Ogg_Vorbis

It may be humorous to non-Objectivists that Objectivism recognizes that a baseball bat can be used to hit a baseball. But when Leonard Peikoff declares that science must conform to HIS philosophy, and you find out that his philosophy can’t accept 20th century science because it doesn’t agree with whatever Peikoff’s senses tell him is true, it ceases to be funny. It becomes hilarious. This is what happens when philosophy rejects the noumenal domain, the realm of amazing possibilities that lies just out of reach of your senses.

That is to say, logic and lawfulness comes, not from us as with Kant, but from outside of us. And since this determination of order comes through the senses, it appeals to the idea that all reality, not just the macro realm, must conform to the same logic and lawfulness that we perceive. Therefore, Objectivists such as Harriman or Peikoff, who are following their philosophy's conclusions to the letter, will declare that quantum particles cannot behave a-causally. Nor can they come into and go out of existence.

Greg Nyquist linked Peikoff's desperate attempt to subordinate science to HIS philosophy to ancient Greek philosophy: https://aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/2010/09/objectivism-metaphysics-part-12.html

I'm arguing that Existence exists isn't related to the idea that existents exist among other existents. I postulated a universe (an existence) in which the only existent was a hydrogen atom. The rest was just me trying to use a lot of words starting with E, hopefully while using the concepts in a consistent way, and putting 'permanence' together with 'change' in a way that makes sense. Permanence, being, is the laws of nature that make change predictable to us. "Beingness," which may not be a traditional concept in ontology, points to the quality of lawfulness in existents. I was also showing that I can play the ontology game too, even without lots of followers whom I neither want nor need. But now that you mention it, 'Existence exists' would be nothing but an empty tautology without Being to give it metaphysical permanence. I wouldn't except a monism of Being. But existence without Being is chaos, or non-existence. As for philosophers catching up and getting with the scientific program, Objectivism, with its reliance on the validity of the senses, can't make sense of any physics after Newton. David Harriman, author of The Logical Leap, and Leonard Peikoff say that modern physics must comply with Objectivist principles. But if it does, Relativity and QM will vanish overnight. https://aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/2010/09/objectivism-metaphysics-part-12.html This Dave Harriman, mentioned by Peikoff, is an amusing enough fellow. His attacks on relativity, quantum mechanics, big bang theory, etc. are filled with clever quips and amusing juxtapositions. Consider what he has to say of space:

Kant agreed with shifting away from Being.

From this forum’s homepage: "Man must act for his own rational self-interest" "The purpose of morality is to teach you[...] to enjoy yourself and live" ”Man MUST act for his own rational self-interest.” MUST. Okay then, MAKE me. Because last I heard there are only two things that people MUST do: pay taxes, and die.

I don't see that concept being derived from objective fact here http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/productiveness.html. I see where she calls non-thinkers (the majority of men) "blanks" and "brutes." And I see a lot of Rand telling people what they MUST do, as if they had to listen to her.

Well, the way I see it anyway, is like this: Rationality: she got it from Aristotle Productiveness: she got it from Locke. Pride: she got it from NB who was a psychology student during a time when "self-esteem" and "self-actualization" were trending in universities. ------------ Euclid was meant for blind obedience, because people were blindly obedient to his geometry until the early 19th century. People identify things all the time, but that doesn't make them correct.

I fully grant that existence does indeed exist. However, that statement is rather ambiguous, as traditional philosophy makes a distinction between existence and Being -- with the emphasis often placed on one over the other -- because the idea of Being is not present in the empty tautology "existence exists." It is not to say that the concept of "existence" exists, as that would be obvious; but that a thing called existence exists that is not itself and can never be an existent. Because existents exist within existence. "Existence" is therefore synonymous with "universe," as the sum-total of all that exists, that is, of all existents. I had to clarify this because the idea that "existence exists" is a mere tautology; it doesn't prove that existents exist among other existents. It does not prove that multiple existents exist at all, because a universe or existence containing a single existent, even if it's just a hydrogen atom, is all that is required for the concept of "existence" to be valid. To bring traditional philosophy back into this, existence is Being, but we posit that existents possess the quality of Beingness (to break with traditional ontology). Because Being is traditionally the permanent in ontology. It's seen as something that is not itself an existent but is an unchanging and fundamental quality that underlies all existents, such as the constants of physics. Individual existents change, but Being itself is permanent. And while existents themselves may exist in a flux, as Heraclites pointed out, they change in a regular, lawful, non-chaotic manner. So the monistic tendency of declaring that "existence exists" falls to the dualism of stating that, yes, existence exists, and not merely as an empty tautology, but that it also cannot exist without at least one existent contained within it (and not just subsumed beneath it as if they were mere concepts). That singular existent, however, is not existence. Existence is something more; it contains the regulated lawfulness of the hydrogen atom in my example: the Beingness. Existence not only contains, it controls the existent, the hydrogen atom, as it changes, bringing to it a modicum of predictability. The term "beingness" is simply used to indicate that the existence of the existent is ongoing, permanent, that it may change its form but never cease to exist. "Beingness" only serves as a pointer to the permanence that exists in the existent. I am not therefore saying that "Beingness" is anything more than a concept. The existence is not Being itself, but we can posit that it possesses the attribute of Beingness without declaring that Beingness is itself an existent.

