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Volens

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  1. Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the evidence of the senses. Mathematics is not an exception. The items in the multiplication table need to be tied to reality. One method I can think of is the following: Illustrate some items on the multiplication table using, for example. apples. 3 x 4 is illustrated using 3 groups of 4 apples, or 4 groups of 3 apples (after counting the number of groups and the number of in each group, count through to the total). Illustrate 3 x 1, then 3 x 2, and after a while, she should get the hang of it. Then see if she can "sort of guess", even without the apples. The idea is that even when memorizing, it is easier to remember something that "rhymes" (i.e. has some regularity, like the beats of counting 3's) than something that is just arbitrary and disconnected. After a while, she should be able to remember at least some higher items, without going through one by one from the lower numbers. There are many regularities in the multiplication table, e.g. 2 x 2 = 4, 2 x 3 = 6, then it comes back to 2 x 7 = 14, 2 x 8 = 16. When reading the table to her, try to capitalize on these regularities when dealing with higher numbers. Also, if you notice signs of her wanting to initiate the counting herself, let her. Maria Montesorri was able to do wonders by allowing children to initiate their own education. Hope that helps. I'm not a professional teacher, though. Just a thinker. And maybe you should try something smaller than apples. :=)
  2. First, I cannot find Ayn Rand's mention of her dislike of "love stories". Unfortunately, I don't have personal copies of "Journals" or "Letters" at hand, but when I do, I will post the reference here. (Can someone else post this information if they know it? Thanks.) And thanks, BurgessLau, for the correction about "Love Letters". Also, I think that my phrase "what Ayn Rand would have thought" was somewhat unfortunate (since it is my business to say what *I* think), but harmless, in that it was quite clear that I was applying a viewpoint which I agree with (which is what I should have said). When I said that romance novels could "approach Romantic literature", I was not referring to the distinction between Romanticism and Naturalism, but to the distinction between Romanticism and "romance novels". I mentioned that Romantic literature involves a plot and some level of integration. (There are many levels, distinguished from one another by the level of integration, as discussed by Ayn Rand in "What is Romanticism?" ). What I meant was that romance novels have little or no existential action to integrate the romances in them, so they just rely on bromides like "taut", "muscular", etc. They do so by their essence, since romance and sex are not primaries. Mystery novels, adventure novels, and science fiction novels can constitute genres, because they center around existential actions, such as the murder of a man or a a journey to the center of the earth. But a romance without existential action is disintegration. The problem with romance novels is not that they are Naturalistic, but that they want to be Romantic, but do not know how to do it. I agree that I was unclear in saying that romance novels could not be "taken seriously". I did not mean that they were popular as opposed to serious, but that they were meaningless, since they were disintegrated. They are second-handed, by relying on the reader to fill in the bromides. For the reasons I mention above, I would not agree with this assessment. I read a lot of popular fiction (e.g. I always have my copy of the new "Harry Potter" within an hour of midnight the day it is released). But I have not read any romance novels (e.g. Harlequin romances) since I came to the U.S. I found them interesting only when I was starved for literature in the old country.
  3. I must mention here the fact that Ayn Rand was against what she called "love stories", i.e. stories which are centered around two people falling in love, not around existential action such as the collapse of the world, a search for a criminal, etc. She said (in her lertters, I think) that the source work for her adaptation "Love Letters" was the "silliest thing imaginable", (or something to that effect) and that it was a lot of work for her to try to make the screenplay interesting. This is what she would have thought of romance novels: they are generic "love stories". But it is not a simple classification: romance novels sometimes have sub-plots involving the take-over of a firm, or a quarrel between brothers. In my view, the extent to which these plots are central to the story, integrated to the love story, and increase in scale, is the extent to which they can be taken seriously and approach Romantic literature. For example, at the high end, there are the Alexandra Ripley novels, which are so similar to historical romances that the author was commissioned to write a sequel to "Gone With The Wind".
