Boydstun

To the historical list, I see now I should add Christian Wolff (1679–1754), who writes in his 1713 Logic, or Rational Thoughts on the Powers of the Human Understanding with their Use and Application in the Knowledge and Search of Truth, known more usually as his German Logic: "Every man is not temperate in the same degree. In order to define temperance therefore we are not to confine ourselves to this or the other degree thereof, in this or the other person . . . ." Wolff understood that we better understand a thing when we measure its qualities and establish their variable quantity's dependence with variations in the quantities belonging to other things. However, in the quoted passage, Wolff does not see what Rand saw, i.e., that indeterminateness of the particular value of a measurable quality is an aspect of what is an abstract concept of a thing. He goes on in the passage to say it is the particular highest measure in the range of values taken on by quantity of a quality of a thing that should attach to the concept of that thing. This comes up in his attempt to argue for his overblown definition of philosophy: "The Science of all possible things, together with the manner and reason of their possibility.”

What an informative article! I wonder how one can validate the idea that technological and health progress was proceeding faster in the period before 1940 talked about and the period since then. I'm not a reactionary like the guy who pointed out the subjectivity in the concept of progress. But there is background valuation and value aspiration in what one counts as progress. That is a subject-relativity which can be teased out into awareness. Thanks!

Source Region for the plague that killed half the human population of Europe has been identified.

That "indicating" claim about DOD is false, prejudiced. "At the time of its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union, despite being a State Party to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), had a large and sophisticated biological weapons program, consisting of dozens of research, development, and production facilities, with tens of thousands of employees, spread across many of its successor states. "In violation of the BWC, this Soviet weapons complex developed a broad range of biological pathogens for use as weapons against plants, animals, and humans, including the weaponization of anthrax, plague, and smallpox. "In contrast, no other European state nor the United States possessed any biological weapon development programs, in compliance with their obligations under the BWC. When the Soviet Union dissolved, it left some newly independent states, like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, with legacy biological weapons program facilities, equipment, and materials that were vulnerable to theft, misuse, and unsafe handling and storage. THE U.S. DEPARTMENTS OF DEFENSE AND STATE FUNDED PROGRAMS TO HELP TRANSITION SUCH FORMER SOVIET WEAPONS FACILITIES INTO PEACEFUL PUBLIC HEALTH FACILITIES. "The United States, through international collaboration, has also worked to address other biological threats throughout the former Soviet Union. Subject matter experts in biology, biodefense, public health, and related fields were engaged from across the U.S. government. These efforts advanced disease surveillance and enhanced peaceful biological research cooperation between former Soviet Union scientists and the global scientific community, consistent with international norms for safety, security, nonproliferation, and transparency. "The United States has also worked collaboratively to improve Ukraine’s biological safety, security, and disease surveillance for both human and animal health, providing support to 46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and disease diagnostic sites over the last two decades. The collaborative programs have focused on improving public health and agricultural safety measures at the nexus of nonproliferation. "This work, often conducted in partnership with outside organizations, such as the WHO and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), has resulted in safer and more effective disease surveillance and detection. Ukrainian scientists have acted consistent with international best practices and norms in publishing research results, partnering with international colleagues and multilateral organizations, and widely distributing their research and public health findings." —DOD ( EMPHASIS ADDED BY ME.)

