Bold Standard

Hi, I like your stuff! My favorite is "foreshortening." Maybe you'd like my music-- www.myspace.com/epistemelody ::end plug:: hehe

Hi, Clarissa. I wondered if you have any of your art posted online, and if you might like to show it? Also, what kind of music *do* you like, if you like any?

Ayn Rand never claimed that man is "just" a rational being. She claimed that rationality is man's most essential attribute. See Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology for a more full study of the implications of this.

It's worth it! Even their diet soda is pretty good. (And I *hate* diet anything.. I only know it's good cause I bought it on accident once lol). Also, water is cheaper than coke or pepsi and there's more of it in every bottle.. Even cheaper from the faucet. You get what you pay for, though. : P

Call me a hippie if you will, but I like Jones Soda myself.

It's been a while since I've seen this, but I thought the alternative given was anarchism. (I know, that's not too much different from communism, but it's about as different from communism as either is from fascism, I'd say).

I think, for one thing, Plato's achievement of being the first systematic philosopher in history earned him at least a degree of admiration from Ayn Rand. This is my personal view on the subject.. Plato came onto the scene amidst, as far as we can tell today, mostly fragmented, factional bickering of sophists and skeptics and various cults. And he steered philosophy into the direction of a systematic approach. His system was tragically flawed, of course, but I think it's in this respect that he paved the road for Aristotle and the birth of science and philosophy as we know it. Kant, on th

Actually, Kant did claim that some knowledge of the noumenal realm could be deduced. He was heavily criticized for this, and it is quite inexplicable in the context of the rest of his philosophy. But there are three basic metaphysical concepts Kant derived from "real reality," as he saw it, and those were God, freedom (volition), and immortality (the indestructibility of the soul). As to how he derived those concepts and what they mean exactly in his philosophy, someone with a much better understanding of Kant than I would have to explain..

You said it backwards. The maxim is that an action is morally permissible if and only if it can be willed to be a universal law. Also, your professor might have translated will to mean desire, and if so never mind this--but I would avoid equating will with desire in Kant. The connotations of desire seem too close to inclination, which is one type of motivator, but one that Kant tried to avoid (though not very well really). This argument is Kantianish, but again I think you have included a much greater focus on desire (inclination) than Kant would have allowed. The way Kant usually

I don't think that philosophers' claims of inspiration by Kant is the issue. The reason that Kant lead to Hegel and German Romanticism etc. is not because he somehow prophetically agreed with their philosophies before they were formulated. It's because some of Kant's unprecedented arguments served as key premises in their philosophies. I do think it's legitimate to judge a philosopher based on that criteria*. It's really not legitimate to say that Nietzsche led to Nazism, because there is very little in Nietzsche's philosophy that bears any resemblance to Nazism, and those ideas which are c

No, she doesn't. She does contrast music as being periodic in nature as opposed to noise which is non-periodic, though. Lol.. Personally, I hate Bach and love Rachmaninoff for the most part. But there are some pieces by Bach that I love and some by Rachmaninoff that I hate.

Before I get up, I usually just think, 'ZZZZZZZZZZ'. Lol, sorry, couldn't resist. : P

I don't believe that music can be described objectively in the context of our present understanding of music's effect on people. But I think it can potentially be described objectively one day. I do think that it is useful to describe subjective things subjectively, if by "subjective" one means a description of one's personal experience with something, the objective causes of which one is unable to determine at that time. Here is an excerpt from Ayn Rand's The Romantic Manifesto on the subject of music. (She writes more about it than this, but this is just one excerpt that I quoted on a dif