Ayn Rand Society


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On 27 December, ARS will have a session on the topic The Moral Basis of Capitalism: Adam Smith, the Austrians, and Ayn Rand. Presenters will be James Otteson, Peter Boettke, and Yaron Brook.

Otteson was very recently interviewed on EconTalk. It's about an hour to listen, or read the transcript.

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The one ARS session I attended, in 2006, had roughly 3 times as many in attendance (I say roughly because I didn't count the house) as the 12 that Mr. Boydstun reports for the session on Nozick and Rand last year.

So a decline has already set in, and it may be ongoing, whether anyone who was planning to go this year has changed his or her mind on account of a boycott.

Perhaps Yaron Brook will speak and only his scheduled commentators will be there to listen.

Then they would have the audience they deserve.

Robert Campbell

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Occasionally, APA symposia have only presentations of a few papers and no commentators, although some time for Q&A. That is the design of the ARS session at Eastern Division this year.

The largest attendance of any session of the Ayn Rand Society I recall was in 2005. I haven’t been to all ARS sessions by a long shot, but of those I attended, I’m pretty sure that was the largest. I have gathered from attending APA sessions in general, including various Society meetings, that attendance is affected strongly by who is presenting (together with who else is presenting in the same time slot at some other session). The presenters at the 2005 meeting* were James Lennox, Allan Gotthelf, Fred Miller, and Robert Mayhew, and the session was chaired by John Cooper (!) (no commentators for this session). Those papers will be included in the forthcoming collection Ayn Rand and Aristotle: Philosophical and Historical Studies.

The lowest attendance I’ve experienced at an ARS session was “Egoistic Virtue in Nietzsche and Ayn Rand” in the 2008 Pacific Division Meeting. There were only 7 or 8 in the audience. It turned out, in my assessment, that the commentator paper (Darryl Wright) was especially fine. Both of those papers are included in Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue: Studies in Ayn Rand’s Normative Theory.*

On a somber personal note, I’d like to mention the death last month of Patrick Suppes,* whom I had the pleasure of hearing as presenter and as audience member at meetings of American Philosophical Association. His works light my mind.

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  • 1 month later...

Continuing #29

Dense and Sparse Meaning Spaces

Comments on Travis Norsen, "Scientific Cumulativity and Conceptual Change: The Case of Temperature"

John D. Norton

Terms can retain meaning, but as background assumptions change, their application differs.

However some terms change meaning. For example entropy. Entropy in statistical mechanics is proportional to the log of the number of micro states. Probablisticallly entropy still increases but the underlying quantity differs.

This gets back to a remark I made in another posting. I claim that physical laws are scale-sensitive. The world of thing subatomic is not like the gross world of man-scale.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Bob, I don’t see how coming to an understanding of micro-things and -processes composing macro-things and -processes necessarily changes earlier concepts of the latter. Was the concept of electric charge and its magnitude changed by our coming to know electrical charge comes in discrete irreducible units? The earlier concept of quantity of electric charge could simply leave open whether there were tiny elementary minimal units of electric charge, provided only that if there were such units, they must be sufficiently small that charge could be treated as if continuous to the needed level of approximation for then-current science and technology. It would seem the story was the same for fluid dynamics and for classical thermodynamic entropy.

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Bob, I don’t see how coming to an understanding of micro-things and -processes composing macro-things and -processes necessarily changes earlier concepts of the latter. Was the concept of electric charge and its magnitude changed by our coming to know electrical charge comes in discrete irreducible units? The earlier concept of quantity of electric charge could simply leave open whether there were tiny elementary minimal units of electric charge, provided only that if there were such units, they must be sufficiently small that charge could be treated as if continuous to the needed level of approximation for then-current science and technology. It would seem the story was the same for fluid dynamics and for classical thermodynamic entropy.

Here is the bottom line. Classical Electro dynamics does not work. It cannot predict the photo electric effect.

So what difference does the "ultimate philosophical definition" of charge make? It is predictions that count, not definitions.

