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kesg

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Everything posted by kesg

  1. Hopefully the answer is because if and when the time came, our military wanted to be able to open a second front against Iran from the West. One of the many benefits of the Iraq operation is a military base of operations from which to keep a very close eye on Iran to the East, Syria to the West, and Saudi Arabia to the South.
  2. This argument is a non sequitur. Voting for candidate A over candidate B means only that, all things considered, you consider candidate A either better or less worse than candidate B. It does not imply that you support or agree with everything that candidate A says or does.
  3. With all due respect, you have it exactly backwards. Everyone you listed with the exception of Beethovenoccassionally had a bad day. Beethoven never did.
  4. I barely skimmed the list so far, but I don't think anyone has listed Where Eagles Dare. So I will. The movie has a great story and intelligent characters who are also men (and women) of action.
  5. I would say that the essential is acting on what you know to be true. Things like danger or fear, when present, are essentially obstacles that one must overcome while so acting. So is any pain, cost, or effort involved.
  6. Tara Smith made this point, among many others. Her focus was on whether objectivity, as Leonard Peikoff described it in in Chapter 4 of OPAR, required mental activity above and beyond identifying and integrating the facts of reality. Her answer seemed to be yes, but I'm not so sure. One cannot properly form or use concepts and propositions -- i.e. properly identify and integrate without contradiction the material provided by our senses -- without holding context and being able to retrace them to their roots in perceptual data. My thought is that objectivity goes to the intellectual component of exercising reason, while rationality -- the broader term -- goes not only to this component but also acting accordingly in our daily choices and actions.
  7. Well, now I am up to "novice." I feel like a frigging moron.
  8. In Galt's speech, Ayn Rand clearly regarded courage as a derivative or aspect of integrity, as "the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to truth..." This virtue plays a bigger role, or at least a more central role, in Aristotle's ethical system, but it essentially amounts to the same thing: the willingness to act in accordance with one's rational judgment regardless of the costs, pain, or hardships involved.
  9. Does anyone have any comments on Tara Smith's taped lecture series called Rationality and Objectivity or, more generally, what differences, if any, exist between rationality and objectivity? Her conclusion was that the two are not exactly interchangeable and that rationality was the broader term. I agree, but perhaps for slightly different reasons. Her view was that rationality tells you what to do, and objectivity (as described in Chapter 4 of OPAR) gives you more specific advice on how to do it. My view is that objectivity is the intellectual component of rationality, which also has an existential component.
  10. Hello everyone. I discovered this forum a few days ago. Looks interesting. I am a grizzled veteran of the humanities.philosophy.objectivism newsgroup (which now has little or nothing to do with Objectivism, which is why I was looking elsewhere). I am already becoming highly annoyed at being called a "newbie."
  11. I think the answer to your question is yes, although this answer is impossible to explain in a few sentences on a forum like this one. I am aware of an excellent essay on the subject by Ayn Rand called Art and Cognition (in The Romantic Manifesto) that covers music among other things. There is also an excellent book on this topic by the late American composer Aaron Copeland, called What to Listen For in Music.
  12. Harry Binswanger asked and answered this very question in his lecture series Consciousness as Identification. His answer, in essence, is that these people don't grasp Ayn Rand's objective theory of concepts and therefore never learn to think like Objectivists. They simply want to jump to their areas of immediate interest -- her views on ethics, politics, maybe esthetics -- without taking the time and effort to learn the method of thinking that enabled Rand to arrive at and validate them.
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