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MS & SL, I like the idea of space as a potential for occupancy. Potentials of nature are real things in my book and so are potential things that might be invented and gotten a patent on. Potential are distinct from mere possibilities in my usage. Possibilities are things in the mind that is engaged in thinking. Potentials are already out there as it were, and together with actualities, they compose existence. Potentials, hence space of the world is real. Space, even unoccupied space, is real, is an existent. However, potential for material or field occupancy is not the only potential

When your 12" cube is empty, none of the particles of reality which exist have attributes i.e. coordinates in space, which coincide with the innermost space of the 12" cube. This does not, of course, in any way contradict with the fact that in times previous, many particles possessed such physical coordinates. Nor does it contradict the fact that presently, when empty, particles, systems, and energy outside possess the potential to cause, over time, some particles to again possess coordinates coinciding with the interior of the 12". Stating that the cube is empty, in fact means, of t

I don't understand why you guys dump on Trump for not being a perfect defender of individual rights but hand-wave dismiss the Democrats and Biden's complete dismissal of individual rights as essentially as "Democrats being Democrats". The majority of their ideas and policies are completely evil, while only a smaller portion of Trump's policies are explicitly evil. That's why I voted for him and semi-support him over Biden.

I mean consuming anything by Gilson should profit you substantially. His Methodical Realism is a very good, short read. His Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge is good for setting the ground rules on engagement with Cartesian and Kantian epistemology. More neo-Thomist stuff: Anthony Lisska's two books Aquinas' Theory of Perception and Natural Law is a reconstruction of Thomistic epistemology and meta-ethics that engages with contemporary analytic philosophy. John O'Callaghan's Thomistic Realism and the Linguistic Turn employs Aquinas' semantic theory to describe how co

You're discussing a section of space. It is not nothing as in a zero. It is nothing as in unoccupied by a material thing. Defining it positively is a real challenge, because it is unlike every thing that exists. It's just space. It's where everything is.

No. Leibniz was too much of a theist and idealist for my taste.

I think space is real, but not a thing, as in an object or body. It's what most people mean when they refer to nothing rather than a mere absence of something. You could look at the space between two trees and say there is nothing there, because you don't see a thing in that space. Then science can reveal that gas molecules are in that space, and with tools we can still see a space between the molecules. We can break the molecules into smaller pieces with space between them, but what of the space? As for whether space is physical, I don't see how it can be. But I'm curious about your idea

An example I was presented with once: Imagine a box floating in outer space. To the box, a vacuum pump is attached. Envisioning a chamber of 12" cubed, the contention is that if everything has been evacuated from the chamber, one is left with a void. There is a context in which this is correct. The 12" cubical void could be filled with a variety of other matter, but it would not satisfy the individual who established the shifting criteria of the thought experiment. So long as the walls of the cube are 12" apart, at least the distance between the walls fill the cavity. The space there

My estimation of Trump’s support led me to believe that he would win re-election and that if he didn’t win , it would be because of vote count manipulation. Sharing that sentiment cemented my conspiratorial nature and had me being branded as beyond naive and prey to vicious lies designed to overthrow the rule of law. I have to say I’m still comfortable in my deluded state and not ready to abandon it. The liars’ lies still seem plausible, the lies only seem to be more and more plausible , are they that well crafted ? Am I still blinded and completely deluded?

The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece I know little about history of Rome. Perhaps others know some good scholarship on it in the league with the preceding book on Ancient Greece.

Huh? Trump has been honest? Now that's hyperbole. I did a double-take on that one, too

So the DNC/ Biden persuaded a majority of voters to view their policies as good ? A majority of American voters back the Democrat Party platform? Biden as a leader articulated a cohesive enough argument to persuade a majority? The campaign had no advantage or assistance to their efforts in formulating the presentation and dissemination of their policies that Trump’s campaign did not enjoy to the same extent? The main media and social media platforms acted independently and covered the candidates in equitable fashion. Seeing or pointing out bias in treatment to the respective campaig

After the initial reading of your OP, the following excerpt had come to mind. In the second paragraph, Stephen articulates that Rand's definition seems restrictive and goes on in the remainder of the cited passage to provide some supporting reasoning with which to underscore it.