That is why physical science produces useful devices and philosophical dissertations on the philosophically pure definitions of physical concept produces approximately bupkis.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Bob, I don’t see how coming to an understanding of micro-things and -processes composing macro-things and -processes necessarily changes earlier concepts of the latter. Was the concept of electric charge and its magnitude changed by our coming to know electrical charge comes in discrete irreducible units? The earlier concept of quantity of electric charge could simply leave open whether there were tiny elementary minimal units of electric charge, provided only that if there were such units, they must be sufficiently small that charge could be treated as if continuous to the needed level of approximation for then-current science and technology. It would seem the story was the same for fluid dynamics and for classical thermodynamic entropy.

Here is the bottom line. Classical Electro dynamics does not work. It cannot predict the photo electric effect.

So what difference does the "ultimate philosophical definition" of charge make? It is predictions that count, not definitions.

That is why physical science produces useful devices and philosophical dissertations on the philosophically pure definitions of physical concept produces approximately bupkis.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Argumentum ad philosophicum is your fallacy as you didn't demonstrate Stephen used it while accusing him of it. Science is nothing but philosophy at work, an idea you're purblind and impervious to. Science completely shares metaphysics and epistemology with Objectivism. The rest is in the details. As for classical electro-dynamics not working, if it doesn't work it doesn't have to work for it's the work that works and the theory can do what it wants, which is bupkis.

--Brant

you can have a philosophy and eat it too for everyone has a philosophy and it's only pretend eating

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Bob. I kind of think you are barking up the wrong tree here. Do you knowwww of Stephen's background in mathematics and physics?

To say he has one of the keenest minds on the entire planet would be an understatement.

I am well aware of that. Half the books in my library are there because Stephen recommended them

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I have a friend that asked for help moving once(also named Bob). I thought " how hard could it be?" He lives like a hermit doesn't even own a T.V. and sleeps on a cot! He had a bunch of books mostly.

Thennnn he took me to his storage unit. It was fully 12' long lined with book shelves in both sides and a double row in the middle. All of them 8' tall and packkkked! I thought I had walked into the lost vault of Alexandria!

Somehow I think your library might be bigger!

He actually gave me a spare copy of Hobbes -Leviathan, a book on Mendelbrot fractals illustrated in nature, Market wizards, as well as Aristotle, and a few others for helping him out.

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. . .

On 27 December, ARS will have a session on the topic The Moral Basis of Capitalism: Adam Smith, the Austrians, and Ayn Rand. Presenters will be James Otteson, Peter Boettke, and Yaron Brook. The session will be chaired by James Lennox. The session will be 6:30–9:30 p.m. at the Marriott Philadelphia Downtown. Admission is registration, which unfortunately is steep if you’re not a member of APA.* The papers in this session will join earlier ARS papers in a future ARS book dealing with Rand’s political philosophy.

A couple dozen people attended the session. Greg Salmieri writes:

The papers were followed by a lively and far-ranging discussion, which included topics such as the relation between Rand’s morality and Aristotle’s, and the respective roles of empirical data and abstract argument in assessing moral and economic theories.

I am also pleased to report that our session at next year’s APA Eastern will concern racism and related issues, and that one of our panelists will be Jason D. Hill (De Paul University), whom some of you may know from his interesting article in Salon last year about Rand’s influence on his life.

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  • 4 months later...

At the end of August, a new book by Tara Smith will be published by Cambridge Press. Its title is Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System

From the publisher:

How should courts interpret the law? While all agree that courts must be objective, people differ sharply over what this demands in practice: fidelity to the text? To the will of the people? To certain moral ideals? In Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System, Tara Smith breaks through the false dichotomies inherent in dominant theories - various forms of Originalism, Living Constitutionalism, and Minimalism - to present a new approach to judicial review. She contends that we cannot assess judicial review in isolation from the larger enterprise of which it is a part. By providing careful clarification of both the function of the legal system as well as of objectivity itself, she produces a compelling, firmly grounded account of genuinely objective judicial review. Smith's innovative approach marks a welcome advance for anyone interested in legal objectivity and individual rights.

