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Boydstun

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Posts posted by Boydstun

  1. Better Capitalism – Jesus, Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and MLK Jr. on Moving from Plantation to Partnership Economics (2022)

    Paul E Knowlton (Engineer, Attorney, Pastoral Counselor)

    and Aaron E. Hedges (MDiv, MBA)

    This book urges reformation of the current US economic system to what the authors name Partnership Economics. The reforms are mostly via private actions under guideline of the conception Partnership Economics. The particulars of that conception are vague, not very specific. They are a perspective and attitude in business behavior. I’ll display some of the authors' interpretations from the names in the subtitle of the book to show the authors' picture suggesting how those leading lights are consonant with Partnership Economics.

    jesus.jpeg

    Smith.jpeg

    Scan 8.jpeg

  2. Quote

     

    Roughly a century ago, in response to growing concerns about drug use, the federal government enacted its first drug control law in the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914.  Subsequent decades saw Congress continue to pass drug control legislation and criminalize drug abuse, but by the 1960s there was growing interest in more medical approaches to preventing and responding to drug abuse.  Upon his election, President Richard Nixon prioritized the reduction of drug use: in rhetoric, he spoke of a so-called “war on drugs”; in policy, he pushed for a new comprehensive federal drug law in the form of The Controlled Substances Act (CSA), enacted as Title II of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970.

    The CSA emerged from a widespread, bipartisan view that comprehensive legislation was needed to clarify federal drug laws, and its centerpiece was a comprehensive scheduling system for assessing and regulating drugs in five schedules defined in terms of substances’ potential for abuse and dependence, and possible medical use and safety.  In design, the CSA was intended to prioritize a scientific approach to drug prohibition and regulation by embracing a mixed law-enforcement and public-health approach to drug policy.  But in practice, the US Justice Department came to have an outsized role in drug control policy, especially as subsequent “tough-on-crime” sentencing laws made the CSA the backbone of a federal drug war in which punitive approaches to evolving drug problems consistently eclipsed public health responses.

     

    How about the US Supreme Court roll back to the States the criminal law on recreational drugs? If an opportune case should come before the present Court, I'll bet a Coke-a-Cola the Justices who overturned Roe will not overturn federal usurpation in this area of the law which is so politically favored by American conservatives.

  3. Rand on selfishness and altruism via Howard Roark.

    Quote

     

    “For the flash of an instant, they grasped the manner of [Roark’s] consciousness. Each asked himself: do I need anyone’s approval?—does it matter?—am I tied? And for that instant, each man was free—free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room.” (HR XVIII)

    Howard Roark:

    “The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power—that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. . . . The creator served nothing and no one. He lived for himself.”

    “Altruism is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self.”

    “No man can live for another.”

    “The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption.”

    “Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue.”

    “The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man’s first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men.”

    “Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive.”

    “This country was not based on selfless service, sacrifice, renunciation or any precept of altruism. It was based on a man’s right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else’s. A private, personal, selfish motive. Look at the results. Look into your own conscience.”

    “I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.”

    “It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.”

     

    Nietzsche on selfishness, explored by John Richardson in his Nietzsche's Values (2020). (Click on image.)

    Fritz - Self.jpeg

  4. LAWS VI 772a

    “Boys and girls must dance together at an age when plausible occasions can be found for their doing so, in order that they may have a reasonable look at each other; and they should dance naked, provided sufficient modesty and restraint are displayed by all concerned.”  –Plato

    Plato.jpg

  5. The electromagnetic radiation from Sagittarius A* that we receive at earth today departed from Sagittarius A* when our ancestors were in the last of the Paleolithic (last of the Old Stone Age). They could do some weaving, make nets, and make ceramic pitchers. They could make figurative cave paintings and they could make figurines. They could not write. Perhaps they made music, for they made flutes.

  6. The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy is in the constellation Sagittarius. It is about 27,000 light years from earth, its mass is four million times the mass of the sun, and the humans have taken a picture of it in 2022, shown here.

