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It may be humorous to non-Objectivists that Objectivism recognizes that a baseball bat can be used to hit a baseball. But when Leonard Peikoff declares that science must conform to HIS philosophy, and you find out that his philosophy can’t accept 20th century science because it doesn’t agree with whatever Peikoff’s senses tell him is true, it ceases to be funny. It becomes hilarious. This is what happens when philosophy rejects the noumenal domain, the realm of amazing possibilities that lies just out of reach of your senses.

That is to say, logic and lawfulness comes, not from us as with Kant, but from outside of us. And since this determination of order comes through the senses, it appeals to the idea that all reality, not just the macro realm, must conform to the same logic and lawfulness that we perceive. Therefore, Objectivists such as Harriman or Peikoff, who are following their philosophy's conclusions to the letter, will declare that quantum particles cannot behave a-causally. Nor can they come into and go out of existence.

Greg Nyquist linked Peikoff's desperate attempt to subordinate science to HIS philosophy to ancient Greek philosophy: https://aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/2010/09/objectivism-metaphysics-part-12.html

I'm arguing that Existence exists isn't related to the idea that existents exist among other existents. I postulated a universe (an existence) in which the only existent was a hydrogen atom. The rest was just me trying to use a lot of words starting with E, hopefully while using the concepts in a consistent way, and putting 'permanence' together with 'change' in a way that makes sense. Permanence, being, is the laws of nature that make change predictable to us. "Beingness," which may not be a traditional concept in ontology, points to the quality of lawfulness in existents. I was also showing that I can play the ontology game too, even without lots of followers whom I neither want nor need. But now that you mention it, 'Existence exists' would be nothing but an empty tautology without Being to give it metaphysical permanence. I wouldn't except a monism of Being. But existence without Being is chaos, or non-existence. As for philosophers catching up and getting with the scientific program, Objectivism, with its reliance on the validity of the senses, can't make sense of any physics after Newton. David Harriman, author of The Logical Leap, and Leonard Peikoff say that modern physics must comply with Objectivist principles. But if it does, Relativity and QM will vanish overnight. https://aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/2010/09/objectivism-metaphysics-part-12.html This Dave Harriman, mentioned by Peikoff, is an amusing enough fellow. His attacks on relativity, quantum mechanics, big bang theory, etc. are filled with clever quips and amusing juxtapositions. Consider what he has to say of space:

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.

Kant agreed with shifting away from Being.

From this forum’s homepage: "Man must act for his own rational self-interest" "The purpose of morality is to teach you[...] to enjoy yourself and live" ”Man MUST act for his own rational self-interest.” MUST. Okay then, MAKE me. Because last I heard there are only two things that people MUST do: pay taxes, and die.

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 don't see that concept being derived from objective fact here http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/productiveness.html. I see where she calls non-thinkers (the majority of men) "blanks" and "brutes." And I see a lot of Rand telling people what they MUST do, as if they had to listen to her.

I didn't say her principles were correct because she identified them. I said she showed how to derive them from objective fact.

Well, the way I see it anyway, is like this: Rationality: she got it from Aristotle Productiveness: she got it from Locke. Pride: she got it from NB who was a psychology student during a time when "self-esteem" and "self-actualization" were trending in universities. ------------ Euclid was meant for blind obedience, because people were blindly obedient to his geometry until the early 19th century. People identify things all the time, but that doesn't make them correct.

I fully grant that existence does indeed exist. However, that statement is rather ambiguous, as traditional philosophy makes a distinction between existence and Being -- with the emphasis often placed on one over the other -- because the idea of Being is not present in the empty tautology "existence exists." It is not to say that the concept of "existence" exists, as that would be obvious; but that a thing called existence exists that is not itself and can never be an existent. Because existents exist within existence. "Existence" is therefore synonymous with "universe," as the sum-total of all that exists, that is, of all existents. I had to clarify this because the idea that "existence exists" is a mere tautology; it doesn't prove that existents exist among other existents. It does not prove that multiple existents exist at all, because a universe or existence containing a single existent, even if it's just a hydrogen atom, is all that is required for the concept of "existence" to be valid. To bring traditional philosophy back into this, existence is Being, but we posit that existents possess the quality of Beingness (to break with traditional ontology). Because Being is traditionally the permanent in ontology. It's seen as something that is not itself an existent but is an unchanging and fundamental quality that underlies all existents, such as the constants of physics. Individual existents change, but Being itself is permanent. And while existents themselves may exist in a flux, as Heraclites pointed out, they change in a regular, lawful, non-chaotic manner. So the monistic tendency of declaring that "existence exists" falls to the dualism of stating that, yes, existence exists, and not merely as an empty tautology, but that it also cannot exist without at least one existent contained within it (and not just subsumed beneath it as if they were mere concepts). That singular existent, however, is not existence. Existence is something more; it contains the regulated lawfulness of the hydrogen atom in my example: the Beingness. Existence not only contains, it controls the existent, the hydrogen atom, as it changes, bringing to it a modicum of predictability. The term "beingness" is simply used to indicate that the existence of the existent is ongoing, permanent, that it may change its form but never cease to exist. "Beingness" only serves as a pointer to the permanence that exists in the existent. I am not therefore saying that "Beingness" is anything more than a concept. The existence is not Being itself, but we can posit that it possesses the attribute of Beingness without declaring that Beingness is itself an existent.

