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Bold Standard

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Everything posted by Bold Standard

  1. I don't have a specific website for it but I have one EP (second one almost finished) done and I can send it to you if you want. :)

  2. Hi, I like your stuff! My favorite is "foreshortening." Maybe you'd like my music-- www.myspace.com/epistemelody ::end plug:: hehe
  3. 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?
  4. 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.
  5. 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
  6. Call me a hippie if you will, but I like Jones Soda myself.
  7. 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).
  8. 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 the other hand, came onto the scene amidst the Enlightenment, at a time when religion was fading, and attempts were being made to understand the world according to reason. He saved religion, suspended reason to make room for faith, dealt a near fatal blow to the study of metaphysics as such, and basically steered philosophy *away* from the Enlightenment approach and away from the attempts to grasp reality by means of reason.
  9. 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..
  10. 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 argued his categorical imperatives, it is not merely *undesirable* for a person to violate the maxim if it were a universal law, but rather *impossible*. I think that's what your teacher meant when he asked you to show how the violation would lead to a "contradiction." One example I've seen used is lying (I don't remember if this was an example Kant actually used or just someone explaining Kant). If lying were a universal law, then that would mean that everything that everybody says is a lie. But if that were so, it would actually be impossible, because it would mean simply that when someone says something, the opposite of their statement is the truth. So everything would be the truth, which is a contradiction to everything being a lie. It is therefore literally impossible, not merely undesirable, for lying to be willed a universal law. (I know that argument is somewhat problematic, but that's one that I've seen as an example before).
  11. 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 consonant with Nazism were not unique to Nietzsche's philosophy but were mostly derivative ideas that were already popular at the time. But it is legitimate to say, for instance, that Plato led to Christianity, because philosophically Christianity was in essence, as Nietzsche once put it, "Platonism for the masses." In particular, many of Plato's unprecedented arguments for the existence of a supernatural world of forms served as a key premise for Plotinus, who's arguments served as a model for many of the church fathers and therefore for the early philosophical development of Christianity. *[Edit: I think don't think it's legitimate to judge a philosopher based exclusively on the criteria of his influence on later philosophers. But I do think it's legitimate to judge philosophers based on that criteria in certain contexts, especially when studying the historical development of philosophy.] It doesn't matter if a philosopher claims to be influenced by another philosopher. It only matters if an essential aspect of a philosopher is derivative of some essential aspect of the other philosopher. It doesn't matter much that Kant claimed to be inspired by Aristotle, because in essence his view was more Platonic than Aristotelian. It's true that there are significant, essential differences between Kant and Hegel. But it's also true that Kant lead to Hegel, because once Kant provided his unprecedented argument of the minds inability to know the noumenal world, Hegel had a foundation he wouldn't have otherwise had to do away with the noumenal world and project his new brand of idealism, which was in turn highly influential on other philosophers who did not necessarily agree with the totality of his philosophy. If it's true that the third critique doesn't cohere with the first two, then how could a philosophical movement possibly derive itself from Kant without contradicting either the third or the first two? I think what's in dispute are which of his points are more fundamental.
  12. 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.
  13. Before I get up, I usually just think, 'ZZZZZZZZZZ'. Lol, sorry, couldn't resist. : P
  14. 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 different thread so I cut and pasted it here): "In listening to music, a man cannot tell clearly, neither to himself nor to others—and, therefore, cannot prove—which aspects of his experience are inherent in the music and which are contributed by his own consciousness. He experiences it as an indivisible whole, he feels as if the magnificent exaltation were there, in the music—and he is helplessly bewildered when he discovers that some men do experience it and some do not. In regard to the nature of music, mankind is still on the perceptual level of awareness. "Until a conceptual vocabulary is discovered and defined, no objectively valid criterion of esthetic judgment is possible in the field of music. (There are certain technical criteria, dealing mainly with the complexity of harmonic structures, but there are no criteria for identifying the content, i.e., the emotional meaning of a given piece of music and thus demonstrating the esthetic objectivity of a given response.) "At present, our understanding of music is confined to the gathering of material, i.e., to the level of descriptive observations. Until it is brought to the stage of conceptualization, we have to treat musical tastes or preferences as a subjective matter—not in the metaphysical, but in the epistemological sense; i.e., not in the sense that these preferences are, in fact, causeless and arbitrary, but in the sense that we do not know their cause. No one, therefore, can claim the objective superiority of his choices over the choices of others. Where no objective proof is available, it's every man for himself—and only for himself."