    This object is known as Sagittarius A* (Sagittarius A star). From earth it lies in the strip of sky known as Sagittarius A. The diameter of its event horizon is roughly equivalent to the planet Mercury's orbit around the sun. From earth that diameter is 52 micro arc seconds, which is as viewing from earth a donut lying on the moon. The event-horizon diameter matches what is predicted by general relativity for a black hole of that mass. Sagittarius A* is orbited by a diffuse gas of electrons and protons. That matter is being pulled from the atmospheres of stars orbiting it. Only 1% of the surrounding matter is being pulled into its event horizon in the era of its light reaching present earth. In that era, the brightness (luminance) of Sagittarius A* is only 100 times the brightness of the sun. There is evidence that as recently as 60 years ago, Sagittarius A* was not on a diet, but a feeding frenzy.

  7. Well Done!

    Ken Danagger asks Dagny Taggart:

    Quote

     

    “And if you met those great men in heaven, . .  what would you want to say to them?”

    “Just . . . just ‘hello’, I guess.”

    “That’s not all,” said Danagger. “There’s something you’d want to hear from them . . . you’d want them to look at you and say, ‘Well done.’”

     

    Dr. Chris Sciabarra is ending his long labor of love The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. He produced the journal for 22 years, which means a total of 44 issues of the journal. I list here some tidbit teasers from the first 10 years of the journal.

     

    V1N1

    “But something changes. At the end of the book, Roark is no longer a seemingly isolated young man, alone with his thoughts in the depths of the countryside. He is just as individual as he was at the beginning, but now he stands at the heart of his country’s economic life, building its most conspicuous symbol, with the glad permission of his fellow citizens. Of the many inversions of perspective and expectation that are suggested by Roark’s dive into the sky, this is one of the most remarkable.”

    –Stephen Cox

     

    V1N2

    “Although both Andrei and Wynand are men guilty of their own tragedy, Rand presents their falls more as the logical outcome of their mistakes than as the just desert of their sins. As in the Aristotelian tradition of tragic ‘hamorita’, theirs is a type of transgression that must be distinguished from pure evil, making their fatal ends deserving of respectful pity rather than righteous condemnation.”

    –Kirsti Minsaas

     

    V2N1

    “You can live any way you choose within a regime of well-drawn non-conflictng individual rights. But again, to know what those rights are, to better be able to shape them coordinately, to limit all but procedural distinctions, we require minarchy.”

    –Murray Franck

     

    V2N2

    “The character may be embroiled in highly implausible situations, but he must still ‘live and breathe before us’ as an actual human being, with motivations we find at least intellibible, else we cannot empathize with the character or imaginatively share his fate. There is much more to it than this, and I am greatly condensing the account. But when I presented it once to Rand she agreed with it, and was pleased by my Aristotelianism on this issue.”

    –John Hospers

     

    V3N1

    “The data the sensations provide us with must come from somewhere, and this somewhere cannot be, as on the Cartesian account, from the physical objects. On pain of rendering incomprehensible why we all largely agree in our empirical beliefs, something that the formal agreement in geometrical belief cannot suffice to explain, there must be some common data source. Given the Kantian account of the physical world, this data source must be supra-physical.”

    –R. Kevin Hill

     

    V3N2

    “It isn’t just Rand who stumbled over the implicit. It gets under psychologists, feet, too.”

    –Robert L. Campbell

     

    V4N1

    “Indeed, I would argue that we can see Rand’s epistemology as an updating of the project that Abelard pursued over 800 years ago.”

    –Peter Saint-Andre

     

    V4N2

    “There is the marked disparity between her popularity as a novelist and the number of articles of literary criticism written about her work, though this too is not without precedent. It took some time for John Steinbeck to achieve recognition by certain sectors of the critical establishment. His work was disdained for its popularity, sentimentality, and the fact that it is accessible even to high school students.”

    –Mimi Reisel Gladstein

     

    V5N1

    “Considerations of self-esteem and self-esteem-based happiness THEMSELVES do not provide an agent with a reason that makes the difference in how he should act.”

    –Eric Mack

     

    V5N2

    “Rand’s measurement-omission analysis of concepts could be correct even if her account of their genesis were incorrect.”

    –Stephen Boydstun

     

    V6N1

    “Dr. Stadler’s complaint that he almost froze to death and numerous references to city-dwellers exposed to the elements for the first time in their lives [also] describe the first winters of Communist rule.”

    --Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal

     

    V6N2

    “I find it tempting to believe that we can gain knowledge through the faculty of reason both in an a priori way and from experience. . . . These two ways could work together.”