Individualism does not equate to being able to rewrite reality. Ayn Rand did not hand out a set of "commandments," and even wrote that such a thing was offensive. She did identify principles of morality. She claimed that they were derivable from objective fact. She showed how to derive them. This is similar to the way Newton identified principles of physics. Newton is not opposed to individualism merely because he came up with Newton's Laws and then claimed they were universal and not subject to individual choice. Newton, like Rand, showed how he came up with his principles. The description of how is more important than the principles themselves, but his work would have been incomplete if he had merely described the "how" and left the principles themselves to implication. So it is with Rand. The identification of Newton's Laws was a major breakthrough in Enlightenment thought because it showed, on a scale never before seen at that time, the power of the mind to grasp reality. Ayn Rand's morality does the same thing (although historically later). Her principles are not meant for the kind of "blind obedience" that religionists encourage from people. If some people take her principles that way, it's because those people have probably grown up with religion and they don't know any other way to handle such principles. People new to Objectivism sometimes enthusiastically graft it onto what they already "know" without realizing that they're still acting on unidentified anti-Objectivist principles. (Then others observe their behavior and think it's Objectivist behavior when it isn't.) Newton was obviously not meant for blind obedience, either, and it was not the final word on physics. Future discoveries made Einstein possible (and necessary). The same thing is probably also true with Rand. There are probably moral principles yet to be discovered, that apply in situations Rand didn't consider, but they would still have to be validated by reference to reality and the requirements of human life. (Besides, applying the principles correctly, to your own circumstances, can require considerable amounts of "thinking for yourself.")

Parmenides dealt with the question of Being and Existence. Your viewpoint is very similar to his, although Parmenides emphasized Being (permanence) over Existence (change, Heraclitean flux).

"Yes" demonstrates to me that you are a philosopher, even if an amateur, and that you can think for yourself. But then again, you're not exactly an Objectivist, as you stated.

I have my readers. Yes.

If I posted any news, it was obviously my (correct) idea that Rand told people what to think, rather than teaching them how to think for themselves (as if they were individuals and not drones). I recently found that another non-Objectivist made the same observation, and I cited the blog address somewhere around here. If it's hard for you to distinguish new from old in my writing, from now on I promise that I will parenthesize everything I write on this topic with either (new) or (old).

Original work on Objectivism from non-Objectivists never goes over well.

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.

I don't know if I have a Beck translation. I stated that I don't want to dig around for the Groundwork. Then I stated that you require people to go look up citations, but that I provide quotes on demand if I didn't provide one originally. Have I insulted you with statements such as "Slow down and actually comprehend what I wrote to you in the little post you quoted. Can you do that? Do you want to?" One nice thing about being me is that, as a nobody (and I prefer it that way), the fact of becoming a somebody has never had a chance to go to my head.

Boydstun stated that he sees people on this forum thinking for themselves all the time. I need to provide a better answer than my previous one. The CONTEXT of my OP was the ability to think morally without relying on a list of values and virtues provided by Ayn Rand. I ended the OP by stating that Kant provided a formula for people to make up their own set of morals, as long as they were rationally validated by the CI. He did not provide them with a set of rules or duties to follow. The contrast between Rand's and Kant's theories was to show the difference between an individualistic moral theory from the Enlightenment that teaches people to think for themselves, and an allegedly individualistic moral theory that only tells people what to think with a set of rules to follow. I hope that clarifies things. This is original work, so misunderstandings will happen.

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?

Latin or German? This is hopeless. I can't research that. I will provide quotes for people who ask for them if I didn't provide one myself, rather than sending them to look up a book that is written in Latin or German. You're welcome for the help I gave you with one of your articles.

Boydstun doesn't want to see anything about Rand being a man-worshipper, which she was. Males, not humans in general. And you think I misunderstand her views, and that I accuse others of misunderstanding her views. I have read everything she wrote several times, except for most of those boring journal entries of hers. They are, however, quite revealing indeed, for what I read. And quite damning in one way. Shall I go on?