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  1. monart

    Motive Power

    Motivation is a key to human action, to its initiation, sustenance, and completion. Based on one’s values, motivation comes in many forms, such as financial, legal, ethical, promissory, logical, intellectual, and esthetic. At its core, motivation is emotive, i.e., e-motion: that which “-moves out”, that which is the motive power of action. An example of esthetic motivation is the following. Motive Power The motive power of life is the engine of directed motion, the generator and creator of life’s ambition, driving actions forward in life’s continuous sustenance and realization. In music, as in life, there’s a motive power that pulls music outward, a keynote that carries the flow of melody in harmony on a constant beat toward resolution and arrival. In literature, as in music and in life, there is a motive power that draws out the words and names the concepts that inform and inspire thought onward to envision real ideals. The source of motive power, in literature, music, and life, is: integration – it’s choosing to clarify and unify words, tones, and actions with integrity and purpose, all aiming for the climax, crescendo, and ecstasy that await. As three models of motive power, behold: In real life is the person and character of genius and benefactor Ayn Rand (see 100 voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand and The Letters of Ayn Rand, In music and literature, are the following two complementary works: one a motion-picture in sounds, the other, a motion-picture in words; the music “Collision” may be heard as a short prelude to the scene from Atlas Shrugged. All models are worth repeated visits for reflection and re-motivation. ===== “Collision”, by John Mills-Cockell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiIe3PjiYp4 And his other similar earlier works from 1970s, such as “Melina’s Torch”. “Tillicum”, “Aurora Spinray”, “December Angel”, "Appaloosa and Pegasus" – all can be heard on Youtube. Also, especially noteworthy is his 2004 Concerto of Deliverance, commissioned as a tribute to Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. http://www.starshipaurora.com/concertoofdeliverance.html ===== Dagny riding the John Galt Line (especially p. 245-246, Atlas Shrugged😞 She felt the sweep of an emotion which she could not contain, as of something bursting upward. She turned to the door of the motor units, she threw it open to a screaming jet of sound and escaped into the pounding of the engine's heart. For a moment, it was as if she were reduced to a single sense, the sense of hearing, and what remained of her hearing was only a long, rising, falling, rising scream. She stood in a swaying, sealed chamber of metal, looking at the giant generators. She had wanted to see them, because the sense of triumph within her was bound to them, to her love for them, to the reason of the life-work she had chosen. In the abnormal clarity of a violent emotion, she felt as if she were about to grasp something she had never known and had to know. She laughed aloud, but heard no sound of it; nothing could be heard through the continuous explosion. "The John Galt Line!" she shouted, for the amusement of feeling her voice swept away from her lips. She moved slowly along the length of the motor units, down a narrow passage between the engines and the wall. She felt the immodesty of an intruder, as if she had slipped inside a living creature, under its silver skin, and were watching its life beating in gray metal cylinders, in twisted coils, in sealed tubes, in 'the convulsive whirl of blades in wire cages. The enormous complexity of the shape above her was drained by invisible channels, and the violence raging within it was led to fragile needles on glass dials, to green and red beads winking on panels, to tall, thin cabinets stenciled "High Voltage." Why had she always felt that joyous sense of confidence when looking at machines? -- she thought. In these giant shapes, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the motors was an embodied answer to "Why?" and "What for?" -- like the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort of mind she worshipped. The motors were a moral code cast in steel. They are alive, she thought, because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power -- of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form. For an instant, it seemed to her that the motors were transparent and she was seeing the net of their nervous system. It was a net of connections, more intricate, more crucial than all of their wires and circuits: the rational connections made by that human mind which had fashioned any one part of them for the first time. They are alive, she thought, but their soul operates them by remote control. Their soul is in every man who has the capacity to equal this achievement. Should the soul vanish from the earth, the motors would stop, because that is the power which keeps them going -- not the oil under the floor under her feet, the oil that would then become primeval ooze again -- not the steel cylinders that would become stains of rust on the walls of the caves of shivering savages -- the power of a living mind -- the power of thought and choice and purpose. She was making her way back toward the cab, feeling that she wanted to laugh, to kneel or to lift her arms, wishing she were able to release the thing she felt . . . . =======
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  2. They are many, we are few -- so? They control us through the welfare state. So? We can refute and resist them. We know truly and can speak clearly of this: Self-Defense in a Welfare State You the welfare statist government say you are here to “help” and “serve” us with “welfare” by taxing, licensing, and regulating us. We the individualists are here to repudiate you the welfare statist government and your electors. . . . . . To reject and remove from you the power to violate our rights and so restrict you to your proper role of just protecting individual rights. We do not need or want your false help. We choose to truly help and live for and by own selves. We are self-sufficient, self-respecting, autonomous individuals. We own and support our lives by thinking and working for our own purpose and profit. We defend our rights to our property, liberty, and the pursuit of our happiness. We reject your welfare statist tyranny and refute the self-sacrifice and self-immolation of the altruism that spawned you. We recognize and uphold the supremacy of reason and reality, not the faith or force of the rights-violating State. We trade and associate with each other freely, without coercion, for mutual benefit with mutual consent. We don’t violate anyone’s rights and won’t accept any violation of ours. If we help each other in times of misfortune, we do so voluntarily, based on value not force. We value each other as individual free agents, as fellow humane, reasoning beings, living productive and proud lives. We seek each other’s benevolent company and appreciate each other’s unique, singular sovereignty. And we stand together against any tyranny with the full moral, rational certainty of our individual rights. So, we neither want nor need your welfare statism, your taxing and regulating our conversation and commerce. While we may comply when we are forced by law, we will not be martyrs or willing victims. We will resist, protest, and seek restitution where provided by law. You tax, license, and regulate, but you must also grant subsidies, relief, insurance, pensions, exemptions, deductions, and all such “welfare services and entitlements” so as to maintain the pretext for your statist tyranny. Where we could and care to, we will make claims on such “welfare” as a form of restitution, in self-defense, but without either agreeing or supporting your welfare statism. We will not vote for any member of any of your welfare parties of any color. We will vote only for legislators who stand for individual rights, and for the ethics of reason and reality that’s its foundation. These individualist politicians will oppose and seek to repeal all welfare statist laws and reform the constitution to affirm explicitly, definitively, the supremacy of individual rights, and to remove the government’s power to violate them, in anyone’s name, not the State, Society, or God. Meanwhile, we will continue to live and let live, to make the best of what’s possible to us, even in this welfare statist tyranny. There are and have been other worst states of tyranny than here now in the US-Canadian America, where it's still, overall, the freest in the world. But being the freest is not yet being all free. There's still a long way to go, but it will be soon enough. The legacy of Aristotelian Enlightenment is still a strong source of philosophy against any tyranny, especially when fortified by the rational individualist philosophy in our own times formulated by Ayn Rand. That the Ayn Rand Institute teaching her ideas of Objectivism continues to grow, 35 years after her death, and that her books continue to be bestsellers, is a positive cultural barometer of the progress of a rational, romantic civilization. More and more, there are politicians who acknowledge Ayn Rand’s positive influence on them. As we live on in the frontiers of freedom, we will avoid, as best we can, your welfare statist interference and distraction from our pursuit of our noble purpose, which, ultimately, is our own happiness. We will keep strengthening our understanding of the philosophy of reality, reason, rights, and romance – seeking continuous self-realization and self-betterment. There’s always a better way, as we’ll teach our children, a better and benevolent way through self-knowledge, self-sufficiency, and self-defense. Our children of liberty are the mothers and fathers of freedom’s future. With truth, courage, and love, we cheer them on. You, Welfare State, your days are numbered!