  4. I just finished listening to this course. I recommend it very highly, not just as a discussion of Karl Popper's ideas, but as the best exercise in what Ayn Rand called "philosophical detection" that I have come across in a long time. One thing that makes it interesting is that Dragsdahl avowedly is, like Ayn Rand (and Karl Popper), *not* a scientist, and so his discussion is exclusively and ruthlessly *epistemological*. Dragsdahl begins his course by describing Karl Popper's theories in the terms used by popular expositions: people believed the earth was flat, now they think it is round; they believed in Newton's theories, now they believe in Einstein's theories, etc. Scientific theories are constantly being "falsified", and this falsification must be the essence of scientific method, this constant process of falsification. The aim of this segment of Dragsdahl's presentation is to make Popper plausible, because, as he says, "even some Objectivists" are taken in by the Popper line. Yet Dragsdahl deliberately ignores Popper's fig leaves, only mentioning in passing the latter's protestations of admiration for science. The only criticism I have of this part of the lectures is that Dragsdahl does not stress one major carrot used by Popperians to ensnare admirers of science: the use of the "falsification" doctrine as a weapon against Marxists, Freudians, and other "pseudo-scientists". But it is brought up during the question period on the last day, and by then Dragsdahl has given us the context to properly evaluate this aspect of Popper's doctrine. After dressing up his subject in plausible colors, Dragsdahl unsheathes his philosophic instruments, and inquires into Popper's stance on epistemological issues. How does man gain knowledge of reality? Through the senses? Through induction? What about concepts, context, and the hierarchy of knowledge? Most central to the lectures is the issue: what is the proper *standard* of knowledge? Then, over the next few lectures, Dragsdahl shows how Popper's premises determine his philosophy of science, and those of his students: Lakatos, Kuhn and Feyerabend. He also shows the origins of Poper's ideas in late eighteenth-centrury and early nineteenth-century German philosophy, by reference to Popper's own statements. As an example of Dragsdahl's intellectual marksmanship (I quote from memory): "So, Popper concludes, we learn from our mistakes. This seems logical enough ... but you have to take him *literally*. He is saying that we learn from our *mistakes*, and not from reality." The summary comments are chillingly brief: "Popper is willing to grant that people *may* have seen the Loch Ness monster, but induction - is a myth." The fact that in the end we see the true face of Karl Popper - one that radically different from the popular veneer - is, for me, only a secondary gain from these lectures. They are, more importantly, an excellent example of how to unmask premises (both in others and in oneself), and how to *read* philosophy.
  5. It may be possible, by studying the theory of laissez-faire capitalism, to convince some thinking people that it is practical. However, most people will not accept it until their metaphysics and epistemology have changed. Capitalism cannot be justified apart from reason. For example, as long as people believe that science consists in positing arbitrary, "intuitive", "creative" theories and then checking whether they correspond to facts, they will prefer to try theories that are more "intuitive" than capitalism first. My particular strategy for improving this situation is based on the observation that many people accept a metaphysics and epistemology that is (or is believed to be) implicit in a special science. This is especially the case with mathematics, which historically was a major selling-point for different versions of Platonism; explicitly for some, implicitly for others. Mathematics always had a "non-observational", "hypothetical" feel to it, which made people think that if mathematics was so important for science, then the Aristotelian view of science as fundamentally observational could not be correct. (This cultural view affected the philosophical response to Renaissance skepticism, i.e. Cartesianism. And now, take a look at contemporary economists with their arrays of rationalistic theories and mathematical constructs). Developing rational philosophy of each of the various sciences would be, in my view, the best next move to make. It would also lead to immense progress in the sciences, since they would be rendered objective. Yet, those who are interested in developing a philosophy of economics or mathematics using Objectivism too often (though not always) simply want to graft some classical or contemporary ideas onto Objectivism. We need to check all the premises all the way down, otherwise the contradictions will be detected and the philosophy will not sell.
  6. I am surprised that people are actually dignifying such a contention as the notion that the "Critique of Pure Reason" was unclear because Kant was rushed to finish his second edition. It's quite clear that with that kind of argument, we are going into the "you are an atheist because you have not read the Bible in Armaic/Latin" argument. But I should make it clearer what I think this Kantian dishonesty consists of. It is a persistent state of continuously twisting one's statements to cash-in on other people's uncertainty and contradictions (see Ayn Rand's comments on "the intellectual con man" in "Return of the Primitive", p.154ff). Anyone with patience can read Kant's books (not just the first "Critique", which is only the worst, and neccessarily is, because in it the foundation is introduced, and not so much dishonesty is needed to draw the conclusions from it) to see that only something outide of the range of human error, something like this mentality described above, could make them possible.
