PJ Moriarty

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  1. Great posts, Baal and Stephen. I was just looking into relevance logic seriously for the first time yesterday. If you've got any suggestion on where to start, outside the SeOP articles, I'd appreciate it.
  2. I recall now the latest I heard from Peikoff was from an email correspondence he had with an acquaintance, not an answer he gives on his show. However, I figured I would search something out on his website, since I knew I'd heard his position before. http://www.peikoff.com/podcasts/page/5/?sort=popular#list The relevant audio is number 1 in the list "Is homosexuality immoral?". Rand once stated that her only position on sex, philosophically, was that it's good. The email correspondence I refer to goes more into Peikoff's objection to hero worship. I'll try to get that and see if it's okay to post it here.
  3. His insistence on the closed system is that not everything Rand wrote on or discussed is part of the Objectivist system. I know he's stated before he thinks that Rand's convictions on sex were ones based in psychology, that had philosophic consequences, much like her view of homosexuality.
  4. Well, synthetic truths are just truths that are not true in virtue of the terms involved in some proposition, it has nothing to do necessarily with experience perse, though many do connect the two. Kant's synthetic a priori truths do not require experience, far as I know. I've never read Kant directly on this, but it's my understanding (SAP) truths are propositions about the external world which are not known via meaning of the terms, but known before experience. This he connects with many of our notions of causal rules, like every event must have a cause. I think Objectivism's axioms stand opposed to this. As I said before, the axioms are truths brought by experience and without experience, we do not know of them. (or anything, really) You could say it is similar to the (SAP) truths in that they both are validated by every experience of the world that we have. Rand (and Peikoff more explicitly and at length) say that the law of causality is a corollary of the axiom of identity and so is reified in any contact we have with the world. In that way, Kant has something in common with Objectivism, but I wouldn't say the axioms and (SAP) truths are any more similar than that. Now analytic a posteriori, mmm I like me some of those!
  5. Anyone that's interested in but hasn't had the spare money to shell out, Joseph's useful text on logic is available for free and legal online now: http://www.archive.org/details/introductiontolo00jose
  6. Hello. Unfortunately I don't have the honored distinction of being the only man smarter than Sherlock Holmes. I also don't run a criminal empire. But a man can dream. Figured I would join this site at the suggestion of a friend. A little bit about myself: I'm a philosophy major, intending on continuing this pointless concentration on into graduate school next year. I'm mostly interested in topics regarding the philosophy of science and ontological issues therein. I've been into Objectivism for about 5 years now. I discovered Rand, as many do, around the end of high school. I maintain what many here will deem "orthodox" Objectivist views, however I fancy myself more freethinking than the caricature many create of a guy who agrees with Rand's philosophy through and through. I admire Peikoff and OPAR encouraged me to pursue philosophy more deeply, but I think he's made some rather asinine decisions and made rather asinine remarks, especially since the launch of his podcast. I don't care about splits and schisms. I like the people within the movement that I like and if people have a problem with that, oh well. So yeah, that's me.
  7. If we're to go with the colloquial definitions of a priori (knowledge preceding experience) and a posteriori (Knowledge as the result of experience) then Rand's axioms are certainly in the latter category. Axiomatic concepts are a special breed, however. One knows any single one of the axioms by experience of anything. To my knowledge, this is not true of any other concepts. Rand's axioms are also not available to the pre-conceptual consciousness, whereas many apriorists would say even infants have knowledge of some proposition, such as Peano's second axiom of natural numbers. (Just pulling some intuitive idea from the ether there). Rand's axioms must be learned, but are implicit in any experience we have.