Parmenides dealt with the question of Being and Existence. Your viewpoint is very similar to his, although Parmenides emphasized Being (permanence) over Existence (change, Heraclitean flux).

"Yes" demonstrates to me that you are a philosopher, even if an amateur, and that you can think for yourself. But then again, you're not exactly an Objectivist, as you stated.

If I posted any news, it was obviously my (correct) idea that Rand told people what to think, rather than teaching them how to think for themselves (as if they were individuals and not drones). I recently found that another non-Objectivist made the same observation, and I cited the blog address somewhere around here. If it's hard for you to distinguish new from old in my writing, from now on I promise that I will parenthesize everything I write on this topic with either (new) or (old).

Original work on Objectivism from non-Objectivists never goes over well.

I don't know if I have a Beck translation. I stated that I don't want to dig around for the Groundwork. Then I stated that you require people to go look up citations, but that I provide quotes on demand if I didn't provide one originally. Have I insulted you with statements such as "Slow down and actually comprehend what I wrote to you in the little post you quoted. Can you do that? Do you want to?" One nice thing about being me is that, as a nobody (and I prefer it that way), the fact of becoming a somebody has never had a chance to go to my head.

Boydstun stated that he sees people on this forum thinking for themselves all the time. I need to provide a better answer than my previous one. The CONTEXT of my OP was the ability to think morally without relying on a list of values and virtues provided by Ayn Rand. I ended the OP by stating that Kant provided a formula for people to make up their own set of morals, as long as they were rationally validated by the CI. He did not provide them with a set of rules or duties to follow. The contrast between Rand's and Kant's theories was to show the difference between an individualistic moral theory from the Enlightenment that teaches people to think for themselves, and an allegedly individualistic moral theory that only tells people what to think with a set of rules to follow. I hope that clarifies things. This is original work, so misunderstandings will happen.

Latin or German? This is hopeless. I can't research that. I will provide quotes for people who ask for them if I didn't provide one myself, rather than sending them to look up a book that is written in Latin or German. You're welcome for the help I gave you with one of your articles.

Boydstun doesn't want to see anything about Rand being a man-worshipper, which she was. Males, not humans in general. And you think I misunderstand her views, and that I accuse others of misunderstanding her views. I have read everything she wrote several times, except for most of those boring journal entries of hers. They are, however, quite revealing indeed, for what I read. And quite damning in one way. Shall I go on?

Those are your opinions. And I am primarily concerned with Objectivists.

I have a copy of the Groundwork in a box somewhere around here. But rather than dig it out, I tried searching for it with Google Books. Then I got this when I searched for 4:397-99:

The Groundwork is a relatively short work. Are you implying it contains at least 399 pages? This is why I quote works when I have to, rather than guiding people to the text itself with pagination. What the heck is 4:397-99? The four is easy this time, but '397-99' doesn't make sense to me. In your other essays, where you write 8:, I have no clue what that means. With regard to similarities between Kant's and Rand's works, there are obviously two camps: those who want to find similarities, and those who don't.

Kant the anthropologist did deal with the concept of life. But not Kant the ethicist, that I can recall. And the context of my comment was his ethics, which I read, and don't remember any analysis of human life. Very similar to Rand's analysis.

Yes, you said as much already. And it's a good idea. I read where you stated that, on OL, you can reach more people by writing scholarly essays. But even if I reached a million people, I wouldn't unless I was paid well to do it. In fact, I would probably start with this massive (to me) undertaking by using the paginations you already have out there.

It seems incredible that Kant was able to reach a dire hand into the future to cause the Simpson jury to find him not guilty. Specifically, he was able to manipulate 90% of the jury into believing that playing the race card is a valid defense. But if my reading of Kant is correct, he was not a big fan of black people. So his motive in this case is unclear to me.

It's okay if people want to stop reading at the end of the Aesthetic and say something like, "Okay, cool, but what was the point of all that?" In the Aesthetic, Kant made a point of dealing with the ideas of space argued for by Leibniz (relative space) and Newton (absolute space). And the domain of the thing-in-itself is not just an interesting concept. It makes conceptual room for possibilities that are developed much later in the Critique: the non-phenomenal Ideas of God, Freedom (free-will), and Immortality. _____________ Perhaps we, or some people, do have intellectual intuition as well as sensible intuition. Who knows? Christians and other spiritual types say that we all walk around with a veil over us that limits our sight to the empirical and blocks us from seeing another, spiritual, realm. I'm open-minded, I enjoy speculating, and so I wrote two heroic fiction books, under a pen name, that involved some far-out spiritual things.