This book is not a project of ARS, but I think this is a sensible place for this notice. Prof. Smith is a scholar of Ayn Rand's philosophy. Her earlier books have been the subject for a couple of ARS sessions.

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Thank you Stephen...

Any pre-publication reviews?

A...

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.

Not yet. Some of her thinking about Originalism can be previewed here.

Great title, Milton and I used to call it Fric and Frac law...

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.

Christine Swanton, who has made presentations at three sessions of The Ayn Rand Society, has a new book:

Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche

(Wiley 2015)

In the forthcoming third number in the series Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies, Prof. Swanton contributes the chapter: “Virtue of Creativity and Productivity, Moral Theory, and Human Nature.” The title of this third number is Ayn Rand and Aristotle: Philosophical and Historical Studies.

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  • 3 months later...

The volume referred to here under the projected title Ayn Rand: A Companion to Her Works and Thought will be issued by Blackwell this coming March with the title A Companion to Ayn Rand. I expect it to include a contribution from Harry Binswanger on art and metaphysical values, from Tara Smith on objective law, and from John David Lewis on Rand’s cultural and political commentary. Much more, and more surely, I’ll let you know when its TOC becomes available.

This book is now at the printer, and the TOC has been released:

Part I Context 1

1 An Introduction to the Study of Ayn Rand 3

Gregory Salmieri

2 The Life of Ayn Rand: Writing, Reading, and Related Life Events 22

Shoshana Milgram

Part II Ethics and Human Nature 47

3 The Act of Valuing (and the Objectivity of Values) 49

Gregory Salmieri

4 The Morality of Life 73

Allan Gotthelf

(completed by Gregory Salmieri)

5 A Being of Self-Made Soul 105

Onkar Ghate

6 Egoism and Altruism: Selfi shness and Sacrifice 130

Gregory Salmieri

Part III Society 157

7 “A Human Society”: Rand’s Social Philosophy 159

Darryl Wright

8 Political Theory: A Radical for Capitalism 187

Fred D. Miller, Jr. and Adam Mossoff

9 Objective Law 209

Tara Smith

10 “A Free Mind and a Free Market are Corollaries”: Rand’s Philosophical Perspective on Capitalism 222

Onkar Ghate

Part IV The Foundations of Objectivism 243

11 Objectivist Metaphysics: The Primacy of Existence 245

Jason G. Rheins

12 The Objectivist Epistemology 272

Gregory Salmieri

Part V Philosophers and Their Effects 319

13 “Who Sets the Tone for a Culture?”: Ayn Rand’s Approach to the History of Philosophy 321

James G. Lennox

14 Ayn Rand’s Evolving View of Friedrich Nietzsche 343

Lester H. Hunt

15 A Philosopher on Her Times: Ayn Rand’s Political and Cultural Commentary 351

John David Lewis and Gregory Salmieri

Part VI Art 403

16 The Objectivist Esthetics: Art and the Needs of a Conceptual Consciousness 405

Harry Binswanger

17 Rand’s Literary Romanticism 426

Tore Boeckmann

Coda 451

18 Hallmarks of Objectivism: The Benevolent Universe Premise and the Heroic View of Man 453

Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I mentioned in the preceding post #70 that the 3rd ARS volume would be Ayn Rand and Aristotle: Philosophical and Historical Studies. That title has been moved to 4th in the series, and a volume on Rand's political philosophy has been moved up to third in the series. I'd be surprised, though delighted, if the Aristotle volume should appear before 2019. Looking forward to it.

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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 weeks later...

.

The two papers delivered last Thursday at ARS in DC were excellent. Jason Hill’s topic was “Biological Collectivism and the Politics of Racial Identity.” Greg Salimeri wrote a stimulating Comment. I expect both papers will be included in the forthcoming ARS volume on Rand’s political philosophy. The ensuing discussion was also very fine. James Lennox was our moderator.