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  3. Necessity and Form in Truths In this study, I firstly examine the Objectivist account of how Rand’s theory of concepts dissolves the customary distinction of truths into ones true in virtue of meaning and ones true in virtue of experience. Although that particular character of concepts in Rand’s mold of them does dissolve that wrong divide of truths—the analytic-synthetic divide—I advance an additional character of her theory, one more peculiar to hers, that also dissolves the A-S division, at least when her theory is set in my ontology. In that residence, concretes as in the world, as in fact, possess form in their situation, passage, and character, I show that the two sorts of necessity traditionally attached respectively to analytic truths and synthetic truths are rightly dissolved and replaced by a single necessity attending a single compounded formula of truth familiar from Rand. This necessity is not a compound of the two necessities, logical and physical, characterized by supporters of the A-S division. It is, rather, a compound of necessity-for of life and of living mind in grasping fact, the realm of necessity-that. I exhibit this single necessity attending truths in logic, truths in mathematics, and truths of concretes tooled by logical and mathematical truths.
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  4. Thank you for your comparisons between Rand-Peikoff's and the others' rejection of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy, the latter of which I knew little about before. I'm just beginning to browse through your prolific work on philosophy llisted on your profile. And I'm looking forward to further postings from you on this topic of necessary truths, and to your explanation of necessity as "a compound of necessity-for of life and of living mind in grasping fact, the realm of necessity-that".
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  5. SIDEBAR In his 2016, Greg Salmieri notes that it is curious that Peikoff 1967 does not mention Quine’s “Two Dogmas.” Salmeiri points out some ways the Rand-Peikoff diagnoses of and remedies for the errors in analytic-versus-synthetic doctrines differ from Quine’s. Salmieri understands the later challenge of AvS from Kripke and Putnam to have more in common with the Objectivist challenge, though Putnam differs importantly from Rand on definitions and essences, which looms large in the Objectivist challenge (2016, 304n34, 311n87). Salmieri points to the book-review article, in JARS in 2005, by Roderick Long for thoughts on some relations between Randian theory of meaning and those of Kripke and Putnam. Long’s 2005 review of Greg Browne’s book Necessary Factual Truth was followed a year later by a substantial reply from Browne and rejoinder by Long (JARS V7N1). From May to September of 2007, Prof. Browne engaged in a very generous exchange (his own words coming to about 19,000) in a thread at Objectivist Living* defending the rejection by Peikoff of AvS and defending his own kindred rejection of AvS. Browne had in his arsenal the Kripke-Putnam developments that had been savaging AvS in the years since Peikoff 1967. Browne vigorously countered, in that thread, devotees of Logical Empiricism (and of Popper) who criticized (and poorly understood the revolution afoot, such as in) Peikoff 1967. Late in that thread, Robert Campbell entered it to ask Browne if he had any thoughts on why Peikoff had not addressed the famous Quine paper in his (Peikoff’s) dissertation, which Campbell had lately acquired. Browne had not seen the dissertation and had not much to conjecture on that peculiarity. (Remember, Peikoff 1964 is not written as a champion of Ayn Rand’s philosophic views, but, in an even-handed way, by an author acknowledging his background preference for some rehabilitated sort of logical ontologism and pointing near the end of the dissertation to some of that rehabilitation, such as fresh thinking on the nature of definitions and essence; distance between Quine’s views on logic and on AvS and Randian Peikoff views would not be the reason for no Quine in Peikoff 1964.) I should suggest that Quine, Carnap, Russell, and Wittgenstein raise such a briar patch of technicalities that it was better (and enough for deserving a Ph.D.) to stick with the more accessible and manageable Ayer, Nagel, Dewey, and Lewis to get the dissertation (already more than an armful in history assimilated) finally completed. I'll be digging through the Carnap-Quine briar patch in the next installment of the present study (along with Neo-Kantianism, Logical Empiricism, and of course Kant). *I stopped posting at that site a year ago, when the owner covertly deleted a post of mine partly critical of Donald Trump. ~References~ Browne, G. M. 2001. Necessary Factual Truth. Lanham: University Press of America. Gotthelf, A. and G. Salmieri, editors, 2016. A Companion to Ayn Rand. Wiley Blackwell. Peikoff, L. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990. Long, R. T. 2005. Reference and Necessity: A Rand-Kripke Synthesis? —Review of Brown 2001. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 7(1):209–28. Quine, W. V. O. 1951. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In From a Logical Point of View. 1953. Harvard. Rand, A. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. Meridian. Salmieri, G. 2016. The Objectivist Epistemology. In Gotthelf and Salmieri 2016.
