Boydstun

Ogg, you may recall that Rand worked with different sorts of 'musts' (as do we all) if you recall what you read in her essay "Causality versus Duty." That all animals must die is a must from a necessity in nature. That one must pay taxes is a man-made must. Another division of "musts" is between the unconditional ones and conditional ones. The latter are of the if-then form: "If such-and-such is to be accomplished, then condition so-and-so must obtain." So there are four kinds of 'musts'. For man-made and conditional, we have: "If you don't want to suffer the penalties of a legal violation, you must pay your taxes." For nature-given and conditional, we have: "If there is to be a fire here, there must be oxygen" and "If you are to breathe, there must be oxygen" and "If you want to live and enjoy yourself, you must do certain things and not others." For man-made and unconditional, there is apparently no such thing (maybe you can think of one). For nature-given and unconditional, we have: "Angular momentum must be conserved" (meaning only it always will be conserved come what may).

When we bought our first real estate, we had just retired. It is a couple of acres with many trees, often large. At first I would walk around thinking this tree is mine, touch another and think this tree is mine, and so forth. Only then could I have a live sense of saying all these trees are mine or this acreage is mine. Similarly, by the time one was reading Atlas Shrugged, one already had known that pencils and telephones and books and . . . . exist. That comes before any live sense in observing "All these things exist. Call that sum Existence. Existence exists." Not every aspect of a particular belonging to all particulars (such as pairs of electric potential differences between all pairs of objects of non-zero rest mass) is an aspect that can be attributed also to the Universe. Existence is one thing that can be so boosted to the whole from the particular. And one does not know that Existence exists except by knowing that there are particular existents. This particular existent has to sleep now. Well, OK, one copy-and-paste: The concept and referent mass-energy is able to hold both stasis and activity. Its amount is constant although mass can be at rest or moving uniformly or accelerating or being turned into pure energy by collision with its corresponding anti-matter. So let the philosophers catch up and get with the scientific program. Rand/Peikoff took all of these to be existents: baseball, its striking the bat and motion to right field, the spin on the ball, and the materials of which it was made. I agree. The shift from Scholastic talk of being to existence is good. One way in which being was divided was as unqualified being (also called absolute being) and qualified being. I'm with Rand/Peikoff and others in thinking there is no such thing as unqualified being (other than non-being, one might sputter). Anything that is is with qualifications, i.e., with identity. We are univocal in our view of existence, as Scotus was in his view of being. I have an Objectivist philosopher friend who disagrees. Against our univocal-existence view, I should try to understand more fully Kris McDaniel's The Fragmentation of Being (2017). When someone says there is at least one absolute being, they are mistaken. Even the totality of existence, i.e., the universe, is qualified by having a certain total mass-energy.

The concept and referent mass-energy is able to hold both. Its amount is constant although mass can be at rest or moving uniformly or accelerating or being turned into pure energy by collision with its corresponding anti-matter. So let the philosophers catch up and get with the scientific program. Rand/Peikoff took all of these to be existents: baseball, its striking the bat and motion to right field, the spin on the ball, and the materials of which it was made. I agree. The shift from Scholastic talk of being to existence is good. One way in which being was divided was as unqualified being (also called absolute being) and qualified being. I'm with Rand/Peikoff and others in thinking there is no such thing as unqualified being (other than non-being, one might sputter). Anything that is is with qualifications, i.e., with identity. We are univocal in our view of existence, as Scotus was in his view of being. I have an Objectivist philosopher friend who disagrees. Against our univocal-existence view, I should try to understand more fully Kris McDaniel's The Fragmentation of Being (2017). When someone says there is at least one absolute being, they are mistaken. Even the totality of existence, i.e., the universe, is qualified by having a certain total mass-energy.

I have my readers. Yes.

I do see Rand's two uses of the term man. That is not news. She said that over the body of her work, she would write "To the Glory of Man." That was her use of the term as model or ideal human. It is plain when she is using man to mean male to which she would be a man-worshipper with the right one. That is not Man, the general ideal for humans. Rand's views on sexual roles are also not news.

Ogg, The little book you possess is in English. Many people have that in the Beck translation, and I have given you the page numbers (13–15) which disprove your recall that Kant said nothing about life in his ethics. He said something right there on those pages, and it's something important. Suppose for a few minutes that you have some things to learn from information people are supplying here, these very people trying to converse with you. Slow down and actually comprehend what I wrote to you in the little post you quoted. Can you do that? Do you want to?

Ogg, The citation is to the Academy Edition (Akademie Ausgabe) of Kant's works (which are in Latin or German). So 4 refers to the volume in that collection and the other numbers to the right pages therein. A volume can contain multiple shorter works, which is why the page numbers are high even though this is a short work. All modern translators of Kant into English show the Academy volume and its pages in the margins as the text unfolds. That way everyone can locate the same text in their discussions even if the participants are using different translations. But if by chance your translation is the one by Lewis White Beck (1959), it does not have those Academy numbers running along in the margins. He does have them in square brackets at the top of each of his own pages. So in Beck, read his pages 13–15.

Yes, that usage of "man" in that context just means "human". That had been commonplace usage in somewhat earlier times from ours, and you are wrong about Rand meaning only males by it. It includes both males and females. If you argue with someone while thinking they mean males only when they really mean humans, you are arguing with a phantom, a mere nothing. And she did not restrict "man" to men of the mind. You can tell when she is using "man" as a model or ideal (as in "Man is man") and when she is speaking of men descriptively only. Her definition of man in full description was that man is a rational animal or a suicidal animal (by failings in rationality). I'm starting to lose confidence that you are a source of useful information.

