Boydstun

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.

@Ogg_Vorbis In thinking about Rand's moral theory and its possible contradictions, it's good to actually deal with Rand's texts and show any contradictions in it. If there is something in the theory stating the nature of human being that is false, well that is also a kind of contradiction, a contradiction with reality, and that is a contradiction very worthwhile to articulate. So are contradictions within her writings. But neither sort of contradiction can be shown without quoting the pertinent exact text so people know you are talking seriously and can see what your charge comes to specifically. How Rand dealt with her competitors and what she thought about the history of philosophy is not her moral theory and its moral advice. Text: "Your life depends on your mind. . . Accept, as your moral ideal, the task of becoming a man. // Do not say that you're afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. . . . Live and act within the limits of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. . . . Your mind is fallible, but . . . an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. . . . Accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory." (1975, 1058) Again and again at this site and indeed overwhelmingly, whether they are agreeing with Rand or disagreeing with her, I've seen people at this sight thinking for themselves, as the preceding quotation recommends. They can think for themselves, they love to think for themselves, and they do.

It is not a massive tome. It is simply this paper I linked for you: Kant v. Rand. It is easy to read, very clear and organized.

I am technically not an Objectivist, since some of my points of disagreement with Rand are ones essential to her philosophy. But I have much sympathy and overlap with her philosophy, and I have always represented Rand's or anyone's philosophy as accurately as possible in discussions of it. I am elderly, though not first-generation, or anyway not zero-generation. There are some Objectivists today, of every age, who judge what's true by what Rand said on candidates for truth or at least what they think Rand would say on candidates. Sometimes that is innocent in that it is just a short way of finding out what implications of Rand's fundamental views there are, given that they have come to accept those fundamentals as true of reality, Rand's fundamental views. Other times it is intellectual laziness or modest intelligence. But many, old and young, think for themselves and well. There is a passage in Rand stating that that is what she hoped for in her readers, but right now, I have to go to sleep.

Read the entire composition very carefully. Everything is cited, and hopefully you go to Kant to know Kant. Metaphysical knowledge would have to be synthetic a priori. You know that, right? It is elementary Kant. There is no excuse, with the English translations available today, to make assertions about what Kant thought, without citations. Likewise, for Rand: quote exactly and give the citation. Show they say what you assert they say, and you will also be making a handy resource for you to return to for cites for your future re-readings of these thinkers Keep reading.

That is false and you can easily know it is false.

If you actually bothered to read what people write here, you would see how flatly false is that generalization "all". But perhaps you presume nobody here has anything to say that you might learn from, you are going to bury your head in the sand about what they write, and you have only come here to enlighten these folks whom you presume to all be philosophical illiterates and have yet to discover thinking for themselves.

-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. It doesn't matter if the senses modify, what matters is that Kant posited the noumenal's existence. It is THIS that is the problem with modern philosophy - not the acceptance of Kant's philosophy, but its rejection of the ground of appearances (or phenomena). Logically, Rand committed the Fallacy of the Consequent in that quote. Because she focused on the alleged consequences of Kant's philosophy rather than specifically on the (incorrect) rejection of the noumenal realm by post-Kantian philosophers, which is my point. Despite the inherent unknowability of the noumenal, its positing serves as the foundation for understanding the empirical origins of phenomena, a notion often overlooked in contemporary philosophical discourse. The empiricist often confuses Kant's form of Idealism with those that infer the existence of an external world from the matter of appearances (mental states). But Kant did not infer it, he wholeheartedly accepted its existence. He only inferred the existence of the thing-in-itself (or noumenon), not the existence of external things, which he accepted. 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. Kant v. Rand