I can imagine how emotionally painful it could be for some performers to not be able to perform. A number of successful performers have also died of the coronavirus, which is something like the public lights that were snuffed out by AIDS before the scientific rescue came through (still no vaccine). I wanted to mention also that regular churches and synagogues suffered greatly in religious feeling during the shutdowns. The getting together in person with their fellowship in a common faith and ceremony of worship is a really big part of many who are religious. Internet viewing would just not cut it. After the first couple of months, I got bored of all discussions, often politicized, about covid-19 and the various approaches to suppressing infection, keeping ICU in enough supply, shutdowns, and so forth. Poltiticalization occurred also in connection with AIDS. At my sister's church (1984), in a discussion group, it came out that some members thought no research should be done on it because in the US the infection was associated with being gay, which God condemned (and they condemned), and the right way was to let them die as punishment. (For the first couple of centuries of European law in North America, the earthly punishment for homosexuality was execution. That was still the case and continued when "the land of the free" was born.) Then too, there was the flocking of libertarians to theses of the cell-researcher Peter Duesberg who denied that HIV was the cause of AIDS, that taking the one medication that had been developed against HIV to that point, together with too much nightlife and recreational drugs, was the cause of people losing the immune defenses in the syndrome called AIDS. I wrote to the editor at LIBERTY magazine, which had carried the Deusberg line on its pages, told them what I knew and had experienced first hand, that the concern of this libertarian flock was political (no research money for AIDS), not a concern for preservation of my life, and that I was going to continue to follow my doctor in his recommendation for anti-HIV medications as they came up for test. To his credit, the editor followed up with an expert writing against the Duesberg views. During those first couple of months of the online discussions of the Covid-19 pandemic, I did a little digging and learned what all had happened during the 1957-58 pandemic of Asian Flu. Eisenhower had gotten some funds for ramping up production of the vaccine which had been developed before the infection hit America and swept across the country in spring of '57. The higher production rate was able to save lives in the fall of that year. The administration considered shutting the schools, because children were especially susceptible to this disease. But the government agencies assessed that it was going to spread so rapidly, that little if any good would be done. So decisions went to local administrators and individual families. Some school districts closed, often because attendance had stopped. Even if your child was not sick, you might call in the child as sick, in order to protect your child. At that time, the country overall, as I gather from the NY Times in those years, was very concerned that our armed forces personnel should not be knocked down with this communicable disease. Ike did not direct closure of businesses. That was correct in my view. Let the chips fall there, like in the schools. One problem in the recent pandemic with closing work places by the federal/state government is that having prevented people from working, you have something of an obligation to compensate them. If they lost work instead from individual decisions, well, then it would just be the usual deal that nature is a giant.

Tad, one's way of appearing to others or to oneself in the mirror would be a bit of what Damasio called one's extended consciousness and one's extended self. That is the self we usually think of as our self. It includes one's long-term memory of one's life, the position one has in society, the ideas and organizations one identifies with, and I would say also the deliberate ways one makes one's emotional and physical appearance for others and for oneself. Rand remarked that oneself is one's mind. I agree, and mind in that sense is one's thinking, feeling, connections to sources of knowledge, and one as sharer with others of the world, experiences, and life-making. But first and foremost, mind is one's embodied thinking. As a system of perception and control, one's self that is one's mind is an entity. But it is a doer as well, that is, it falls into both of Rand's categories entity and action. I've noticed that when one has an addiction to something like cigarettes or beer, one may find it hard to think of oneself as living without them. They have become part of oneself. But people who have succeeded in quitting find in a while they are still themselves. I don't think a germ-mask or wearing a dust-mask in the shop are so tightly tied to one's extended identity as are addictions such as cigarettes. Those masks are woven into one's habits, like the habit of using a cane for while. The mask of the Lone Ranger is more essential to his social persona than anyone wearing a health-mask, pretty sure. Tad, in waking hours, I think relation of one's subjective experience of consciousness to human consciousness as awareness of existents is this (from standpoint of my own philosophy in "Existence, We"): "Grasps in observational acts of consciousness are actions. Making statements are actions. The fact of consciousness is implicitly affirmed in making and grasping statements about existence. The fact of consciousness, one’s own and others’, is the fact of an activity, a fact of living activity. One does not wait on education in biology to know one is alive, to grasp in know-with attending observation that the self and other of consciousness are intending and alive.50 Implied in the act of grasping any statement about existence is the fact of living action. ", , , Consciousness is living action itself, as intender. Self-consciousness is living existence itself, as intender and self-controller. Life conscious of itself is us self-conscious and other-conscious. In any knowing of consciousness is knowing of life. To imagine a consciousness not a living feature of living entity is to neglect the essential of life in one’s own most basic knowing of consciousness.” Rand thought of the consciousness in dreams as depending on the basic waking consciousness: awareness of existents. I concur, and I think all the science on dreaming bears out at least that dreams are in part made up of things and persons and events from waking life. Dreams would seem a good example of subjective experience of consciousness.

That seems to be a major district in what people take for common sense. What we think of as common sense in one era may have been knowledge that required empirical science and shrewd innovative thinking in the earlier era from which it has descended. That bodies require work to keep moving whatever kind of non-spinning motion they are undergoing was an idea overturned by Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. But nowadays I hear young people who don't know the history say of the principle of inertia—say, of the Voyager spacecrafts now in interstellar space: they will continue to move in a constant direction, locomotion-wise, and at a constant speed unless acted upon by an external influence, viz., an external force—"well of course. That's just common sense." It's a good thing that good scientific sense gets taken in time as common sense. I take as common sense with that sort of heritage that to protect myself from airborne pathogens I should have a face mask in my pocket for crowded gatherings of people (and something else in my pocket were I about to get into a situation of possible exposure to an STD).

PS – I forgot to mention that Hilbert lifted betweeness-relations to the honor of primitive relations useful for a rigorous Euclidean geometry. Their residence, I notice, is not only as assumptions in an abstract geometry, but in given physical reality.

