dondigitalia

My knowledge of Russell is marginal at best, so I won't discuss his paradox directly, but: It is right here that an Objectivist would (or at least should) reject your argument. Logic is useful only as a means of gaining and validating knowledge, and knowledge is always knowleddge of reality. On what grounds do you separate logic from metaphysics in this way? lol, this is exactly the view I was going to attempt to unearth at the heart of your arguments, but it seems you've already done it for me. Are you aware of the grounds on which Objectivism rejects this view of concepts? Is there a reason you say anti-realism instead of nominalism?

I see what you're trying to say here, but it's a little confused. Concepts do exist metaphysically, as a process of integration, i.e. an action, performed by a certain type of consciosness. Actions exist. What concepts don't have is metaphysicaly primacy--no actions do. Metaphysical primacy belongs only to entities (which perform actions).

Here is an excerpt from Peikoff's paper, which Dave Odden reffered you to: I highly recommend reading Peikoff's paper in full, as he goes much more in depth than this short quote. I just chose this one because it was the one that seemed to address his rejection of contingent facts most directly.

I don't remember where I got this from, but it really stuck with me: "Conspiracy theories are unique in that they are the only theories whose entire basis is the complete lack of any evidence whatsoever." -- Unkown

To frame it in a way that will highlight your initial question: Acontextual: Force is bad. Contextual: Initiation of force is bad. It is never ok to initiate force, because initiation is the context which makes force immoral. If that context changes to retaliation or defense (against forceful action), it is immoral to not use force.

I just want to say that I use a mac (and a PC; PCs are not an upgrade, I assure you), and it works fine for me, in both Safari and IE.

What you provided were dictionary entries. Modern dictionaries (influenced by nominalism), despite their claims to the contrary, do not record definitions of concepts, but descriptions common usages of words. Occasionally, you'll get a good one, but 9 times out of 10 they are either circular or non-fundamental. Objectivism has a great deal to say on the subject of definitions. They are one of the most crucial aspects of Objectivist epistemology. Because definitions, in Objectivism, are such an immense subject, I won't go into why those defintions are bad or explain how to arrive at a good one. Instead, I'll just give you a full definition of the concept that is used in Objectivism: Happiness is the long-term state of non-contradictory joy that comes from the achievement of values.

The irony of that [JASKN's last post] is so astounding as to be almost surreal.

Your ignorance of how this forum operates and in what manner opposing views will be tolerated can be remedied very easily by clicking the "Forum Rules" link under the heading at the top of every page and reading the material therein. It is your responsibility to articulate your points clearly enough so that they are easily understandable to everyone, rather than relying on someone who (somehow) understands it better than the others to do it for you.

I agree with this; slavery certainly must be taken into consideration, and I think people tend to gloss over it when they talk about the glory of the 19th century. I wouldn't say that the most free era was sometime the 20th century, though, but the latter part of the 19th century. I'm not married to that judgment, though. It's an extremely complex historical issue, and I think it would be incredibly foolish for anyone (possibly excluding very knowledgeable historians) to consider this anything but open to debate. They can't be, and EC's smear is almost laughable, especially considering Hal's fairly consistent rationality, and his open, honest recognition of the areas of Objectivism with which he disagrees.

There's nothing wrong with taxes, provided they aren't collected coercively.

The only thing that's uncertain is what you are talking about. The question raised in this thread is one of very high interest to me, and I'd be glad to answer any questions relating to it, but only if you care to untangle the indecipherable mess you just posted.

Here are a couple of quotes: That article has such a bounty of information on the idea of public property, that you should really try to read it in full. I just chose one quote of many. That's pretty much all that last one had to say about public property, so if that's all you're interested in at present, it might not be worth it to read the whole thing.