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  6. I do not advocate any of these things. I think there's a confusion here between what the forum as a whole does (e.g., through moderation) versus what its individual participants do. Part of this is the recognition that every individual participating here has the right to make their own judgment about which arguments are rational and why, as well as which arguments are worth responding to and which not. (And on the other hand, if they make invalid arguments, their arguments will be judged accordingly.) I don't think such individual judgment should be usurped by the forum itself such as by banning arguments, which amounts to deciding that the participants shouldn't be allowed to see them or, possibly, that they shouldn't be allowed to make them. I am aware that the resources of this (or any) forum are privately owned and that the owner can decide how they can be used. However, the amount of these resources for any single post is pretty small (and I'm sure the owners would like them kept small). Providing a public forum is not in fact a moral sanction upon everything people say there, just like giving away sheets of blank paper is not a moral sanction on whatever people happen to write or print on them. Nor can anyone who posts here claim (with any honesty) that their post, merely by virtue of not having been banned, is in agreement with the owners, or with Objectivism, or is any kind of award-winning great achievement. Further, when the forum owners and moderators decide to exercise judgment about which posts are correct, then they are implicitly asking the participants to cede their right to make their own judgments. That becomes a cost for the participants, just as much as if you were asked to give up other rights you might have. They then have to consider whether it's worth it. Maybe I helped precipitate this confusion by saying that the forum should conform to the Objectivist epistemology, but the role of the forum in the Objectivist epistemology is not to think for the participants but to make sure the participants are not blocked from thinking for themselves. Once one has decided to offer a forum, this becomes a negative obligation -- not a demand for more resources. (It is in fact banning stuff that requires more resources, because somebody has to make the decisions about what to ban, and those have to be checked for accuracy, etc.; this is why big companies like Facebook end up needing large censorship moderation departments where people look at posts all day, or else they need AIs to make those decisions automatically. It is why larger magazines need editorial departments to pore over manuscripts. It is why the East German Stasi needed so many people to monitor phone calls.) Being open is a large part of what offering a forum is. That is the value it offers. It should be allowed to offer it.
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  7. There can be options in concept formation; the Japanese color 青い covers blue and also blue-green and maybe green in some contexts, and there are probably other examples where concepts in different languages overlap but don't coincide. If this sort of overlap can happen between languages, it can also be possible between people who share the same language but perhaps aren't using a dictionary or aren't using the same dictionary. This doesn't mean that either one is non-objective, just as the difference in colors between English and Japanese doesn't indicate that either language is non-objective. The result of the difference is a lack of precision but not necessarily accuracy. Obviously, with differences in the units, the accuracy is slightly less, just like a translator might have to determine whether to translate 青い as "blue" or "green" in a particular context. It's easier to be precise and to agree with things like the "meter" which can be measured easily than with things like the exact line of demarcation where a forum becomes something more like a magazine. One could ask, what is the essential characteristic of a forum? I was thinking of "openness" as an essential characteristic, and the reason I think it's essential is that a "forum" that isn't open is useless, not just to me but to everyone else; that's what makes openness essential. This is not to say that "magazines" are invalid. There may be certain people whose opinions I care enough about that I might want them accurately represented. I might subscribe to their magazines. But it is telling that Leonard Peikoff, for example, hosted a Q&A, where he would answer questions, and he could pick and choose which questions he wanted to answer, and the answers were unambiguously his as opposed to what someone else thought he might say. It was a Q&A, not a "forum." He didn't host a "forum," invite people to post, and then ban opinions he disagreed with. Also, Peikoff had already built his reputation, so people were interested in what he, in particular, had to say. What if you come up with a new idea? Where do you put it? Assuming you are not famous. Nobody approves of your idea yet because nobody knows what it is. Do you want to take a chance that you will get banned because people disapprove of it? Is it fair that you should have to take that chance? And what if you want to find new ideas that might have been come up with by other people, who aren't themselves famous enough to create their own forums? Where do you go to look for them? How can you find someone who runs a forum that allows new ideas, given that the forum owner has to take the risk that the new ideas might be wrong and that he has therefore sponsored wrong ideas? If people have to censor ideas that they disagree with, people must have been grossly immoral for publishing Ayn Rand's books and ideas, since after all those people could not have agreed with the ideas already, since they were new. (Or else they were taking a chance on being immoral, sort of like shooting off a gun in random directions and being lucky enough not to have hit anyone. Which is also immoral. But anyway...) A personal attack is an ad hominem, it's a fallacy. But the reason for banning personal attacks is not because they're ad hominem: the fact that they're ad hominem is what allows us to get away with banning personal attacks, because we know we're not accidentally banning any legitimate ideas. The reason for the ban is because personal attacks tend to turn away the contributors who are attacked, and thus renders the whole forum useless to them, and less useful to others who might have wanted to read those contributions, or other contributions which might have never gotten made. I don't know if I want to try to run an open forum, because people might join and then demand that I suppress other people's views based on arbitrary criteria. Or if I didn't have time to moderate it myself, I'd have to trust someone else, and then they might start banning people for disagreeing with their views, and they might do a lot of damage before I stop them. I wouldn't want to run a forum where I banned people for disagreeing with me, either. What if I ban someone on an incorrect basis? It would ruin the forum for everyone and destroy its value. Wikipedia used to be great, until a cabal of editors formed who decided to take it upon themselves to rid Wikipedia of views they thought didn't have sufficient "notoriety" (because it was embarrassing to them that some articles about popular TV shows were longer than articles about important historical events -- so all they did was go around deleting articles because they lacked "notoriety"). This mostly happened on the English-speaking Wikipedia. Later, another cabal took over, this one consisting of leftists (or maybe it was the same cabal), with the idea of suppressing anything critical of leftism. As a result, Wikipedia has become less valuable and less useful, unless you are a leftist. (You can still use it if you are looking for an idea a leftist wouldn't disagree with.) That could happen here, too. The site might end up supporting, not Objectivism per se, but a particular flavor of it, and it could easily be the wrong flavor or a distortion, and no one would be able to say anything about it if it were. It would become an echo chamber. I suppose this is a problem of the culture at large, that people no longer tolerate views they disagree with, and that they wish to silence those views rather than engaging them in debate (and they can't accept the idea of just leaving their opponents alone, either; they have to silence them). The silencing of people is the main thing I am objecting to here; if there is some error in my definitions of "forum" and "magazine" then that error is not essential to my objection. Maybe this tendency to reject opposing views is a product of the current educational system (because I suspect that a lot of the people calling for this are younger than I am and it certainly aligns well with the leftists who are taking over the culture at large). Maybe it's also a problem that people don't want to see views they disagree with, so they hope some moderator will step in and ban those views before they have to see them. That sounds like the "safe spaces" that are being promoted in schools and universities, too, and it's the exact opposite of "Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion," which at least requires that you know what those facts and opinions are.