One way to rescue the thing-in-itself within the spirit of Kant’ critical philosophy is the way of Salmon Maimon (1753–1800). Maimon urged conception of the thing-in-itself as only an ideal of reason, an asymptotic concept which human thought requires and under which it can profitably proceed, rather than conceiving thing-in-itself (as had Kant in A250–53, A38; 1783 §§12, 13, 32, 57; Bxxvi–xxvi; A45–46 B62–63, B69, B306–9, A696 B724) as an object in a noumenal domain (Beiser 1993, 306–309). Rand can maintain that no such ideal of reason is necessary for cognition, and of course, for Rand the parts of an existent unknown in present perception or thought concerning it can be things not only as things possibly knowable, but things as they are. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In all that sort of sensibleness in the second edition (1787) of KrV, Kant was not retreating one inch from his characterization of space as form supplied from the side of the subject, form ideal and without which no outer experience is possible, form that does not exist without a perceiving subject (A26–28 B42–44, A42–43 B59–60, A85–89 B118–22, B148, A492 B520). Kant’s primacy of outer intuition is not Rand’s primacy of existence. Contrary the primacy of existence, Kant writes, for example: “Apperception, and with it thought, precedes all possible determinate arrangement of presentations” (KrV A289 B345). Rand should have argued against Kant’s tenet that all spatial form is necessarily the product of the subject in episodes of perception. There is elementary form—such as the betweenness-relations (my right index finger is between my right thumb and right middle finger), a right-hand glove is an inversion of a left-hand glove, and so forth—belonging to concrete particulars and belonging to them as particulars and independently of our perception or any overt cognitive process concerning them. Kant’s notion that formalities in our perceptions and understanding do and must bar our discernment of mind-independent reality then dissolves. The betweenness-relations among my fingers may require some conceptualization to fully firm in mind, but like some similarities and magnitude-relations, which Rand did notice (ITOE App. 217, 199–200, 278–79), those betweenness-relations are physical relations lying in the physical, extra-mental world. The truths and necessities of geometry can be attained without falling into thinking that (i) if they are empirically founded, they must be established by empirical testing (thereby removing the incontrovertible necessity we honestly find in them and being blind to how we actually proceed in geometry) or (ii) thinking with Kant that that necessity (and applicability to physics) is attainable only if geometry rests on form the constructing subject brings to perception and not on form in the world independently of our perception of it as well as in the world as we perceive it. ~~~~~~~~~ Bird, G. 2006. The Revolutionary Kant. Open Court. Beiser, F. 1993. The Fate of Reason. Harvard. Fugate, C. D. and J. Hymers , editors, 2018. Baumgarten and Kant on Metaphysics. Oxford. Guyer, P. 2018. Baumgarten, Kant, and the Refutation of Idealism. In Fugate and Hymers 2018.

From the book The Realist Turn: There are extensive reviews of this book here.

The issues in this thread have been raised and debated also in a paper Is Benevolent Egoism Coherent? by Michael Huemer. You can sign up and read the paper for free at that site. Reply: On Egoism and Predatory Behavior by Michael Young. Rejoinder: Egoism and Prudent Predation by Prof. Huemer.

SL in the preceding post draws attention to consideration of strategic self-interest in social interactions such as not violating rights. This has been developed in terms of game theory. Rights have been supported by game-theoretic self-interested strategy. See. They tell how the couple of things Rand said about rights—subjugation of collectives to moral law and the social-coordination function of rights—can come about. (These are professional academics; they do not mention Rand; one has to make the connection to Rand's system for oneself.) The strategic considerations SL brings to decision of respecting rights are also pertinent to decision in truth-telling, another issue raised by LB in this thread. Listeners to one's reports on happenings in reality know that reality all fits together self-consistently. So to tell lies, one has put one's memory to work overtime: one has to remember what all one has said before and not undermine the lie by inconsistencies. Just routinely telling the truth is a lot easier because one can just keep looking back to reality (which one is continually doing for oneself anyway) and reporting it, and leave it to reality to take care of consistency. Being found out in lies can be a great handicap in opportunities for further satisfactions from social interactions, due to reconfiguration of people's attitude toward you, and this is the point at which SL's line of thought concerning rights is a consideration also concerning honesty.