    --Richard C. B. Johnsson

     

    V7N1

    “Rand’s trader principle does not suffer from the problems of [Adam] Smith’s invisible hand principle because she explicitly grounds her defense of trade in an individual’s right to exist for his or her own sake. . . . I do not sacrifice my interests for your sake, and you do not sacrifice your interests for my sake.”

    --Robert White

     

    V7N2

    “If you want a deconstructionist, go to the English Department. Philosophy departments in Anglophone countries are still predominantly homes for linguistic and logical analysis, the whole tone and tenor of which are very much in opposition to subjectivist nihilism. In fact, analytic philosophy of all styles began in self-conscious opposition to such German gobbledlygook.”

    --Max Hocutt

     

    V8N1

    “That worry is precisely the worry that being unmarried ISN’T a necessary property of anything, prior to and apart from the convention in question. . . . It’s only qua bachelors that those entities are necessarily unmarried, and the worry is that what it is to be something qua bachelor is an artifact of the convention, not a fact about the world. / I believe this worry can be met, but that the way to meet it is to show that it can arise only from OUTSIDE the linguistic practice in question, and cannot coherently be raised from within it. No one who assents to the proposition that bachelors are necessarily unmarried (thereby participating in the practice) can consistently add “oh, but that’s not a fact about the world.”

    --Roderick T. Long

     

    V8N2

    “To be fair, Objectivists do not deny the existence and importance of ‘spiritual’ qualities. Objectivists argue strongly against any sort of reductive materialism such as behaviorism or eliminativism. But, for Objectivists, material entities are the ultimate reality and conscious beings somehow supervene upon this underlying reality. Thus, the existence of any sort of supernatural entity, such as God, is ruled out.”

    --Stephen E. Parrish

     

    V9N1

    “A human being is a coherent unity of mind and body, yet this way of stating the fact still leaves ‘mind’ and ‘body’ conceptually separate. The concept ORGANISM conceptually integrates these two facets of human nature in a graceful and unit-economical way.”

    --Andrew Schwartz

     

    V9N2

    “Both see rationality as our distinctive means of avoiding threats and securing our survival, given our animal vulnerabilities. However, where MacIntyre diverges from Rand is in relation to the implications of this in respect of our ongoing dependence on others.”

    --Ron Beadle

     

    V10N1

    “We do not believe there are untethered and dispositionless will acts made in complete freedom of antecedent conditions. . . . We endeavored to use notions of self-direction in ‘common-sense’ ways not packed with a lot of philosophical baggage, because we believed that ordinary usage (say, ordinary common law usage of choice and intent) were sufficient to complete the political argument.”

    --Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen

     

    V10N2

    “He [Nietzsche] insists, as she does, that it is absurd to live for the sake of the collective (i.e., what he calls ‘’the majority’), but the reason he gives is not the one that she would give. Her reason would be that it is absurd to live FOR ANYONE [who is not oneself]. The answer he gives is the aristocratic one, that one should live for the best and the rarest. Even here, though, his position still overlaps with hers IN A WAY: for what he is saying here can be captured by a phrase that Rand sometimes applies to herself, namely, hero-worship. Nietzsche’s aristocratic hero-worship I think is the key to understanding the collectivist-sounding language in . . . .”

    --Lester Hunt

    Chris.jpg

  8. On 4/4/2021 at 8:12 PM, Boydstun said:

    . . .

    PRIMACIES OF EXISTENCE

    . . . Things in all that they are are what we know part of and know that our known is only part of the all there to be known. Further, existence of a thing is nothing more than—indeed, it is identically the same as—existence of all that a thing is.[10]

    [10] See further, Baumgarten 1757, §§15, 37; Kant, KrV A324–27 B380–83. . . .

    References

    Baumgarten, A. 1757 [1739]. Metaphysics. 4th ed. In Fugate and Hymers 2013.

    Kant, I. 1781, 1787. Critique of Pure Reason. W. S. Pluhar, translator. 1996. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

     

    Additionally, “existence is identity” in mathematics means not only that any mathematical fact will be correct statement of an identity, but that the identity is the existence. Concerning concrete existence, “existence is identity” must include in that identity: specification of spatial and temporal relations, for it to be the case that the identity is the existence.