Here's a haphazard way of approaching it. Ethics Explainer: Naturalistic Fallacy Main take-away: The naturalistic fallacy is an informal logical fallacy which argues that if something is ‘natural’ it must be good. It is closely related to the is/ought fallacy – when someone tries to infer what ‘ought’ to be done from what ‘is’. Naturalistic fallacy: (Wikipedia entry. Doesn't hone in on O.P.) Moral Non-Naturalism (Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) The naturalistic fallacy is very poorly named indeed (a point also made by Bernard Williams; see Williams 1985: 121–122)

I will get into my answer later for intrinsicist, but as a matter of clarification. Rand would probably claim that all that exists metaphysically speaking (apart from your consciousness) is 1. The only universals that exist are 3, with the emphasis that they only exist in the mind. 2 would not be anything valid that exists (there are no universals outside of the mind). Objective thinking (rational thinking) is the way we connect 1 and 3 in a valid way. Connecting 1 with 3 would not require some intermediary existent like 2.

I believe Trump won the election, I doubt he lost any support among his 'base' and seemed to have garnered more support from parts of the electorate that voted against him in 2016. I believe there is a concerted effort between the establishment/deep state/media/big tech to remove Trump and install Biden. I think the pandemic provided 'them' opportunity to increase the level of chicanery in the way the election was carried out.

This needs a comment. I have never accepted the false, emotionalist, alternative which has dogged the Trump presidency. Why must I "like" him - or hate him? How about I approve of, in general and in essence, what he did and tried to do for the USA and for freedom lovers everywhere? Some time prior to Trump's arrival I became aware of some anti-American, anti-individualist nastiness stirring in the US. That he hated its proponents, with "malice", as was remarked, is simply justice to them. Personalities are irrelevant. It's not as if I want to take him home to meet the folks. That's a

Hello again, I wanted make a thread to discuss my latest post from my blog Active Objectivism. I think this form of argument, known as "presuppositionalism" or a "transcendental argument", is crucial to philosophy, and largely unrecognized and unappreciated. Ever since Kant it has been fallaciously thought only to prove things about man's own mind or perspective (Kant's so-called "transcendental idealism", aka. the "Copernican revolution"), thus damning the science of metaphysics forever (the "noumena" or "things in themselves" are forever unknowable as we can only see things t

Yeah Biden won, no strings. Countries around the world put in place public policy that had never been heard of prior , no strings.

This election was the triumph of aesthetic feelings around a personality ABOVE reason and real values. The media-fed "image" of a leader has counted to a majority of voters (and mainstream Objectivists, which leaves me aghast) above his effectiveness at opposing self-sacrifice and establishing American independence. d_w, mark this point, there are those there in majority and many abroad who want to perpetuate the customary altruist USA and were terrified that it may end. That's the basis of Trump hatred. Here is where "many sense something is a amiss and can't put their finger on it", as you s

Un’aura amorosa (Così fan tutte) Mozart Josh Lovell

In the US Thoreau’s Walden has been very popular since the 1930’s. I was introduced to this work in junior year of high school which is when students had a course in American Literature. Do your high schools have a course in Canadian Literature? It’s hard for me to imagine someone coming out of high school in the US without having gotten into some of the writings and ideas of Thoreau and Emerson. But perhaps they do. Perhaps some come out with no exposure to any literature and philosophical ideas or to their connection to books and essays that went before, and perhaps they just wouldn’t b

This is not a "valid deductive argument," per @2046's post. You'd need an additional premise that an entity ought to perform the function it was created to perform to make the argument deductively valid.

Yaron Brook thinks he got what he hoped for but there are many anomalies in the election. He came out November 5th or 6th saying that his “educated guess” is that there will be no “provable” vote fraud. He meant fraud either by those who want the Republicans to win or by those who want the Democrats to win, he sees the two groups as equally likely to engage in fraud. His arguments are ridiculous, see: Yaron Brook Show (starts at 9:44)

I’m not up on terminological arcana, so while I’ve vaguely heard of a “transcendental argument”, I wouldn’t know one if it bit me on the ass. However, the particular logical form that you identify is, IMO, one of the greatest contributions of Objectivism to my own philosophically-based work. It is particularly important in saying what “hierarchical knowledge” is, in rationally structuring knowledge, and I believe that a failure to identify the presuppositions of a concept are a significant source of logical error. There is a recent bit of related discussion here.

Do I have insight as to the provenance of Q ? Nope. I’m a fan of the phenomenon though. Even as ( or especially as) allegory.