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  8. Part 3 – Quine, Objectivism, Resonant Existence – Α A sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, propositions, and judgments had been important in the modern empiricist philosophy received by Quine. In the present Part and the next, I set out the relation of Quine’s opposition to the distinction in the 1950’s to the Peikoff-Rand opposition to the distinction in the following decade. I emphasize a major problem, tackled earlier by Kant, as reason the dichotomous distinction had been important. That is, I emphasize the problem it had been set to solve in a way not Kant’s. The characterization and responsibilities of analytic statements in sharp contrast to synthetic statements put forth in Logical Empiricism (also called Logical Positivism) constituted an alternative solution to that old problem, alternative to Kant’s solution. I shall step back in the next Part to more of Carnap and the response of Quine to him, and step back to the epistemological problem that had arisen in Kant. I’ll formulate a new solution, one in some affiliation with Rand’s theoretical philosophy and her theory of value. Form and necessity will enter, and I’ll assess Peikoff’s ASD against my layout.[1] “[Quine] is perhaps best known for his arguments against Logical Empiricism (in particular, against its use of the analytic-synthetic distinction). This argument, however, should be seen as part of a comprehensive world-view which makes no sharp distinction between philosophy and empirical science, and thus requires a wholesale reorientation of the subject” (Hylton and Kemp 2023) Quine held that the best science we have garnered is the best ultimate truth at present we have of the world. He did not see logical principles such as the law of excluded middle as arising from ontology, but as a principle of convenience pervasive in knowledge. I should say that dichotomy between those two candidate bases is false. I go with Rand’s picture of elementary logic, as a certain pervasive character of method in successful identifications of reality. Such existence-based logic infuses any higher logic naturally appropriate in attainment of ordinary and scientific knowledge. I add that excluded middle is a tooling formality for a living mind. It is not a formality belonging to concretes in their actuality and independently of the existence of living mind discerning them, by thought, in their concrete identities. Further, in my system (2023), alternatives of any sort do not exist in the universe at all until life enters the scene, and all alternatives, however high in the intellect, are descendants of the fundamental alternative that Rand exposed as uniquely facing the living: continuation of maintaining life or termination of life. We have mind, I say, capable of getting knowledge of concretes in part by use of principles of logic and mathematics tooled from formalities that belong to concretes. Identities of concretes—their characters, situations, and passages—can be formalities belonging to concrete existents, where discernment of those formalities is by thought engaged in elementary experience of ordinary objects in the world. Belonging-formalities such as a broad-form principle of identity “Existents have identity, and existence of the latter in full just is the former” can be assimilated and tooled by thought into further formalities tethered to belonging-formalities. The principle of excluded middle, for example, can have a tether to belonging-identities as well as to the high-powered human mind. In other words, we need not begin with logic, then use it in grasping the world, as Quine would have it. No, we begin with the world, including its identities in belonging-formalities, the world in ordinary human experience. When retaking the world in science, we wield formal tools with some tethers, by ancestry, from the world of ordinary experience. Which tooled formalities of logic and mathematics are best suited to which parts of the world is a further intellectual enterprise. Minkowski geometry can be weighed against 4D Euclidean geometry for most faithful and most effective tool for comprehending physical flat spacetime. Aristotle’s syllogistic and second-order logic can be weighed against Quine’s choice.[2] Quine aimed to integrate knowledge historical, knowledge scientific, including psychology, and knowledge philosophical. I notice, whole truth be told, he ended up smashing against early-childhood cognitive developmental psychology in the second half of the twentieth century, from his armchair. Elizabeth Spelke remarked: “Our research provides evidence, counter to the views of Quine (1960) and others, that the organization of the world into objects [in comprehension] precedes the development of language and thus does not depend upon it. I suspect, moreover, that language plays no important role in the spontaneous elaboration of physical knowledge” (Spelke 1989, 181). The reorientation between science and philosophy sought by Quine is wholesome, I should say. Ayn Rand remained in the old outlook from the philosopher’s chair. She took the sciences, including the modern hard sciences, to be in a one-way need of philosophy, especially in epistemology.[3] “Philosophy is a necessity for a rational being: philosophy is the foundation of science, the organizer of man’s mind, the integrator of his knowledge, . . .” (Rand 1975, 82; also ITOE 74). “Science was born as a result and consequences of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical (particularly epistemological) base” (Rand 1961, 44; also 26–27). Rand acknowledged that scientific biology informed her concept of the general nature of life that she employed in her theory of ethics. (More generally, on the influence of biology on philosophy, see Smith 2017.) A bit of measurement theory informed Rand’s theory of concepts. A bit of Helmholtz, her thoughts on music. Rand acknowledges no cases in which science begat or informed philosophy in metaphysics or epistemology. I disagree. Harmonics, geometry, and astronomy existed before Aristotle, before his metaphysics or his theory of science or his organization of logical deduction. Aristotle’s empiricism was a boost to sciences (De Groot 2014), but harmonics, geometry, and astronomy were not inaugurated by systematic explicit philosophy (see e.g. Graham 2013). The idea of a physical law mathematical in expression was not invented by philosophers. Nor the need to look for certain symmetries and symmetry breaking in comprehending parts of physical reality (see Schwichtenberg 2018 [2015]; Healey 2007). From Plato-Aristotle to the present, where theoretical philosophy flourished, it was shaped by received mathematics and science (Netz 1999; Bochner 1966). Concerning science in our own time, contra Rand, it has not declined in comparison to advances in the nineteenth century, which Rand had maintained in support of the idea that bad strains of modern philosophy have led to a decline in scientific achievements (Rand 1975, 78). Modern hard sciences have continued their stampede to the present time, and cognitive developmental psychology arising in the second half of the twentieth century continues bringing new light to the present. To be sure, scientists operate within a general metaphysics they hold, and as Michael Friedman has illustrated, this may be especially useful for resolutions during a time of fundamental innovations in the course of science (2001, chap. 4). Scientists have also been innovators in methods of investigation, theoretical, observational, and experimental. In that we might say they have on a philosophical hat. But I object to the picture that full-tilt philosophers come up with valid methods of rational scientific inquiry independently of existing science, methods not already in the heads and hands of scientists rolling back the darkness. (To be continued.) Notes [1] Recall that “Resonant Existence” is my own philosophy, whose fundamentals in theoretical philosophy are set out in my paper “Existence, We.” The overlap between my philosophy and Rand’s theoretical philosophy and her theory of value are extensive, although, the differences are substantial. [2] Bivalent, first-order https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-firstorder-emergence/ predicate logic with identity [such has been proven complete]) for best truth-preserving tool in science. I might add, it seems fine tooling-form logical structure of natural-language thought on the world, at least when this much classical logic is bound additionally to existence by relevance logic. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-relevance/ [3] But consider Sciabarra 2013 [1995], 121–23. References Bochner, S. 1966. The Role of Mathematics in the Rise of Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boydstun, S. 2021. Existence, We. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 21(1):65–104. Friedman, M. 2001. Dynamics of Reason. Stanford: CSLI. De Groot, J. 2014. Aristotle’s Empiricism. Las Vegas: Parmenides. Graham, D.W. 2013. Science before Socrates. New York: Oxford University Press. Healey, R. 2007. Gauging What’s Real – The Conceptual Foundations of Contemporary Gauge Theories. New York: Oxford University Press. Hylton, P. and G. Kemp 2023. Willard Van Orman Quine. Online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Netz, R. 1999. The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics – A Study in Cognitive History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rand, A. 1961. For the New Intellectual. New York: Signet. ——. 1975. From the Horse’s Mouth. In Rand 1982. ——. 1982. Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Signet. ——. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. Meridian. Schwichtenberg, J. 2018 [2015]. Physics from Symmetry. 2nd edition. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Sciabarra, C. 2013 [1995]. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. 2nd edition. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Smith, D.L., editor, 2017. How Biology Shapes Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Spelke, E. 1989. The Origins of Physical Knowledge. In Weiskrantz 1989. Weiskrantz, L. editor, 1989. Thought without Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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  9. Part 2 – Morton White* Let me abbreviate the title of White’s 1952 paper by UD (for Untenable Dualism). White saw the myth of a sharp divide between the analytic and the synthetic as affiliate of an older mythically sharp division: the Aristotelian division between essential and accidental predication (1952, 330). He urged rejection of both of these affiliates due to the divisional sharpness falsely maintained for them. White noted two kinds of statements that had lately been regarded as analytic. The first are purely formal logical truths such as “A is A” and “A or not-A.” The second are cases of “what is traditionally known as essential predication” (UD 318). He ponders especially the example “All men are rational animals.” That statement is logically the same as “Any man is a rational animal” or “A man is a rational animal.” This last expression of the proposition is one of Leonard Peikoff’s examples of a purportedly analytic statement in “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” (ASD 90). White did not pursue in this paper whether it is correct to characterize logical truths as analytic (UD 318–19). It will be recalled that Peikoff held forth Rand’s conception of logical truth against that of A. J. Ayer, who had maintained: “The principles of logic and mathematics are true universally simply because we never allow them to be anything else. . . . In other words, the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies” (Ayer 1946, 77; ASD 94, 101, 111–18; Branden 1963, 7). Whether one were to take analytical truths to be identical with or based on logical truths, I say that the Objectivist view of logic (with which I agree) does not allow the inference of Ayer and others that logical truths are not informed by fact. Logic on our view is a tool we use in identifications of existents. Logical truths are in no way prior to other truths, ones having empirical content. We learn the logical principle of Excluded Middle in an elementary logic course, but that learning is really an explicit articulation of a principle we have already found effective and reliable in thinking about the world we are negotiating. Either there is a bear sleeping beside the mail box OR there is not. Either I will continue to work on this project non-stop for two more hours from now OR not. Either vampires exist OR not. But there is a limited proper vista on the world within which the principle is sensible if our use of it is in pursuit of identifications of existents. It is nonsense to say that either there are some things existing in the world OR not. The effectiveness and range of sensible employment of the logical principle is learned from experience, and the concept of existence and its totality is learned by experience. The fact that the sensible range of the principle is so wide that it is convenient to indicate its general form as “A or Not-A” does not give us license to suppose there are no limits on sensible “applications” of the Principle of Excluded Middle or to suppose we do not learn that principle by experience. With that Objectivist view of elementary logic, they can say