Ogg, In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant discusses the nature of life and the inadequacy for making life the end for ethical values at 4:397–99. As Fred Seddon and George Walsh (phi professors) earlier did, you are making too much similarity between Kant and Rand by being too coarse-grained about their ideas and treating terminology they shared as though their meanings for the terms were always the same, which is false. Kant's and Rand's are philosophies thoroughly at odds with each other, both in theoretical philosophy and in ethical theory, even if Rand did not always get right just what all were her difference from the real Kant (what he really wrote) in the area of theoretical philosophy.

When you say "it" are you referring to materialism? If so, yes, materialism today about living things would be the discreteness of cells. But that is not a conjecture or implication of any modern philosophical position; it is just the result of nineteeth century biology that all living matter is made of cells. It is a further speculation, such as I would make, that all consciousness and experience and memories are results in living matter engaged with the world and the organism's own internal regulations. That would be a modern materialism of consciousness and pals. That the matter is cellular is only from science. In the portion of what I said that you quoted, I was thinking only of general ontology and Rand's point about it in that first paragraph at the top of page 39 in ITOE, with which I mainly agree. I don't see that as implying an ontologic discreteness, rather, an absence of any absolute disconnection of any existent from any other existents at all (except the existent that is the entirety of existence, of course). And I don't see that position in general ontology as implying any sort of materialism.

Monart, let me respond to these last two secondary posts of yours together in this note. On the Rand question, I don't have an answer either way, at least not thinking of it as what a definite deceased person would think. Our loved ones in life are continually surprising us and delighting us with some amount of unpredictability in their thought and expressions. Our experience of that part of them is part of our loss when they die. I'll allow as at least a slight possibility that Rand would agree with me as you posed. However, if she did, and if she wanted to say that her philosophy had not changed in any of its essentials by this change, that might take quite some tall argumentation. On your second post, there has been some deliberate public not-mention of Boydstun perhaps, but I think that can be for all the reasons you mentioned at the same time. Also, for the reason of not advertising alternatives or extensions (notably, as mere extension, my 2004 "Universals and Measurement") that were not worked through and published with the imprimatur of their own organization. Three professional Objectivist philosophers have very possibly picked up original ideas of mine (published in the 1990's, also the 2004) and incorporated them in their written presentations without giving any credit: Gotthelf – my idea of independent causal chains in connection with physics and free will; Binswanger – introducing into his expositions the Moh's hardness scale for exemplification of ordinal measurement in the physical realm (re Rand's theory of concepts) and gravitropisms in some plant roots for best contrast of gravity pulling a stone into rolling down a hill (re teleology of vegetative life); and Rheins – mention that the law of identity does not strictly imply uniqueness of outcomes from same initial conditions in physics (which, he neglects to mention, Rand and Peikoff had always supposed it did). All of these presentations tried to pass off these tidbits and outlooks as part of Rand's thought, which they most certainly were not, and which in the ordinal measurement topic, she flatly contradicted. But as you suggest, on to our own frontier. The flowering of online forums and of FB has allowed us to get our thought before more eyes and minds for these several years and perhaps will be here for future minds beyond our lifetimes. Minds communicating with minds is the core. All record of it is erased by thermodynamics eventually, just as all record that humans ever existed. What mattered was only while life was.

If I may add: Kant's predecessors such as Leibniz thought we have a faculty of intellectual intuition by which we DO access things as they are in themselves. Kant denied we have a faculty of intellectual intuition, only a faculty of sensory intuition. He was not in any sort of lamentation over that; it is not like we should be having a rational ambition to get hold of such a thing, like we pursue science, and are forever to be disappointed. Kant was NOT saying: "Oh, if only our senses were not getting in the way, we could grasp things as they are in themselves. Kant did not regard the senses, including the forms time and space that he thought of as contributions from the human powers of apprehension as DISTORTING anything. Indeed, he expressly denied that and denied that by appearance he meant illusion. Rand, and I also, are fully satisfied to know things as they are without trying to cast them as things as they are in themselves. Nothing is as it is in any way not standing in relations to things not itself.

At this site, anyone can go to your profile page. There is a "See my Activity" button there, where they or you can see all the posts you have made. If you give citations, you can use that list of posts as a map to the definite sources you have relied on in making your claims about Kant or Rand.

That is incorrect.

-Ayn Rand (For the New Intellectual, 32; Kndl ed.) If the majority of philosophers rejected Kant's "noumenal" realm, they have left out an important aspect of his philosophy - the source of all phenomena. Because even if the noumenal is unknowable, it is, for Kant, the grounds for phenomena beyond the senses. . . . The noumenal is the ground of experience. Without it, there is no perception, nothing to perceive. Kant never denied the ground of perception, only that it is knowable in itself, that is, by somehow going outside of your consciousness to know it directly without your senses. The noumenal is posited to exist as the ground of perception, of something for the senses to sense. The only way to know it directly would be to somehow go outside of your senses. Simple as that. Rand did not say that a majority of philosophers rejected Kant's noumenal realm. She said that a major line of philosophers rejected it. She knew what line that was from elementary history of philosophy. Do you know what line that was? "These appearances are not things in themselves; they are only representations, which in turn have their object—which cannot be intuited by us . . . and may be named the non-empirical, object = X" (A109). Kant indicates that the transcendental object, which he takes to be the ground (or cause, or correlate) of (the matter of) appearances, should not be identified with noumena. Scholars are divided on whether the two are always kept distinct in Kant, but in representing Kant, it is safest to call the source of (the matter of) appearances "transcendental object" if one's aim is to speak truly in representing Kant's view.