    If we add that all existence outside existence in mathematics (or in logic, e.g. Löenheim-Skolem Theorem) is existence in physical space and time, then the ontological argument, of Anselm and Descartes, for the existence of God fails with respect to non-mathematical existence. From a set of predicates not including specification of spatial and temporal relations, the existence of God cannot be inferred, and inclusion by fiat of Its spatial relations (everywhere) and temporal relations (everywhen) in a mere conception does amount to the existence of God in that usual intended sense of existence.* Whereas, Existence itself is not something concluded from a conception, but is simply there all around us and is the physical and epistemological context for any knowing of any existent or identity.

    * Cf. Christian August Crusius (1745) in Leibniz & Kant, Brandon C. Look, editor, (Oxford 2021), pp. 61–66.

  9. Rand "is the cold, stony advocate of self-interest, the poet of the sociopath." That quotation is from the book AYN RAND AND THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA (2022) by Derek Offord. He goes straight to Rand's various representations and condemnations of altruism and collectivism and to her holding high ethical egoism and attendant inversions of traditional virtues, such as the displacement of humility with pride. He sees the audacity of Rand's vision of a guilt-free human life.

    The author sticks to the clashes between Rand’s ethics and the traditional, altruistic ones, secular or religious. He takes no notice of continuities of the old and the new and ways in which the latter took up the old with redefinition and placement in an orderly account of value per se. By sticking to only the stark clashes and by ignoring facets of the psychology of Rand’s protagonists—indeed conjecturing that such things as empathy and concern for others are entirely absent in those characters (and in their creator)— Offord makes it easy on himself to slide from Rand being the poet for personalities asocial, to antisocial, to sociopathical. Even the asocial is in full truth not fitting of Rand’s protagonists.

    This book is another distortion and smear of Rand’s philosophy. It is a smart one, by someone who actually has read Rand’s novels and The Virtue of Selfishness. He is of independent mind, not one repeating old critical reviews by others.

    From page at the University of Bristol:

    Quote

     

    Derek Offord is a specialist in pre-revolutionary Russian history, thought and literature and in language usage and language attitudes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia. He has published books on the revolutionary movement in its Populist phase, on the debates in the nineteenth-century intelligentsia (especially between its radical wing and its liberal and romantic conservative wings) and on the ways in which Russian writers travelling in the West used their travels to shape notions of national identity as Russia entered the European world. Together with William Leatherbarrow, he co-edited a documentary history of Russian thought in 1987 and a new History of Russian Thought published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.

    From 2011 to 2015 he led a multidisciplinary project funded by the AHRC on the history of the French language in Russia from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The project yielded three co-edited volumes, two clusters of articles, and a 700-page monograph co-authored with Vladislav Rjeoutski and Gesine Argent and published by Amsterdam University Press in 2018. This monograph, The French Language in Russia: A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary History, was awarded the Marc Raeff Book Prize for 2019 by the Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies Association, an affiliate of the American Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, and (as Joint winner) the 2019 R. Gapper Book Prize awarded by the Society for French Studies. It has been translated into Russian and is due to be published by Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie in Moscow in 2022. The website of the AHRC project, which includes twelve documents or sets of documents from primary sources accompanied in each case by an explanatory article, is at http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/research/french-in-russia.

    Derek's latest book-length publication is on Ayn Rand and the Russian intelligentsia (published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2022 in their Russian Shorts series; details at https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/ayn-rand-and-the-russian-intelligentsia-9781350283947/).

    Derek is also the author of two widely used books on the modern Russian language, Modern Russian: An Advanced Grammar Course (1993) and Using Russian: A Guide to Contemporary Usage (1996), which was republished in a revised and augmented edition co-authored witn Natalia Gogolitsyna (2005).

    He is currently beginning work on a survey of contemporary Russian nationalistic thought.

     

     

    Derek_Offord_photo_October_2021_1.jpeg

  10. D,

    You might want to sign up in a large online hookup site and include in what you say about yourself something about what interests you in larger life and that you are open to forming a long-term relationship.

    I am an older gay person, the one to the right in the photo below with my husband. 

    My first life-partner was a college friend who had the same level of interest in and like of Rand's literature and philosophy as I had. Over the years, we both developed further intellectually, and that entailed that in some areas of philosophy we became more different from each other than at the beginning. Having different views in some areas can be fine; at least the differences did not result in calling off the relationship.

