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Showing content with the highest reputation on 08/02/22 in all areas

  1. tadmjones

    Follow-Up on 9/11/01

    On a balcony in Kabul visiting his family. It looks like suicide by drone.
    1 point
  2. Boydstun

    Atlas Shrugged

    I’ve followed up on the last paragraph of the preceding post. My American Heritage dictionary defines volition as: An act of willing, choosing, or deciding. A conscious choice; decision. The power or capability of choosing; the will. On their surface, one might slide into thinking those definitions come to free will. The debates over free will/determinism/compatibilism, however, are about whether and what sorts of freedom are behind willings, choices, and decisions. So in common usage volition is not equivalent to free will in a full-bodied sense. That is, volition does not mean free volition, but leaves open the controversy of whether and which volitions are free. When one looks in the index of The Virtue of Selfishness or of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand for free will, one is simply directed to see volition. Peikoff speaks of free will in OPAR (55), but clearly volition (meaning free volition) is his preferred term of art in expressing Rand’s theory. He remarks at the end of his discussion (55–72) that Rand’s layout of (free) volition, joining it inalienably to the conceptual power, fits this fundamental sort of freedom smoothly into the natural world and removes it from its modern refuge in constructs supernatural. Because of its common residence in distinctly religious frameworks, one might think it better to shift its name from free will to (free) volition in shifting the thing itself from its religious sanctuary into the light of plain day. Rand and subsequent Objectivists have used the term volition idiosyncratically in taking it to mean always free volition. Some of us, when young, first learned the term volition from writings of Rand and Branden and were not awakened to its meaning in the wider educated culture until we opened the dictionary on the term. This disparity is no great problem, I’d say. Blackwell’s A Companion to Ayn Rand (2016) indexes free will, and under volition the Index simply directs one to free will and to the subsidiary volitional under the entry reason. In his Chapter “A Being of Self-Made Soul,” Onkar Ghate has a subsection titled “Free Will” (107–12) with an endnote 9 in which he states: “Rand uses the terms ‘free will’ and ‘volition’ interchangeably, and I will follow suit.” (I see that incorrect conjugation of the verb to be, first person, simple future, in many scholarly books from some high class presses these days. Still, if you would like to avoid irritating some of the elderly, please use I shall and we shall for simple future tense when writing formally.) Ghate’s presentation is good (107–12), and he relies on and quotes from the Rand and Branden compositions that are included among the Objectivist references on free will that he lists in that endnote 9. Among those references, Rand, Peikoff, and Binswanger, had stuck with volition in preference to free will. Branden had traded expressly in free will all along. The Rand references are to Galt’s Speech and “The Objectivist Ethics,” and the Peikoff is OPAR. The Branden references are four articles in The Objectivist Newsletter and The Objectivist journal. The Binswanger reference is to a 1991 monograph in which he redrafted those Branden contributions and made some additions and cast all in a nicely biocentric way. Branden’s compositions were incorporated into his The Psychology of Self-Esteem – A New Concept of Man’s Psychological Nature (1969). That book indexes volition, and has for free will: see volition. Binswanger’s monograph treatment is incorporated into the “Free Will” chapter of his How We Know – Epistemology on an Objectivist Foundation (2014). That book simply indexes free will/volition. (Binswanger’s monograph and book and Peikoff’s OPAR never write the name Branden, but with the Blackwell book, that dark public stamp of personal animosities in major Objectivist scholarly work has been dispelled with honest light.)
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