BRG253

Thanks!

I'm reading OPAR and don't quite understand this statement on epistemology. Piekoff states that "since the objects we percieve have a nature independent of us, it must be possible to distingush between form and object; bewteen the aspects of the percieved world that derive from our form of perception (such as colors, sounds, smells) and the apsects that belong to metaphysical reality itself, apart from us." By "form" I think he's referring to the perceptible characteristics of entities, i.e. the red color of a tomato. By "object," I can only infer that he means characteristics of entities that cannot be described in perceptual terms, i.e. the fact that a tomato is a nightshade. I may be way off here. Can someone please explain? Many thanks in advance.

Rand warned about the possibility of future dictatorship, Peikoff has alluded to his belief that we may be heading toward a dictatorship ruled by religion, and Onkar Ghate recently remarked that attacks on freedom of speech are warning signs that we are headed toward a real dictatorship. If it comes to pass as these philosophers have warned, who will occupy the role of the dictator?

http://www.citizen-times.com/article/20091...EWS01/912080327

self-explanatory I care about what happens to my property and the short list of people I care about personally. That's about it.

Maybe it's because Catholicism was an instrument of torture during my childhood that I resent the idea that I should be obligated to call him "Father." If the person recognized my right not to say it, I might be less aversive to it. I can't believe I got banned over this. Make no mistake about the purveyors of medical education, they are every bit as entrenched in mindlessness as everyone else.

In a legal context, the woman should have full autonomy. If she loves and respects the father, she ought to value his wishes, but she is solely empowered to make the decision.

Many say that reason is their highest value, and I agree with that, but I don't think it would be a good answer to my question because, even if it is possible to lose reason, you would have to possess reason in order to regret its loss. So, other than reason, is there any value which you hold as so sacred to you that you wouldn't wish to live without it? You may have many values, but is there any one value upon which your ability to enjoy the others is dependent?

Natural selection occurred to me before I learned about it.

Thanks for the reply. Isn't Rockafeller kind of an anti-Capitalist name though?

I'm having a debate about this on a forum for medical students, or was before I got the ban stick. The following question came up: if you were a doctor treating a Catholic priest, should you address him as "father" if that was his preference? I stated that I would not do so, because to me, that would imply that I consider him a religious mentor, or even acknowledge the respectability of his position. My resposne was very unpopular and I promptly got flamed. Later in the thread I got banned for stating that Catholic priests produce absolutely nothing of any slightest value whatsoever. Am I in the wrong? I think not. I didn't say that I would walk up to a priest and spit in his face. All I said is that he would have to be satisfied with "sir." I would feel that I was degrading myself by calling him "father."

I'm just getting into the technical details of metaphysics so forgive me if thise question is the "free will" question re-hashed in another form. Suppose you reflect on a regrettable decision you made in the past. The mistake was due to an error of knowledge; you had bad or incomplete information and were not exposed to better information until after the fact. In this case, was it even possible that you could have made the correct decision, or was your incorrect decision an inevitable result of having assimilated bad information (or having not yet assimilated better information)? My understanding of Obectivist metaphysics is that it holds that "any choice by its nature could have been otherwise" (to quote Peikoff). I'm struggling to see why this is necessarily true. It seems to be that we make decisions based on the information stored in our minds, which in turn has a biological component, i.e. the neural processes responsible for storing and accessing knowledge, which must be metaphysically given. Exposre to new information, or reflection on past errors may allow us to become more knowledgable and hence, to make better decisions in the future, but it seems to me that many (all?) decisions are likely to be based on factors which are metaphysically given. Where am I going wrong here?

Objectivists hate poor people and want a world without love. Objectivism fails because George Bush and the last eight years, blah blah blah

HIT has never been practiced on a large enough scale to justify even raising the question of empirical support. Dismissing HIT due to lack of empirical support is like dismissing Objectivism because it doesn't enjoy widespread acceptance in academia.

I recently learned that he's been sued four times for malpractice....

Several years ago, I got mixed up with a terrible hack of a podiatrist. The results of my affiliation with him were catastrophic. While under his care, I got the impression that he actually wanted me to be debilitated and dependent. He seemed to be opposed to the concept of being healthy, strong, and able to exist without podiatric treatment. He would occasionally make references to God and the Bible, but not being philosophically grounded at the time, I didn't think anything of it. It was one of many warning signs that I should have picked up on. So my question is - is it possible for a mystic to be a good physician, or does his orientation automatically make him malevolent, as the above passage suggests? When I speak of a mystic, I mean a real mystic, as in a Bible literalist or something along those lines.

Forcing insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions is so irrational that it seems like it could only be done out of sheer malice. Peter Schiff recently stated that the bill will make it more attractive for healthy people to pay government fines than insurance premiums, so that most of the people buying new insurance policies will be the sick. Then, when insurance companies go broke, the politicians will blame the free market and insist that we need single-payer healthcare. Of course, that's sheer speculation on my part, but the whole thing seems like somethng right out of Atlas Shrugged.

Douglas J. Amy has got to be the most disgusting intellectual in America. In this article, he equates "tax breaks" with "cash handouts," and likens the recipients of tax breaks (i.e. people who keep their own money) to "panhandlers on the street." He looks like a man who is scared of his own existence: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/misc/profile/damy.shtml

Do professors of philosophy enjoy the privilege of being able to teach their own ideas, or do they typically have to teach standard university courses as the department dictates?

Taken as a whole, the only thing the literature proves is that academic exercise physiology is an intellectual cesspool dominated by jocks and glorified PE instructors masquerading as scientists.

To be fair, the pharmaceutical industry has been about as abusive of government, and probably more abusive of science than any other industry that has existed in recent history. They large pharma corporations have been unduly influencing the prescribing habits of doctors for decades. They have fostered rampant conflicts of interest in academia and an extremely dangerous entanglement of government and industry with the FDA. They manipulate research, distort medical knowledge, and obstruct competition from natural products by illicit means. The situation is about as anti-capitalist as it is possible to get. It is a mistake to assume that drug companies are virtuous just because they fall into the category of big business. I'm not saying there is anything intrinsically wrong with a big drug company, but, in the current intellectual environment, things have simply gone to hell.

If you want a book recommendation, I suggest "The New H.I.T." by Ellington Darden, Ph.D. Although not an Objectivist, he is probably the world's foremost authority on HIT. "Body by Science" by Doug McGuff, MD is also a good book.

My father is a physicist who is supposedly very good at his job (he works for a major aerospace corporation and has patented a design for solar cells) but is so hopelessly irrational in every other area of his life that I sincerely believe he wasn't fit to have children. It's not just that he has philosophical problems, it's as though his actual IQ drops by 50% and he devolves into somethng absolutely infantile as soon as he leaves work. His ability to handle logic is so poor that I now refuse to discuss anything serious or important with him. The woman he married, my mother, is well below average intellectually, does not have the capacity to be rational in any area of her life, and is, in my opinion, an all around failure of a human being. How could a supposedly intellegent man be attracted to such an abomination as her? How is it even possible?

To claim that lying is universally immoral is to declare that others have the right to demand whatever information they want from you.

Does Objectivism deny the possibility of God, or merely dismiss the notion as arbitrary? My line of inference is that claiming the existence of God necessarily places Him within the sphere of existence, which makes it impossible for Him to transcend the universe. But is it possible for a God to exist as part of the universe, if not as the creator of existence?