one thing what Morton White did not say: One’s concept of what is an analytic truth by identifying the analytic with the logical or basing the analytical on the logical does nothing to show that any purported analytical truth is entirely independent of experience, that it bears no information about existence at all, or that a purported analytical truth is made true and derives its necessity of being true by social convention untethered from facts of the empirical world. As with Quine’s “Two Dogmas,” White undermined the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic by finding fault with various explications of what analyticity amounts to. They concluded there is no durable articulate way of classifying propositions and truths as analytic in sharp contrast to synthetic. One way of conceiving an analytic statement is as expressing a proposition deducible from a logical truth by substitution of a synonym of one of its terms. (i) Every A is A. Therefore, (ii) Every man is a man. With “rational animal” as synonym for “man”, by substitution of identicals, we obtain (iii) Every man is a rational animal (UD 319). So some might propose that analyticity is explicated in terms of logical truth and synonymy, as in the preceding paragraph. White rejects the view that whether “man” and “rational animal” are synonymous is a matter of arbitrarily selected convention. Similarly, that “man” and “animal who can skip” (my example, demonstrated, along with other distinctly human moves here [Tina]) are not synonymous is not a matter of arbitrarily selected convention. Natural language is not like an artificial logical language in which meanings of terms are set entirely by stipulation (UD 321–24). Could analytic statements be defined instead as those whose denials are self-contradictory? (UD 325–26). White argues that denials of such propositions as “Not every man is a rational animal” are not contradictions, but his concept of contradiction is, in step with dominate contemporary views of logic, too narrow, as I have elaborated above in connection with Ayer. White did not relate this criterion for analyticity to Kant, but I should do so. One of Kant’s characterizations of analytic judgments is that in them the predicate is “thought through identity” with thought of the subject. Synthetic judgments connect predicate to subject, but not in the relation of identity (KrV A6–8 B10–12), where simple complete identity is meant, not Rand’s more expansive notion of identity as some or other distinctive traits belonging necessarily to anything that exists.[1] According to Kant, all judgments must conform to the principle of self-consistency, but only judgments certifiable by self-contradiction upon denial alone, apart from their truth in experience, are analytic (A151–53 B190–93; 1783, 4:266–70; 1790, 8:228–30, 244–45; Allison 2004, 89–93; Garrett 2008, 204–6). I object that contradiction upon denial is no genuine grounding of any truth. If we start with a truth and then show that upon denial of it we arrive at a contradiction, well isn’t that cute? But establishment of its truth is elsewhere. Morton White found that appealing to synonymies in the language is not illuminating in the absence of objective criteria for synonymy (UD 324). If it is said that one’s sense of wrongness in “Man is not a rational animal” differs from one’s sense of wrongness in “Man is not a skipper,” White responds that that is surely only a matter of degree, not a sharp difference in kind. Between one’s response to contradiction of “Man is a rational animal” and contradiction of “Man is a skipper,” there is not a sharp difference in kind. If self-contradiction upon denial of a proposition is the criterion for analyticity of the proposition, then there is no sharp divide between the analytic and the synthetic (UD 325–26). Objectivism can add that there is no qualitative divide in the purported divide analytic/synthetic because elementary logic is based on the widest-frame, worldly facts that existence exists and existence is identity, in Rand’s expansive sense of identity. White did not surmise that the merely-difference-of-degree in our sense of wrongness in “Man is not a rational animal” and in “Man is not a skipper” might be because a thing is everything that it is, as was later underscored by Peikoff in ASD. White saw the myth of a sharp divide between the analytic and the synthetic as affiliate of an older mythically sharp division: the Aristotelian division between essential and accidental predication (UD 330). This kinship was also recognized in Peikoff (ASD 95), as I remarked earlier. But Peikoff went further: He observed that essentials of a thing do not exhaust what a thing is. No concepts of a subject are concepts of only what are the essentials in the definition of the subject. (To be continued.) Note [1] Joseph Butler (1692–1752) stated: “Everything is something or other.” Taken as the Principle of Identity, it is expansive. This expansive concept of identity is championed in Oderberg 2007, chap. 5. References Allison, H. 2004 [1983]. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Revised and enlarged edition. New Haven: Yale University Press. Allison, H., and P. Heath, editors, 2002. Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy after 1781. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ayer, A. 1946. Language, Truth, and Logic. New York: Dover. Branden, N. 1963. Review of Brand Blanshard’s Reason and Analysis. The Objectivist Newsletter 2(2):7–8. Garrett, D. 2008. Should Hume Have Been a Transcendental Idealist? In Kant and the Early Moderns. D. Garber and B. Longuenesse, editors. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Linsky, L., editor, 1952. Semantics and the Philosophy of Language. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kant, I. 1781(A), 1787(B). Critique of Pure Reason. W. Pluhar, translator. 1996. Indianapolis: Hackett. ——. 1783. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science. G. Hatfield, translator. In Allison and Heath 2002. ——. 1790. On a Discovery Whereby Any New Critique of Pure Reason Is to Be Made Superfluous by an Older One. H. Allison, translator. In Allison and Heath 2002. Oderberg, D. 2007. Real Essentialism. New York: Routledge. Peikoff, L. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990. Quine, W. 1951. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In From a Logical Point of View. 1953. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Rand, A. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. New York: Meridian. White, M. 1952 [1950]. The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism. In Linsky 1952. Included also in White 2004. ——. 2004. From a Philosophical Point of View. Princeton.