  15. You might be interested to read The Romantic Manifesto, in which Ayn Rand lays down her theory of the meaning and value of art. She discusses dance, and mentions her favorites are tap and ballet. They just opened up a big new skatepark here in Houston, right next to downtown. I went to the opening the other day. It was super crowded! But there was a demo, the first pro demo I'd seen irl. There does seem to be an element of dance in it, though I suppose there are sports elements too. Anyway, it looks like so much fun, I wish I was better at it. Hopefully that place won't always be so crowded so I can try it out. : )
  16. If someone must must take care of x, and if only the government can take care of x, and if the government must forcibly tax people in order to take care of x, then, if the government didn't forcibly tax people, nobody would take care of x which would be bad or impossible. Most likely the faulty premise is "only the government can take care of x", but it depends on what x is. If x is courts, military, or police, then the faulty premise is that the government must forcibly tax people in order to take care of x. Another possible faulty premise is someone must take care of x at all. Depends what it is.
  17. You might try using the search feature to find the many identical threads to this one. Criticisms of Hume abound in Ayn Rands writings (notably in her essay For the New Intellectual and in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology). But she considered Kant the worst because he made much of Hume's skepticism academically acceptable and introduced "solutions" to his problems so weak that they quickly collapsed into the subsequent skepticism of German Romanticism etc. [edit: Oops, I should have read post#2 before I wrote this lol.] If you look up her comments on Nietzsche in the Ayn Rand Lexicon, you will see she expressed very similar opinions about Nietzsche. She hated him as a philosopher, and liked him primarily as a writer and poet. If you are interested in Kant's influence on Nazism, there is much about it in Leonard Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels, which is a very interesting read. I'm curious in what way Kierkegaard was a direct influence on the Nazis? I'm not aware of a specific connection, but they did attempt to sell themselves as being consistent with every popular philosopher no matter how disparate, in order to give themselves credibility in the public eye. Kierkegaard was an individualist (somewhat) despite his hatred of reason and his religiosity. The term 'altruism' was coined by August Compte as a description of Kant's moral philosophy, so in that sense he was the origin of altruism as an ethical doctrine. Kant's Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals is a much easier, much shorter read than CPR, and in it he lays down most of his ethical philosophy. I'd recommend reading that, if you're more interested in his influence on moral philosophy. German Romanticism [as a term in philosophy, as opposed to 'romanticism' in literature] is the name given to those German philosophers mostly in the 19th century who believed the mind was divorced from reality, and opposed "system building" in philosophy, ie, opposed any systematic approach to philosophy.
  18. Sure, some people make that mistake. I didn't, though. I never said it was a primary. Those are not the only effects of alcohol.. Yes, someone would have to be irrational to get drunk for those reasons.. But who gets drunk for those reasons? "Yeah bro, lets throw back some beers so we can have decreased motor skills!" No. There is a legitimate issue there--it's irrational to do drugs for irrational reasons. Many people are irrational and enjoy drugs as a response to their irrationality. But I disagree that *only* irrationality can make drugs pleasurable, or that people only do drugs for irrational reasons. I know it's kind of futile, because I usually make similar posts in similar threads and always get the same response, but still it bothers me to let the alternative view go unchallenged as if it's the only possible rational position. Well, don't go to a comedy club! Unless it's Carrot Top or something. I like being clear headed and thinking, too. But I also like to see things in a different way--that's why the common things seem funny, when you're tripping. You make connections you never made before. You realize things and attributes about the common things you never noticed before, to the point they don't seem common anymore. It's like when Ayn Rand describes Ralston Holcombe as looking like a lion, with his big mane-like hair, in The Fountainhead. It's such a vivid, hilarious description. I (being quite sober) laughed for five minutes when I read that, because I could just picture it, and it seemed so like his character to look like that. I noticed things like that when I was tripping.. Connections and analogies between things I would normally not really think about. But, it's probably different for different people. I like to explore my dreams. I'm fascinated by my subconscious mind. When I write songs, I'm often surprised by the things that come out of my own mind. I want to know what else is in there I don't know about. I know everything I've ever learned and everything I've ever experienced is in there somewhere. Sometimes all it takes is some subtle nudge to make a new connection that will end up having profound significance in my life and attitudes. I don't see anything irrational in that, at all. Drugs aren't the only way to do that, of course.. I try to do it all the time. But they do deliver different unexpected results sometimes. So once in a while I think they're okay. Cocaine, destroy you no matter what? No, I don't think so even with that. Maybe, sniffing gas or glue or something like that would destroy a person no matter what. Lol. But the social atmosphere not being light enough is a problem you're trying to solve, isn't it? Thanks for the compliment. : ) Work has been busy, this year! June and July are the only slow months, and even in June I'm scheduled for about 13 days so far, which is still sort of busy for the summer time.