Kant's Wrestle with Happiness and Life

Ethical Egoism and an Alternative, and Honesty

The preceding (X) is my proposal for a biological basis of distinctly moral proprieties. It is not a moral code so far as it is now developed. There are some virtues that may be drawn from this basis, however, and in this it will be helpful to compare with Rand and with Kant. As with Rand’s, in my proposal, biological operations as they resulted in the course of nature on earth resulted in such things as needs and functions coming into the world. It is upon the organization that is life and its character we have the fact upon which oughts can have objective ground. Functions had come into the world before humans emerged. We and our ancestors were each of us functioning, more and less well, at any stage of our existence. Famously, for part of Rand’s ethical base, she characterized life in complete generality as self-generating and self-maintaining. This she took from standard biology along with the findings that all organismic life is cellular the findings of ontogeny and of evolution from Darwin to the present. It is quite true that self-generation and self-maintenance are features (which is character in my general ontology) of any life. Even if we humans become creators of life from inanimate matter, our success will mean that we created means for the appearance of matter organized such that it is self-generating and self-maintaining. We are relying on that character when we plant, water, and fertilize crops, even if we only dimly notice that the crops do the growing themselves and possess various ranges of adaptability themselves under changes in surrounding conditions. That living things have functions in their subsystems to the preservation and replication of the whole organism and that living things have powers of self-generation and self-maintenance might better have some elements such as growth drawn out more, but I’ll stay with Rand’s broad meanings of self-generation and self-maintenance. Notice that these steps are not necessarily only suited for a ladder to ethical egoism. To be a fair characterization of life in general, we must understand “self” in self-generating and self-maintaining in a broad and indeed rather shifty way. Overwhelmingly, life gets started from life. Other life. Self as individual organism and self as its species work back and forth for continuation of those two selves. An individual life can be just a quickly disposable trial tool in the function of preserving the species, although overall, the species requires individual organisms. Of course. I stress that functions are operating in each one of us in all one's ontogeny. Rand noted that the pleasure-pain mechanism of the body is the progenitor of what is joy and suffering in organic elaboration and that all of those are indicators for good or evil for life of and proper functioning in the individual animal, including humans. I stress that it is not only other animals in which all of that is part of its overall individual control system. Our high-level, socially instructed conscious control system in maturity remains tied to the automatic one still running. Rand centered on a choice to live in the case of human life. I think that element is better characterized as a choice to continue living. And that means, as stated in the monograph, continuing to pursue the facts and the coordination with others in that pursuit. Rand has it that rationality is our overarching method for getting the facts and making good uses of them. That is fine, but I contest the picture in which one was just going along alone rationally pursuing the facts and how to use them and then as it were noticed, secondarily, that the existence of other people is enjoyable, knowledge-boosting, and economically advantageous. The higher intelligence of humans does indeed have launchings spontaneously in individuals. Young children will spontaneously seriate a group of rods according to their lengths; none of our closest primate pals do that. But we have been in intelligent human company all along our individual active existence, from precautions and playing to learning common nouns, proper names, verbs, classification, and predication. Rationality is profoundly social in one from the get-go, even as its acquisition by each person consists in individual facility in its operation independently of direction from others and self-direction in seeking information or specialized skills from others Rationality is seen by Rand as the basic moral virtue because it is the necessary general operation needed for the human form of life. She takes the other virtues in her ethical system to be salient strands of rationality aimed at individual survival. I say, rather, that rationality is the given proper being of a human and the proper responsiveness to persons, other and self. Rationality is the grand means of human survival, as Rand held, but that is not the whole of its story. Rand had proposed that the virtue of rationality is not only virtue in a social setting, but virtue—main moral virtue—for a castaway on a deserted island. This is because in the isolated setting rationality is necessary to the individual’s survival. That is so, however, I say that enabling survival is not the only source of the goodness of rationality. There is a person on that island: the castaway. Rationality is proper responsiveness to and continuation of his self. It is call of life in that life form that is his personal self that is the distinctively moral in the virtue of rationality for a castaway. Though the castaway carries along other in foundational frame, he is now the only human present. He is an end-in-himself with much rightness to continue himself. (A pet might go a ways for fulfilling the need to love and interact with another human self.) Returned to society, an individual remains an end-in-himself rightly making his life, a fully human life with interactions and mutual values and interactions with the other ends-in-themselves that are human selves at centers of making lives. Ayn Rand offered an ethical egoism in which rationality took its place as central overall virtue for a person due to the need for rationality in making one’s reality-according individual human life. She tried to weave the prima facie virtue of truth-telling to others as a derivative of the need to be honest with oneself about the facts. That is not plausibly the basic reason one wants to and should want to be honest with others. Rand’s account of honesty is inadequate by reliance on a purely egoistic basis. Ethical egoism, a genuine one such as hers, one attempting to derive all its moral virtues purely from self-interest, is false. It rests on an inadequate view of what is the constitution of the human self. (To be continued.)