm no difference of the inertial and gravitational mass in a measurement with accuracy down to one part in a thousand trillion. MICROSCOPE physicists looked, from data gathered from April 2016 to October 2018, for any difference in gravitational effect on two cylinders: one 301-gram titanium alloy, the other 402-gram platinum alloy. Physical Review Letters Ye 'ole Eötvös Experiment