"Whenever you committed the evil of refusing to think and to see, of exempting from the absolute of reality some one small wish of yours, whenever you chose to say: Let me withdraw from the judgment of reason the cookies I stole, or the existence of God, let me have my one irrational whim and I will be a man of reason about all else—that was the act of subverting you consciousness, the act of corrupting your mind. Your mind then became a fixed jury who takes orders from a secret underworld, whose verdict distorts the evidence to fit an absolute it dares not touch—and a censored reality where the bits you chose to see are floating among the chasms of those you didn't, held together by that embalming fluid of mind which is an emotion exempted from thought." (Rand 1957, 1037 [1st ed. hb.]) Rand here argues for constant rational moral principles by claims about human psychology, about bad results for the mind that crosses moral principles once in a while. This is opposite the sort of argument she makes for her principles of metaphysics: she does not argue that Existence is identity (if no identity of a thing, then no such thing) by observing that incoherence in the mind will result if that principle is not so. She points to examples of identity-delimitations, examples from various categories of existents, and generalizes to all existence, and then she defends the generality by showing* contradiction in any denial of the generalized principle. I think it is fair for Rand to shift strategy for moral principles as distinct from metaphysical principles. Appealing to effects of decisions on the mind of the agent seems fine in thinking about moral principles. Human beings have a general nature, which is pertinent in every human act. Of course, claims about what that general nature is need to be substantiated to support a thoroughly sound argument for constant rational moral principles. * Rand did not execute much of this showing, but a few years ago, I did some of it for her. Every entity is of some kinds that are exclusive relative to other kinds of entity. Let me argue this thesis for Rand. That is, let me argue the axiomatic standing of “existence is identity,” where the existents are entities and the identity is kind-identity. All entities are of some exclusive kinds—a leaf cannot be a stone at the same time—and this postulate must be accepted on pain of self-contradiction. Suppose an entity exists and is not of any kind that excludes it being any other kinds. If the supposed entity is nothing but existence itself, then there is no contradiction; one is simply talking about existence as a whole. So suppose an entity exists and is not of any kind that excludes it being other kinds and is not existence as a whole. Then the supposed entity could be one with any other entities that are of exclusive kinds (just as a leaf that is a drain clogger could be one with a leaf that is dead, maple, and wet). For it is not an entity of any kind excluding it being other kinds. But to say that an entity is not of any exclusive kind and that it is one and the same with another entity that is of some exclusive kind(s) is a contradiction. (Non-A is A.) Indeed, if some entity were not of any exclusive kind, then it could be one with the person who supposes such an entity. Then to suppose an entity that is not of any exclusive kind is to suppose that one’s person could be an entity not of some exclusive kinds. (If A is identically B, then B is identically A.) But that supposition contradicts the presupposition that one is of the exclusive kind person, a person who makes the (errant) supposition. (Cf. Aristotle’s Metaphysics 1007b19–1008a28.) My argument is supposing that particular, numerical identity is admitted by both disputants, while specific identity is the identity at issue. But that seems a fair supposition.

That rationale for honesty is not sufficient in its authenticity, and the same would be true in the case for universal individual rights to be respected. In both cases, there is another element in Rand's picture of human nature that is being left out, and it is here. (Rand approved the essay in which N. Branden spoke of species solidarity.) Also, consider that the conceptual organization for Rand has it that the circumstance that every individual human is an end in themselves is prior to two consequent branches: one immediate branch is universal individual rights, the other is rightness of rational self-interest, indeed a morality of rational self-interest. The latter branch is not basis for the former branch, whose support is back on the trunk, just like ethical egoism.

Jesse James committed self-sacrifice. But then it was a small sacrifice, considering only the actual sort of self at hand.

I'd rather the science, not dumbing down and not humanities' social-agendas rattle-talk, LB, for this sector, advances as in root post and in these links. Evidence of early evolution of the mammalian middle ear--one of the most important features for all modern mammals. Between Aquatic and Land Vertebrates The good social news is that science, the hard sciences, continue to roll back the darkness as ever since Newton and with much educated public interest, including readers at this site, any presumption, wishing, or hollering to the contrary notwithstanding.

Pope Francis appeals to government leaders on Ukraine: "Please do not bring humanity to ruin" "The Pope! How many divisions does he have?" —Lenin

Sexual Selection Promotes Giraffoid Head-Neck Evolution and Ecological Adaptation