    Five years after he died, I decided to devote some time to trying to make it all happen again. I did, though the way was very different from the first time. There were not yet the personal hookup sites online, but there were Personal sections in newspapers. You responded by writing and sending it by mail, which went to the newspaper, who then go it to the person placing the ad. His ad had included that he was open to forming a long-term relationship. He stated what he was looking for in bed and in attitude to life. I thought I fit the bill and wrote back a single-word response: Exciting. We met and learned the basics of each others lives. The sexual match was fantastic. Certain other likes and views we also had in common were love of classical music and opera and we were both atheists. All the other views on which we did not agree were never anywhere near sinking our ship. Financial compatibility is also probably an important necessary condition. The bed is extremely important to getting to sea. It can disappear altogether later when you get old, but the afterglow and the love and life you've made together can go on secure and wonderful as can be. I rather enjoy that not all our views on things coincide.

     

    W, S – May 2022.jpg

  11. To represent what the protagonists of Rand's novels are like, one needs to discuss how they are in the novels. Reading and reporting instead musings the novelist jots down in her journals about a future character she is working on does not get you a satisfactory grade in a literature class. But the point of this smear-article was not to read and report the literature or the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Behind all such personal attack-pieces like this one is simply the favor of politics or religion opposed to Rand-quarter positions concerning politics or religion. It is easier to vilify persons, such as Rand or her fictional protagonists, than to argue ideas. The latter would mean reading and accurately representing what were the ideas of Rand that she argued and that she illustrated in fictional stories. After accurate representation, one would go on to argue against those ideas, making counter-arguments in support of one's opposing views. (Which is what is in my writings concerning Rand or any other thinker I take up.) If someone is already in the church of the author of this personal-smear approach to morals and politics of Rand or libertarianism, one can get bolstering by reading this article. One does not get accurate information from it, only distortions. But there are readers who think that is fine, if only they get their church and political beliefs defended, however cheaply and slovenly. Precision respecting reality and life may not be their thing. But people who are after truth, including truth about what is Rand's philosophy, what is right in it and what is wrong with it, people like that read people like me.

  12. Wolff was a Lutheran, though an unusual one running full stride with reason: We should “give ear to our reason; namely our own Perfection, from which the Glory of God . . . cannot well be separated” (German Logic, 10.VI). Wolff defended the Leibnizian pre-established harmony, and together with Wolff’s wide scope of PSR, this could be stretched by others to support fatalism and removal of penalties for breaches of law, such as penalties for desertion from the Prussian military. Pietist faculty got the King to bar Wolff from university teaching, and Wolff was banished from Prussia in 1723 (if he was not gone within 48 hours, he would be hanged), which cemented Wolff’s status as intellectual celebrity of the Enlightenment throughout Europe.

    The serious Pietist philosopher Christian August Crusius (1715–75) rejected the full scope of Wolff’s PSR. Crusius was particularly concerned that PSR not overrun human free will, the truly originative agency of humans free to have chosen otherwise in a particular choice-circumstance. Crusius took it that humans are not subject to a PSR so strong as: nothing can be otherwise than it is (Sketch of the Necessary Truths of Reason, 1745, §84). Rand and Peikoff explicated Rand’s principle of causality (“All the countless forms, motions, combinations and dissolutions of elements in the universe—from a floating speck of dust to the formation of a galaxy to the emergence of life—are caused and determined by the identities of the elements involved.") such that some human action can be freely chosen.

  13. "Existence exists, but there has to be a reason why it does; it's not sufficient to just state that it does. Existence must exist for a reason."*   –EC

    Reasons presuppose possibilities presuppose potentials and actions presuppose existents, parts of Existence. Reasons presuppose Existence (by which latter, I mean not only existence per se and some existents, but as well, the totality of existents).

    From preceding post: 

    "For Rand, rightly I’d say: PSR [Principle of Sufficient Reason] in the form “For every existent, there is a reason why it exists, rather than not” can apply at most to constituents or proper parts of Existence, not to that comprehensive standing Existence, the all, the whole comprising all actuals and their potentials, all those concrete objects and their concrete actions, attributes, and relationships.[18] PSR in the form “Nothing happens without a reason” applies only within Existence, not to that all-of-alls Existence, which is not a “happening.” PSR in the form “There must be a sufficient reason for every truth of fact” does not apply to the bare truth Existence exists. There is the reality of the fact that that truth acknowledges; there is nothing begetting that fact. Rand’s curtailment of PSR did not diminish one bit the intelligibility of Existence by human reason, I should mention."

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