  7. You really believe that thoughts don't have to follow the laws of reality? How? When you reach a problem like this, the first thing is to concretize it. What thought have you ever had that did not follow the laws of existence and identity? Perhaps you mean that a man can imagine a block floating in mid-air with no support, but that this is not possible in reality. You need to remember that there is a distinction between what is in your mind, and what is in reality. This distinction is grasped by each baby the day he wants his mother and his mother does not magically appear. What is in your mind is the imagination of a block floating in mid-air, what is in reality is something else. This imagination in your mind is subject to a different set of laws from the block. Imagination involves the combination of material derived originally from the senses. Without the neccessary materials (previous awareness of something similar to a block, something similar to floating), there can be no imagination. Also, imagination requires either a conscious focusing on the materials, or a subconscious process that is performed automatically based on previous, related, conscious processes. These are both instances of the law of identity. So, you were missing a very obvious distinction indeed, the distinction between existence and consciousness. As for volition being an exemption from the law of identity, see Leonard Peikoff's "Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand", chapter 2. In the meantime, why don't you "will" yourself into turning into an orange, or tell the person you love the most that you can't see them any more because for all you know, you might be "willed" to stab them to death tomorrow.
  8. LifeSimpliciter: 1. Are you aware of the basic Objectivist refutation of Kantian philosophy: that it is invalid to reason from the fact that man perceives with certain certain organs, in a certain form - to the fact that his perceptions do not give evidence of the external world? "The fact that consciousness has identity is self-evident; it is an instance of the law of identity. Objectivism, however, stands alone in accepting the fact's full meaning and implications. All the standard attacks on the senses -- and wider: all the Kant-inspired attacks on human cognition as such -- begin with the premise that consciousness *should not* have identity and conclude that, since it does, consciousness is invalid...." -- Leonard Peikoff, "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, p.49" The fact that we perceive things "in space" and "in time" is not grounds for stating that space and time are not attributes of existents in the world. Actually, Kant said more than this: he said that we are unable to even "conceive" of things without conceiving them in space and time. Thus, his alleged defence of the "objectivity" of space and time consists in destroying their objectivity altogether: by detaching them from sensory evidence and allegedly validating them by reference to our ability to "conceive" (which last is determined by certain innate "synthesizing" structures), he opened the way to all the moderns who say that because we can imagine alternatives to space and time, or because conceptually advanced descriptions of space and time (such as those based on Einstein's physical theories) are not conceptually the same as the theorems of schoolboy geometry, there is no objectivity with regard to space and time - or anything else. 2. There is a distinction between the use of the terms "objective" and "subjective" on the one hand, in philosophy, and the use of the terms "absolute" and "relative", to describe space and time, on the other. (It is the irrationalism of modern philosophy that has equated the two: Einstein -- whatever his errors, his concessions to irrational philosophies -- fought against such an interpretation of his scientific views.) Isaac Newton observed that our measurement of the velocity of an object depends on our own motion (the so-called "Galilean relativity", observable by anyone who watches the world "go past" him from a smoothly moving boat). Yet he said that there was a distinction between motion and rest, a distinction that applied regardless of the observer's motion. He gave a famous physical argument to justify this. This is Newton's theory of "absolute" space and time. Albert Einstein's theory of relativity does not say anything about space and time being "within us." It says that measurements of space and time *depend* on the motion of the observer. This is an entirely determinate relationship, and may be no more "subjective" than the fact that when we are close to a door, it appears larger than when we are further away - measurements are the form of our cognition, not the content. Needless to say, the fact that measurements of objects depend on our physical state does not mean that the attributes measured are "within us". It only means that the measurements are a product both of the nature of the object, *and* of our physical state and physical organs. This is what makes such measurements accurate: they give us evidence of the sum total of active factors. See Leonard Peikoff's book above, chapter 2, for an analogous discussion involving the senses.