  19. I wonder if any of the people who make claims like this have ever tried LSD, or any other psychedelics, lol. Tripping on LSD is no gateway to mystic insights, of course. But in my opinion, as someone who's tried it before (once, so far), I think it can be an entirely pleasant experience that can force a person temporarily out of the cage of his psychological defense mechanisms and see things from a fresh perspective--in a similar way one sees things differently in dreams, except, much easier to remember and integrate into his conscious perspective afterwards. And what's so bad about something that makes you laugh and laugh for hours.. It's fun. It doesn't necessarily "destroy your mind." Of course it does temporarily impair one's ability to reason--so does going to sleep. But it does have benefits (even, just, if it's a fun time) that could, i think, outway the negatives for some people in some contexts. Of course he is! You must have never heard Raspberry Beret.. Controversy.. Little Red Corvette... lol
  20. Well, I have read some of Hegel's works, but I have read more from his followers, because I've found them to be much more clear, consistent, and explicit. This is not a subject in philosophy I've studied much in depth, so it's quite possible I've misunderstood something. If you believe the thesis/antithesis/synthesis description of the dialectic process to be an inaccurate portrayal of Hegel's philosophy, would you mind providing us with a better description of the meaning of negation, and the dialectic process? Was it really Hegel, or Hegel's followers that were primarily an influence on Marx and Engels?
  21. Must be annoying to have all those school buses and students being dropped off and picked up in your bedroom, lol. j/k. I think the song needs a chorus or something, cause it's kind of repetitive sounding after a while (maybe just changing up the bassline a little would help). The singing is pretty good, though.
  22. Why don't you look her up in your school's yearbook? Just a suggestion, if you're really curious who she is.
  23. The punk scene has been intellectually dosed with communists, and other forms of statist radicals (such as anarchists) from the beginning. The Clash is a good, typical example (they were outspoken communists). But before that, the various countercultures emanating from the New Left since the 1960's shared a hatred for the individual and for capitalism. For Ayn Rand's analysis of some of the relevant cultural events of the 1960's with occasional insights into her views of the countercultures and the culture in general, I recommend her book: The New Left: The Anti-industrial Revolution. The punks in the 1970's rejected some elements of the hippie culture and accepted others. But, in my opinion, once the 80's came, and especially as the various scenes evolved around punk in America, one can't pin it down to any one particular, ideologically directed, countercultural movement. Not even in any one city, really. It's just fashion, at that point. It's too disparate. Still, some of the statist elements of the earlier punks (such as The Clash) continue to inspire those sheep-like scenesters who want to be "genuine" by mimicking the ideas of those who mimic the ideas of those who were mimicking someone's statist ideas at the time punk became a mass media phenomenon.
  24. I forgot to mention that the synthesis of thesis and antithesis then becomes a new thesis which is then synthesized with its antithesis and so on.. That's the "dialectic process". Which inspires the question, what happens after communism is achieved? Which most communists will say can't be answered or even conceived of at the present time. Besides that it will mark the end of ideology and individuality etc lol.
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