Plato did not claim that the universe was created, even according to the wikipedia link you gave. Plato's Demiurge did not create the universe, but organized something which already existed. The wikipedia entry has a sub-heading, "Why the Universe Was Created," but here is a direct quote from that: "It is important to note that for Plato, the demiurge lacked the supernatural ability to create 'ex nihilo' or out of nothing. The demiurge was able to only organize the 'anake.'" Most cultures do have their cosmologies, but in western culture, no thinker (that there is record of, anyway) ever held to the idea that the universe was created until Juedaeo-Christian philosophy. As far as whatever the primitive religions of Mesoptamia and Sumeria believed in, I can't say. The context of my comments was the history of Western philosophy. Whether or not, in Christianity, the heavens existed prior to creation is irrelevant, unless the dogma states that the universe was created by rearranging elements of the heavens. That isn't my understanding of what they say though. As I understand it, God was supposed to have said, "Let there be such-and-such," and then there was such-and-such. Edited to add the last paragraph.

Descartes was wrong. Not just on that, but on a whole slough of things throughout his philosophy. He allowed his expertise in Mathematics, a specialized science (the validity of which rests on philosophy, not the other way around) to determine the course of the rest of his thinking. How? By modeling his philosophy on math. He started with a set of arbitrarily chosen axioms (not that mathematical axioms are arbitrary), and proceeded to deduce an entire philosophical system from them. This method is called rationalism. To paraphrase Ayn Rand and Dr. Peikoff: To say that sense-perception is an invalid representation of reality is a contradiction. In means, in effect, that we cannot know reality because we know it through our means of knowing reality.

In one of the Q&A sessions of Peikoff's lecture course, "Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume," someone asked the question: What is the role that man's awareness of his own mortality has played in philosophy? Here was his answer: I transcribed this myself from the CD. I'm pretty sure I got it all right, but any errors are mine. [Edit - Moved part of this post to another thread on a different topic - RC]

It's pure science-fiction, but premusably, in the process Hal was describing, the perceptual memory would have to be a part of the "data transfer." If (and that's a VERY big if) a scientific discoverry were to be made which enable knowlede-transfers, however, I'm afraid we'd need some new philosophy to go along with it (although it woudl not invalidate the accuracy of Objectivism under the old conext). EDIT: I also want to add that I've read sci-fi which (sort of) talks about this. In Frank Herbert's Dune Chronicles (mostly the last two books), there are women who can transfer memories and knowledge to one another, although they do it by mystical, unscientific means.

The way I use the term "mind," yes. My use means: the integrated relationship of both consciousness and the brain.

Unless this person is incredibly important to you, I wouldn't waste my time trying to convince her at all. If she's an avowed evader, she's probably just going to evade anything you say anyway. In my experience, people usually need to figure this one out on their own. Most of the time, any advice you have to give goes in one ear and out the other. My 2 cents.

If a man knowingly chooses actions which might lead to certain consequences (like the birth of a child) he is responsible for those consequences. If he chooses the actions, he is choosing the obligation--not to the mother, but to the child. This does not mean women are required to get a man's permission before having an abortion, because prior to the birth, it's not a child your dealing with, but a parasite on a woman's body, and the man has no claim on her body, anymore than the woman has a claim on the man's life for supporting the child. The important distinction between my actual position and the one you are (quite innocently, I'm sure) implicitly painting for me is that I don't say the woman has a claim on any portion of the man's life, but that the child does. The great travesty of the whole child support system is not that it places an obligation on men, but that it obligates the man to the woman, and not to the child. The dysfunction of every bad child-support situation I've observed stems from the parents trying to use it as a power play over each other, rather than a team effort to fulfill an obligation to the child. I have seen one case where the parents kept their heads on straight and it worked out great, but I'll admit that such cases are the minority.

Unless your computer has a mind (i.e. is conscious), then it isn't using concepts--in the Objectivist sense of the term anyway. I don't know if you're using a different concept of "concept" here, but I'm positive you know that, in Objectivism, a concept is: a mental integration of two or more similar units.