  9. Are you guys really talking about Immanuel Kant, *that* Immanuel Kant? Did those people who are comparing Kant to Ayn Rand actually read the Critique of Pure Reason? The undercutting of man's perceptual faculty, his concepts of causality, his logic, all to be subjugated to the "unconditioned", the illogical, the causeless, to "God, freedom and immortality"? The denial of reason "to make room for faith"? I cannot describe the pain of slogging through sentence after sentence, in which he projects all kinds of senseless alternatives to man's means of cognition: the transcendental such-and-such, the synthetic unity of this-or-that, turning every single one of man's fundamental faculties and integrations from a realistic necessity into a "limitation" of man's consciousness, a "limitation" that must not itself be limited, since, after all, limitation does not appeal to "things-in-themselves". Consider all the modern philosophies, large and small, which describe "the structure of scientific revolutions", "the propositions of logic", "the validity of scientific theories", and after describing at length conditions and tools of knowledge which they acknowledge to be neccessary for man, turn around to describe these bases of knowledge as "tautological", "not neccessarily true", or "tentative", on almost the same grounds on which they were "validated". Immanuel Kant is at the root of all these theories: unlike his contemporaries and predecessors, he was so consistent in this approach, that the whole of later philosophy became the repeated application of his basic pattern. If Kant had written his philosophy clearly and honestly, the contradictions would have been clear to all; but he took great care to conceal his arguments under an array of linguistic devices, of concepts (e.g. "experience", "intuition", "manifold") that were as "causeless" (i.e. as undefined, as non-hierarchical) as he claimed his things-in-themselves to be. If there ever was an evil philosopher, it was he. But why read my plodding criticism, when Ayn Rand has written so much about it? In "Philosophy: Who Needs It", she describes exactly why she considers Kant to be the most evil philosopher in history. Why not counter her criticisms point for point?
  10. The musical is based on the a late sensation of Romanticism, Gaston Leroux's 1911 novel "The Phantom of the Opera" (it seems that virtually all these works were written before the end of the First World War, just as Ayn Rand described in "What is Romanticism?"). I saw the similarity to "Notre Dame de Paris" as well, and it seems that the relationship is not entirely accidental: "Despite his possessiveness and jealousy, the Phantom is still a heart-breaking character, and the writer of the novel Gaston Leroux had said at its publication in 1911 that he had been inspired by Victor Hugo's hunchback". Phantom vs Phantom Part of what saddened me when watching the movie was its Hugoesque quality, the obvious veneration of genius combined with the premise that genius is impotent in matters of the heart. In spite of this, I probably enjoyed it more than any movie I have seen for a long time (and this includes even movies that I have more respect for, such as the Fritz Lang movies and Andrew Niccol's "Gattaca"). This is because 1) Fritz Lang movies often contain a metaphysically collectivist element (the Burugundian feudal ties in "Siegfried", the anthill conception of society in "Metropolis") that clashes with my sense of life, and 2) Andrew Niccol's movies, while intellectually very brilliant and egoistic, lack (so far) the grand-scale spectacle and visuals required for true Romanticism.
  11. Ayn Rand was once asked what she thought of Howard Hughes in a Q+A (in "The Moral Factor" or "Cultural Update", I'm not sure which). Her reply was negative, to the effect that he had problems with his premises; the reply was based on her evaluation of the movies Hughes made, so it probably did not apply to his work as an aviator. I didn't know what AR was referring to until I saw "Hell's Angels" on TCM a few months ago. To understate somewhat, I will say that the film, especially in its ending, is unsettling. Its production values and its aeroplane stunts are groundbreaking, but in its soul, "Hell's Angels" is very much a creature of the twentieth century. I have often suspected that the development of most mental illness, although having hereditary and other physiological components, is highly dependent on the premises of the subject. This suspicion arose from observing the high incidence of mental illness in twentieth century intellectuals (John Nash, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, etc.), compared with those of the previous centuries: prior to the last one hundred years, artists and scientists often suffered from overwork and nervous breakdowns, but twentienth century intellectuals (especially those in the humanties or philosophy) always seem to be not far from serious neurosis or worse. The case of Howard Hughes seems to confirm that theory somewhat, although it is still a hypothesis.
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