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  10. Part 1 – Leonard Peikoff* By truths I mean, as Ayn Rand meant, “recognitions of facts of reality” which is to say “identifications of existents” (ITOE 48). Without living, fallible minds, there are no truths in this sense of the word. The world would have facts, but until some are recognized, no truth would have come into the world. Truth is sometimes used to mean what here is meant by fact. That is not the way I mean truth here nor the way Rand or Peikoff used it. Leonard Peikoff’s 1967 essay “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” (ASD) set out the basics of the contrasting sorts of truths—analytic and synthetic—the way the distinction had been cast up to middle of the 20th century. Analytic truths had been lately taken as true in virtue of their meaning. Rationality and animality would be included in the meaning of the concept man. So the truth “man is a rational animal” would be an analytic truth, a truth made so by definition, which under contemporary nominalism had become a matter of social convention, pretty arbitrary, free of much constraint by facts of the world. Necessity in such a truth would be from the say-so in our definitional prescription.[1] That choice of convention, I notice, satisfies a necessity of self-consistent, coherent thinking and talking. Such necessity lies among the class of necessities for a purpose, necessities for an end. I call this class necessity-for. The truth “man has only two eyes” would not be analytic, the story went, because the feature of having only two eyes is not part of the meaning of the concept man. Such a truth is known as synthetic. Unlike analytic truths, which are necessarily true, a synthetic truth is said to be only contingently true. Peikoff argued this to be a false dichotomy among truths. The historical root of this widespread falsehood in philosophy, Peikoff maintained, is the Platonic theory that only essential characteristics of a thing are part of the form of a thing and its definition. The inessential, which is from the material aspects of a thing, not its formal aspects, are not part of a thing’s definition. I concur in Peikoff’s discernment that the false dichotomy in truths between those analytic and those synthetic has a distant ancestor in a false dichotomy in Plato. In Cratylus Plato has Socrates uphold the principle that contrary attributes never belong to a fully real thing simultaneously and the principle that “things have some fixed being or essence of their own. They are not in relation to us and are not made to fluctuate by how they appear to us. They are by themselves, in relation to their own being or essence, which is theirs by nature” (386d–e; see also Euthyphro 6d–e; Phaedo 65d, 75c–d, 78d, 100c; Republic 475e–76d, 479–80). Each thing has attributes such as shape, sound, or color; but in addition, each thing has a being or essence. Indeed, “color or sound each have a being or essence, just like every other thing that we say ‘is’” (Cra. 423d–e). Plato maintained moreover that what each thing essentially is, such as Man, Good, Size, or Strength is not discovered by sight or hearing, but by reason when it is most free from bodily, sensory distractions (Phd. 65, 74–75, 78c–79d, 83, 86, 96–105; Theaetetus 184b–87a). The character of each thing that is always the same is a kind—call it a Form—that is “a being itself by itself” (Parmenides 135a–c). Sensory perceptions are as shadows and reflections of these intelligible forms, these intrinsic natures, these essences and being of things (Rep. 509d–e). Plato had no notion of ideas or concepts encompassing both visible forms (such as shapes, sounds, or colors) and intelligible forms.[2] Modern notions of concepts or ideas are, in Plato’s frame, only our thoughts grasping intelligible forms.[3] Peikoff acknowledged, correctly, that Aristotle breathed new life into this Platonic error by bringing essences down from some purely intellectual nether-realm to the material world open to regular senses.[4] Aristotle is the heavy-weight instigator of the necessary-contingent divide and the essence-accident divide. These doctrines constrained Scholastic theories of universals, concepts, and predication, and facilitated the modern A-S divide. Peikoff observed that Rand’s conception of the concept of a thing, and her conception of the essential in the concept, rules out an A-S partition of the kinds of conceptual truth in our possession. A thing is all the things that it is (ASD 98). I might add that Rand took a thing’s external relationships as part of what a thing is, a blunt contrast with Plato (ITOE 39). And in Rand’s epistemology, we can have a conception of all that a thing is, including all its external relationships and all its potentials, even though we know our present concept of the thing contains only a portion of that totality of its identity. In Rand’s conception of right concepts, they are “classifications of observed existents according to their relationships to other observed existents” (ITOE 47).[5] Furthermore: “Concepts stand for specific kinds of existents, including all the characteristics of these existents, observed and not-yet-observed, known and unknown” (ITOE 65). Objectivist epistemology does not regard the essential and the non-essential characteristics of existents as simply given, as if in an intellectual intuition. Rather, that distinction is based on our context of knowledge of the facts of existents (ITOE 52; ASD 107, 101–103). “To designate a certain characteristic as ‘essential’ or ‘defining’ is to select, from the total content of the concept, the characteristic that best condenses and differentiates that content in a specific cognitive context. Such a selection [in Objectivist epistemology] presupposes the relationship between the concept and its units [its member elements in reality regarded as substitutable for each other under suspension of their particular measure-values of their shared characteristics]: it presupposes that the concept is an integration of units, and that its content consists of its units, including all their characteristics.” (ASD 103) Nelson Goodman had written in a 1953 footnote: “Perhaps I should explain for the sake of some unusually sheltered reader that the notion of a necessary connection of ideas, or of an absolutely analytic statement, is no longer sacrosanct. Some, like Quine and White, have forthrightly attacked the notion; others, like myself, have simply discarded it; and still others have begun to feel acutely uncomfortable about it” (60). I’ll examine the cases mounted against the A-S distinction by White and by Quine, and compare them to the Objectivist case, in the next two installments.