I'm curious what people think of this... I'd like to see a list of all the states this is happening in, and I'd like to know the probability that it could happen by chance. I mean, regardless of what you may think of the source... these are actual numbers, and it should be possible to check them... right?

When I wrote A Metaphysics for Freedom #1 on Nov. 2, I didn’t include much from pages 9-12 in order to emphasize her argument for free will rather than her argument against determinism. This morning I added an addenda to #1 that will hopefully satisfy MisterSwig for the present.

Several of the California ballot propositions, not just 22, turned out well - racial quotas, tax increases and new dialysis regulations among them: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/good-news-for-conservatives-from-california/. Oregon voted for a big drug decriminalization.

It appears you've made the Garbage Pile with your Bickering crap.

Imagine thinking having books will increase your status and allow you to assert more things

Here are just two shelves of mine. I have all the extra paperback Atlases and Anthems and Capitalisms and Virtues because there are still some used bookstores in Denver and I pick up every copy I find and I place them into the free libraries that are spotted all over Denver in front yards. I have read and loved Ayn Rand and promoted her ideas since I was fourteen years old.

Annual amount of electrical energy produced by countries of the world is here. Leading source for generation of electric power for each US state, 2001 v 2019. Information used by NYT (10/28/20) in making these maps is from the US Energy Information Agency.

I really liked this book, and I have every reason to believe the userbase here will know of other, similar books of which I am ignorant. On reflection, the reasons I liked the book were that it's Aristotelian, very confident of our ability to know the truth objectively (in this case, in metaphysics), informative, well written, seemingly well argued, and has a lot of inspiring quotes scattered throughout. That sounds like an ad for the book, but it's not. It's just a description of the sort of book I'm looking for. Here's the back cover: So basically, I'm looking for more book

There's a lesson somewhere in this I've been (too) long in learning. I remember getting to high school and college and grad school and, each in turn, thinking something along the lines of "this is it?" College especially, I expected to be... more than it was. There's a reverence I've always felt for learning, for reason, for truth, and I've always expected that, in a place surrounded by people who shared these pursuits, I would discover a community characterized by passion and kindness and understanding. Benevolent. Then, having discovered Rand and Objectivism, I think I transferred some

Indeed, he is totally owned by the Communist Party that has tormented billions of people for generations. Trump swore an oath to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, so he can not and will not allow Biden to assume the Presidency. The Biden Crime Family and the rest of the filthy Washington swamp will be dealt with appropriately in Trump's glorious second term, all backed up by the newly-legitimate Supreme Court.

This essay of mine was first published in V5N2 of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies – 2004. Universals and Measurement I. Orientation Rand spoke of universals as abstractions that are concepts (1966, 1, 13). Quine spoke in the same vein of "conceptual integration—the integrating of particulars into a universal" (1961, 70). Those uses of universal engage one standard meaning of the term. Another standard meaning is the potential collection to which a concept refers. This is the collection of class members consisting of all the instances falling under the concept[1]. In the present

II. Analysis (cont.) Affordance of Ordinal Measures Recall again Rand's characterization of measurement: identification of "a quantitative relationship established by means of a standard that serves as a unit" (1966, 7). The phrase "a standard that serves as a unit" suggests that Rand's conception of measurement for her measurement-omission analysis of concepts was ratio-scale or interval-scale measurement. These two types possess interval units that can serve as interval standards. They possess interval units that can be meaningfully summed to make measurements. The quantitative rel

II. Analysis Rand gave three definitions of concept. I shall tie them all together in the next section, but for the present section, we need this one alone: Concepts are mental integrations of "two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted" (Rand 1966, 13)[6]. The units spoken of in this definition are items appropriately construed as units by the conceiving mind. They are items construed as units in two senses, as substitution units and as measure values (Rand 1969, 184, 186–88). As substitution units, the items in

Rather than make a new thread I thought I would tack this entry onto this existing thread. quantamagazine.org: Quantum Leaps, Long Assumed to Be Instantaneous, Take Time nature.com Letter: To catch and reverse a quantum jump mid-flight

In objectivism, morality (principles for action) have an OBJECTIVE basis (life as the standard of value) and would never be based on either the whims of others, or the whims of ones' self projected onto others.... which is what the Golden Rule would have us make the basis for moral determinations. I think the contradiction between that and the Golden Rule is pretty plain to see.