I don't find it amazing at all that honest women still exist. I find it completely expected. What I find amazing is that there are so many men out there who are willing to, entirely of their own accord, in full knowledge of the consequences of their actions, create a child and then not carry through with their obligation to that child. And for a man, it means that knowingly participating in actions that might lead to the creation of another person, brings all the responsibility for that person's care squarely down on his shoulders. All of the responsibility lies with both the man and the woman. It is a shared responsibility--excepting, of course, unique contexts in which there was some type of force involved, or an explicit agreement to the contrary beforehand. That's not true at all. What I'm supporting is the helplessness and dependance of children. I don't believe that women are incapable of caring for children on their own anymore than I think men are incapable of the same thing (apart from the pregnancy part). I'm also supporting any individual's obligation toward a life they create. This obligation can be (and often is) transferred to other people, but that doesn't wipe it out of existence.

There is no fallacy in my argument. There is a fallacy involved in the misapplication of my principle to the context of an in vitro fertilization. In that context, when the man is donating the sperm, it is with the understanding that he is not accepting responsibility for the child. That understanding changes the context hugely. The fallacy involved in misapplying that principle is context-dropping, and its the same fallacy that would be involved in attempting to universally absolve men of any obligation toward any unwanted pregnancy. The government doesn't have the authority to expropriate a man's wealth for an unchosen obligation, but my whole point is that acting irresponsibly is a choice, which any reasonable man knows might lead to a pregnancy. All choices are not left up to the woman in the scenario I described--only the final one. The man's choice is that he can wear a condom or not have sex at all.

One thing that's important to remember on this particular topic is that the question of what kind of consciousness animals have is a scientific one, and not a philosophic one. Ayn Rand wrote a couple of time that only humans have a conceptual consciousness, and she may have been right, but it would probably take a zoologist who specializes in higher primates to say for sure whether or not they can use concepts. That said, using primitive signs does not necessarily indicate use of concepts. What it indicates is that they have the ability to memorize a large number of perceptual concretes (signs) and combine them in different ways. I've read that higher primates might be able to use the signs to deal with things we would normally integrate into first-level concepts, but that there is absolutely NO evidence that any process of abstraction is occuring. Evidence of abstraction would consist of moving beyond first-level concepts and making abstractions from abstractions to form concepts like "furniture" and "fruit" as opposed to "table" and "chair" or "banana" and "apple." Although Ayn Rand said that no animal except humans can use concepts, what Objectivism qua philosophy has to say on the subject is that if an animal can use concepts, that they will use them in such and such a way and have rights. Personally, although I do not have any sort of expertise in zoology, I agree with Ayn Rand entirely on this until and unless I see an animal do something highly conceptual (like multiplication or building a primitive machine). The line is very black and white. Have you ever seen an animal build a house, use an ATM, drive a car, go to the moon, get married, read a clock, or any of the other many, many uniquely human activities that require making abstractions from abstractions? Ding, ding, ding! This can be validated by introspection. On the perceptual level, you really have no control over your consciousness. You can choose to look here and not there, or close your eyes and not see anything at all, but that is a selection of stimulus more than it is actually directing perception itself. On the conceptual level, however, you have complete control over what you think about, how hard you think about it, what facts you use in thinking about it, how long you think about it and all sorts of other things. Dealing with abstractions is volitional, while dealing with percepts is not. Well, it's important to realize that a human can survive physically without using reason, but they would be surviving qua animals, not qua rational beings.

Under the circumstances of this particular case, I completely and truly hope Dubay is absolved of any legal obligation to this child. As for a blanket "man's right" to refuse financial support for the product of any unwanted pregnancy, I am totally and completely against it. I think that there should be laws protecting men from such deceitful action on the part of some women, but what about these circumstances: He knows his girlfriend isn't on the pill. He knows she is fertile. They both choose not to use any other form of birth control (the reason they make that decision is irrelevant), and then OMG, there's a bun in the oven--and of course everyone is SO shocked that this could have happened. In my (second-hand) experience--and granted, I haven't known all that many people who've ended up with an unwanted pregnancy on their hands--this type of scenario is FAR more common than Dubay's. Under these circumstances, I hold a man 100% responsible for the product of his irresponsible actions. And yeah, he doesn't get a say in what happens after that initial act, but you know what--that's just our (men's) tough luck.