Boydstun

Caring for human life includes caring for rationality in human selves, indeed caring of the entire human psyche supporting its rationality. What good would be a person having all she desires but her rational mind? Distinctively moral caring is caring for human selves, notably in the great psyche-constituent and power of rationality—caring in the sense of concern and caring in the sense of tending. The power of human rationality is discovery and utilization of nature, and it is also our fundamental human love, which is an originative, out-springing love for the natural world and, as well, for we humans in nature, for human selves and our attainments. It is the love of creation and production, the love of intelligent conversation and commerce. That rationality is the fundamental human virtue. One failing to have it is in human failure, including moral failure. Fight for human rationality, knowing yours is the battle “for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.”

Correct. Just as: If it cannot proven that thinking does not exist, then it does exist. And thinking does exist, and some of thinking is our ability to formulate definitions and to construct proofs. Proofs that free will does not exist, proofs that when we experience making a free choice, it is not really free have been offered by others. Which one do you think correct? What is your proof, specifically? If you find no proof up to your standards and if you have the experience of freely choosing to reply to this post or not, then you should accept that you have that freedom. At least you should accept it until such time as you formulate or see a good enough proof that it does not exist, despite appearances.

State your proof that free will does not exist. Just as you would state your proof that Martians do not exist. Or that the sum of angles in any triangle in a Euclidean plane is 2R.

How do you know there are no Martians? Must you have proof to know that? How do you know that there cannot both be and not be Martians at the same time and in the same sense? How do you know that is true? By proof? How do you know you have typed some questions? Do you need a proof to know that is so? I'd say one does need memory, working and semantic, to think anything up at this level of posting, and one needs thinking to know anything. But surely we know lots of things without proof of them. To know that the sum of the angles of any triangle is 2R requires proof. But to know that any triangle is trilateral does not require proof. To know I'm writing this does not require proof. To know I selected to do this instead of not doing it does not require proof. To know, to the contrary, that I did not freely select between those two options would require proof. What is the proof that I don’t have free will? where free will is exemplified by my having the ability to make this post or not and choosing to make it. What is the proof that humans have no free will? If there is no such proof, then what is plain is true: they have some free will.

These Hours of Resonant Existence Tomorrows

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.