[6] (To be continued.) Notes [1] Brand Blanshard’s book Reason and Analysis appeared in 1962. It was reviewed favorably by Nathaniel Branden the following year. Branden understood that Blanshard was some sort of absolute idealist, but the book offered access to contemporary positivist and analytic philosophy (including the A-S distinction), and it offered criticisms of them, which Objectivists might join. Against say-so free of constraints from conditions of the world being the source of necessity in necessary truths, see Rasmussen 1982. On the nature and need of understanding for truth, see Haugeland 1998. [2] Cf. Metaphysics 987b1–13; Notomi 2005, 193–201. [3] See further, Kraut 1992, 7–12; White 1992. [4] ASD 95. See also Peikoff 1972, 191, on Aristotle’s influential division of the necessary and the contingent. On medieval and early modern roots of the false A-S dichotomy, see Peikoff 1964, 15–16, 45–59. [5] Concept empiricism is defended and a version of it, thickly informed by pertinent modern science, is formulated in Prinz 2002. [6] White 1952 appeared originally in Hook 1950. Sidney Hook would a few years later become Peikoff’s dissertation advisor. Recent defense of the A-S distinction against the attack by Quine is Russell 2008. Additional contemporary debate on the issue is Juhl and Loomis 2010. I’ll not undertake assimilation of these in the present study. References Aristotle B.C.E. 348–322. Metaphysics. C.D.C. Reeve, translator. Indianapolis: Hackett. Branden, N. 1963. Review of Brand Blanshard’s Reason and Analysis. The Objectivist Newsletter 2(2):7–8. Goodman, N. 1953. The New Riddle of Induction. In Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. 4th edition. 1983. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haugeland, J. 1998. Truth and Rule-Following. In Having Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Hook, S., editor, 1950. John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom. New York: Dial Press. Juhl, C., and E. Loomis. 2010. Analyticity. New York: Routledge. Kraut, R. 1992. The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge. Linsky, L., editor, 1952. Semantics and the Philosophy of Language. Illinois. Notomi, N. 2005. Plato’s Metaphysics and Dialectic. In A Companion to Ancient Philosophy. M. L. Gill and P. Pellegrin, editors. Wiley-Blackwell. Peikoff, L. 1964. The Status of the Law of Contradiction in Classical Logical Ontologism. Ph.D. ProQuest. ——. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990. ——. 1972. Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume. Lectures by Leonard Peikoff. M. Berliner, editor. 2023. Santa Ana, CA: Ayn Rand Institute Press. Plato c. 428–348 B.C. Plato – Complete Works. J. M. Cooper, editor. 1997. Indianapolis: Hackett. Prinz J., 2002. Furnishing the Mind – Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rand, A. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. New York: Meridian. Rasmussen, D. 1982. Necessary Truth, the Game Analogy, and the Meaning-Is-Use Thesis. The Thomist 46(3):423–40. Russell, G. 2008. Truth in Virtue of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. White, M. G. 1952 [1950]. The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism. In Linsky 1952. Included also in White 2004. http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/.../White%20-%20Analytic... ——. 2004. From a Philosophical Point of View. Princeton: Princeton University Press. White, N. 1992. Plato’s Metaphysical Epistemology. In Kraut 1992.
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  11. Before the GOP became a nationalist/theocratic cesspit, it was a band of cowards who would soil themselves the moment some leftist brought up poverty while they posed as champions of capitalism. Today, they have found a way to be even more disgraceful: Throw capitalism under the bus, and adapt left-wing arguments to be deployed against ... porn. This is both a trial balloon and a proof-of concept. If this succeeds, just wait to see how else they'll try cram their religious strictures down your throat. The below is buried within a Reason Magazine article, about Mike Lee's (R-Utah) PROTECT Act, which could ban all existing pornography from the internet as it is written today. The rationale will sound familiar to anyone who grew up (as I did) while the South was under the thumb of Southern Baptists and to anyone whose has suffered an RSI to his eye muscles (as mine have) by rolling his eyes every time some mealy-mouthed leftist has used poverty as an excuse for crime (individual theft not sanctioned by the state) or redistributionism (theft performed by the state):What's next? Banning alcohol (again)? (Image by unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)And in all cases, we're left with this broad and vague definition of consent as a guiding principle. The bill states that consent "does not include coerced consent" and defines "coerced consent" to include not just any consent obtained through "fraud, duress, misrepresentation, undue influence, or nondisclosure" or consent from someone who "lacks capacity" (i.e., a minor) but also consent obtained "though exploiting or leveraging the person's immigration status; pregnancy; disability; addiction; juvenile status; or economic circumstances." With such broad parameters of coercion, all you may have to say is "I only did this because I was poor" or "I only did this because I was addicted to drugs" and your consent could be ruled invalid -- entitling you to collect tens of thousands of dollars from anyone who distributed the content or a tech platform that didn't remove it quickly enough. Even if the tech company or porn distributor or individual uploader ultimately prevailed in such lawsuits, that would only come after suffering the time and expense of fending the suits off. [bold added]That's right. After decades of being too frightened to contest the idea that one man's need is another man's moral duty, conservatives haven't bothered to think for themselves for once, or (if they ever did) finally dared to say Nobody owes another anything simply because he needs it. No. They have instead chosen to say, Okay. Men are obligated to arrange their lives around the needs of others, and we declare that others 'need' to be unable to see porn -- or anything else we decide is 'offensive' to the deity we have never proved exists and whose will we claim to know. What's next? Welfare for "porn exploitation survivors"? Don't laugh: Conservatives are now big fans of welfare for women whom they've denied abortions to. I said years ago that the moment a religious conservative saw a conflict between his religion and freedom, he would throw freedom under the bus. As usual, I was right. Today, they're going after the porn industry, an easily demonized target. What will they do tomorrow? Rank-and-file conservatives would do well to stop cheering abuses like this, and salivating over what they hope people like Mike Lee will target next. Rather, they should consider something they like that some nut from a religion not their own somewhere might object to, and think about that getting banned on some equally ridiculous pretext. -- CAVLink to Original
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  12. https://www.asil.org/insights/volume/8/issue/25/world-court-finds-us-attacks-iranian-oil-platforms-1987-1988-were-not I had not heard of the military action prior to clicking on the link and not sure how much credence to put on ICJ proceedings but seems they determined the US strikes on the oil platforms were not consistent a with self defense, defense. I think the destruction of the Iranian Navy would have to precede from a declaration of war, no ?
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  13. Don't Tread on USA! The US has said they will not attack targets inside Iran for their use of terrorist organizations to attack Iranian opponents. I hope, however, that the US has not taken destruction, sooner or later, of the entire Iranian navy off the table as among US retaliatory response actions.*
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