The audience was only eight people. They ranged in age from about twenty to seventy. Attendance at the APA Meetings, at least our Eastern Division ones, seems to be falling. The prices of the hotels and the conference registration are rising, but there is likely some other factor(s) unknown to me that have led to this reduction. Most of the sessions I attended were about the size of the ARS one. At one session there were only three of us in the audience.

The quality of papers at the APA meetings remains superb, and I learn so much. Three sessions for me were absolutely stellar and were well attended, drawing twenty to thirty people for each:

(1) Sartre on Mind and Body

(2) Formal Unity in Early Modern Aristotelianism

(3) Author Meets Critics: The Activity of Being – An Essay on Aristotle’s Ontology (Aryeh Kosman)

At the book booths, the number of books being display by the massive presses Cambridge and Oxford were significantly reduced. Fear not. Scattered across the venders, I bought eleven books and had to resist so many others.

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  • 2 months later...

The more substantial blog posts at Check Your Premises in this first quarter of the year have been:

“The History of Objectivity in Light of Rand’s Epistemology and Ethics” – Ben Bayer / Regarding Rand and the book Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (Prof. Bayer is presently at Loyola New Orleans, and this semester he is teaching his first course on Rand. Atlas is the main text, with readings from classical philosophers for comparisons.)

“Recent Work on Epistemic Possibility and the Burden of Proof” – Ben Bayer

“What’s Wrong with the Concept ‘Libertarian’?” – Greg Salmieri

“A Mostly Bibliographic Note on the Objectivist View of the Arbitrary” – Greg Salmieri

I’ve made some comments at that blog on some of these and others. On that second one by Ben, these two comments:

Quote

I’ve lately been studying Barbara Vetter’s Potentiality (2015) and particularly her efforts on the relation of potentials to possibilities. You might find this book and the literature it engages pertinent to your present work.

But I have an elementary question. Concerning many arbitrary assertions, it would seem the assertion is not neither true nor false, but demonstrably or flatly false. I mean one might make an arbitrary (no evidence) assertion that states a falsehood such as that boiling a nail after being wounded by it will help heal the wound or that something can come from nothing. Isn’t there some sort of caveat(s) needed to further narrow down the context for saying an arbitrary assertion is neither true nor false? Or should we say those sorts of assertions I gave as examples are not arbitrary, not “inherently detached from facts”? I gather Leonard Peikoff should say Yes and Yes (OPAR 166). We have a context, ours, a context of established facts of existence, in which those claims are assessable for truth. Yet, further, isn’t that always the case for any claim that is fully understandable, so that no understandable, but purely arbitrary, claims are neither true nor false, but rightly judged presumably false if not demonstrably or flatly false?

Harry Binswanger concludes: “An arbitrary claim is not to be taken as true, nor as even possibly true. But neither is it false. To be false, a statement must first say something: it must attribute some definite characteristics to a clearly designated subject” (How We Know 283). A claim “Blorites exist” would fit the bill because the subject (let us assume) is without specification. But this seems to fail in having a truth value already by being meaningless, apart from its arbitrariness and lack of evidence.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My first challenge for Objectivism in this area was this category of assertion: An arbitrary assertion not meaningless on its face but provably meaningless and not flatly or provably false. The first problem would be to bring forth an example of such an assertion. A second problem might then be whether the example-assertion should be said to be entirely meaningless, hence neither true nor false (just like an assertion meaningless on its face--"Blorite exists"), or partly meaningful and to that extent presumptively false (because without evidence). Whether proven entirely meaningless or only partly meaningless, the burden would be on the one making the assertion to (give it up or) transmute it into a fully meaningful and evidenced assertion.

At Objectivist Living there are comments by Robert Campbell on the second of Greg’s posts here.

I participate also at Policy of Truth (blog of Irfan Khawaja), and I’m enjoying greatly the substantial posts being contributed by some Ph.D. philosophers there.

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