Country-404

It was correct, from the standpoint of her philosophy, for Rand to counter Kant’s notion that our minds cannot grasp things as they are apart from contributions from our minds. But there is a deeper criticism of Kant, based in Rand’s philosophy, that we should observe, one she never expressly stated: there is no such thing as a thing-in-itself in Kant’s most fundamental sense. From Rand’s metaphysics, fully grown, it is not only that Existence is identity and consciousness is identification. It is, additionally, that every existent has measures—they bear magnitude relations—and cognitions engage measurements, discernments of magnitude relations. “If anything were actually ‘immeasureable’, it would bear no relationships of any kind to the rest of the universe, it would not affect nor be affected by anything else in any manner whatever, it would enact no causes and bear no consequences—in short, it would not exist” (ITOE 39; Baumgarten §53– “whatever is entirely undetermined is nothing.” ). Then there is no such thing as Kant’s thing-in-itself. It is not only “as nothing to us,” it is nothing (and not because it would be as nothing to any kind of intelligence whatever, even an omniscient one, contra Rand’s thought in ITOE App. 194). With respect to relations, Rand’s dicta “Existence is identity” should be cashed as “No existents are without relations to other existents.” Among relations to things not itself would be possible real relations of any real thing to human consciousness. Kant’s distinction between things as perceivable or knowable and things in themselves is in reality a distinction between things as perceivable or knowable and things that do not exist. Inability to know things that do not exist is no shortcoming; said thing-in-itself is not something at which our perceptions and conceptions aim. Then too, it is not a thing-in-itself that brings us sensations; from nothing, nothing is supported or arises. Never “is the thing in itself . . . at issue in experience” (A30 B45) is so for the Kant-missed reason that there are no such things as things in themselves. However, although Kant was wrong to characterize things as they are independently of our discernment of them as things as they are “in themselves,” and we have exposed that misidentification of the two notions, it remains to complain against Kant that he should have the human mind, led by the senses, incapable of any discernment of things as they are apart from the human mind.

US Party-Press Era Much later, while I was a child, in the 1950's, the newspapers we had were aligned with either Democratic Party or Republican. They made no bones about it, and everyone, even children, understood that that was the way it was. The other way to get news was by radio. I don't recall our family getting news by that medium; we listened to boxing, popular music, and skits like Fiber, McGee, and Molly. News was in reading newspapers. The elections for Governor or US Senator were decided by the Democratic Primary, because it was a forgone conclusion the the Democrat would easily win over the Republican in the general election. There was no Democrat state-wide newspaper, but there was a Republican one out of Oklahoma City. In 1962, the first-ever Republican was elected Governor.* His Democratic opponent blamed it all on the publisher of that OKC state-wide newspaper. But really, it was mainly that the Republican candidate had found a winning motto: "no new taxes." His Democratic opponent was proposing adding a penny to the State sales tax. The losing candidate, who was a successful businessman, then established a state-wide Democrat newspaper. Some things were easy to know notwithstanding newspaper favoritisms and slants: that there was an election, who won, and why.

One thing common to both the G.W. Bush and Putin aggressions was that they first amassed their armed forces obviously near the borders of the target country. In the Bush case, it surely seemed from here that there were two reasons: (i) to intimidate Sadaam into allowing nuclear inspectors in with full access to any site the outside inspectors requested and (ii) to suck Sadaam's forces into striking US forces first, thereby relieving Bush of being plainly the aggressor. Saddam caved on full inspections, but contrary his prior demand for that, Bush did not sieze the peaceful and nuclear-safety handle, but instead invaded, after failing to draw the Iraqi forces into attacking American forces first. His advisors had been aiming to topple Saddam all along, and one of the reasons was because of his percieved threat to Israel (and his being idolized by Palestinian youth.) Advisors to G.W.'s father in the Gulf War had advised leaving Saddam on the throne to bar a Persian sweep to the Mediterranean. To the mind of G.W.'s wife, the US invasion had won a humanitarian cause. She remarked in an interview (in sweet-voiced vicious sarcasm): "I can't imagine why they (25% of Americans from the start) oppose this war unless they support Saddam (who had gassed segments of his own population, etc.)" My picture of Putin's invasion and likely real motives (likely with overdetermination of reasons, of course, and likely some lies, of course) are more foggy. But I wouldn't be surprised but what amassing his army near the border also served to give a chance for Ukraine troops to strike first, but also, get some sort of concessions from Ukraine without having to carry out the conquest (Hitler succeeded like that in Austria). (This is distracting me from work too much. I'm going to leave off here. Best wishes, all.)

Tony, do you condemn Bush's aggression in Iraq? Do you see that it was an aggression and that a preemptive invasion is an aggression? Do you see that the fact that Sadaam had aggressed against Iraq's own peoples does not make Bush's invasion, however benevolent, into not an aggression? Do you condemn Putin's invasion as an aggression?

Given what I attend to, it is a spectacular claim that this person I never heard of is lording over me. // Stop watching television. There's a lovely and fertile world out here waiting for getting hands dirty and for clean accomplishments.