Correspondence and Coherence blog


merjet

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3 hours ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

Aristotle was more concerned with causation, and he named four types, of which First and Final became a two-headed monster that ate whole civilizations.

Aristotle's four causes were Efficient, Formal, Material, and Final. First cause refers to religious notions such as God as First Cause of the universe or free will as First Cause within human consciousness. :wink: 

REB

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On 4/6/2017 at 11:13 AM, BaalChatzaf said:

WW 2 is the reason why we have employer paid medical insurance plans.  During WW2   wages were frozen by law and the only way employers could attract employees   was not by higher wages,  but by offering benefits as a non-cash kind of salary inducement.  A bonus as it were.  That is how Blue-Cross and Blue-Shield became the major players  they became. 

Aren't "temporary wartime expedients" wonderful? My favorite is the federal income tax withholding, which was invented by Milton Friedman as a way to help the federal government jump-start the financing of our participation in World War 2. If Trump's not careful, he's going to wind up making "America First" as unpopular as it was back in the 1940s. Trump = the new Charles Lindbergh? 

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1 hour ago, Roger Bissell said:

Aristotle's four causes were Efficient, Formal, Material, and Final. First cause refers to religious notions such as God as First Cause of the universe or free will as First Cause within human consciousness. :wink: 

REB

Uh-huh. First cause (Unmoved Mover) was plain enough in Aristotle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover#Aristotle.27s_theology

Final cause (teleos) did more damage, because you could make up any insane "end" to justify brutality and ritual.

Why am I discussing this with a horn player?

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1 hour ago, Roger Bissell said:

Aren't "temporary wartime expedients" wonderful? My favorite is the federal income tax withholding, which was invented by Milton Friedman as a way to help the federal government jump-start the financing of our participation in World War 2. If Trump's not careful, he's going to wind up making "America First" as unpopular as it was back in the 1940s. Trump = the new Charles Lindbergh? 


I liked your first two sentences. The second two don't make any contemporary sense.

--Brant

 

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6 minutes ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

Uh-huh. First cause (Unmoved Mover) was plain enough in Aristotle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover#Aristotle.27s_theology

Final cause (teleos) did more damage, because you could make up any insane "end" to justify brutality and ritual.

Why am I discussing this with a horn player?

Because you didn't explain yourself in the first place?

--Brant

because you got what you wanted (so why are you ad hominem complaining)?

and you still need a little more explication on "Final" so I can slice and dice it without first pulling out your teeth--one by one

:evil:

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8 hours ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

Uh-huh. First cause (Unmoved Mover) was plain enough in Aristotle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover#Aristotle.27s_theology

Final cause (teleos) did more damage, because you could make up any insane "end" to justify brutality and ritual.

Why am I discussing this with a horn player?

The "horn player"  also does some mathematics....

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13 hours ago, Wolf DeVoon said:

Uh-huh. First cause (Unmoved Mover) was plain enough in Aristotle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover#Aristotle.27s_theology

Final cause (teleos) did more damage, because you could make up any insane "end" to justify brutality and ritual.

Why am I discussing this with a horn player?

Uh-huh, yup, you betcha.

Sure, Aristotle talked about Unmoved Mover, though he didn't call it "First Cause." That was added in the Middle Ages by our Scholastic pals. And it was added by our ARI pal, Leonard Peikoff, to refer to the function of free will in human consciousness.

Aristotle's four causes were Efficient, Formal, Material, and Final. The end or final cause or TELOS (one e) of any action is not inherently evil any more than the instigator or efficient cause of that action is inherently evil. 

If Aristotle *had* thought of the Unmoved Mover as a cause, it would have been a *fifth* cause. Either that, or maybe a four-in-one of the others. Sort of like Certs mints on steroids. :wink: 

As Ba'al noted, in addition to being a "horn player," I occasionally do mathematics - and even philosophy, several hundred pages of which have been published in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies since 1999. But Ba'al has pledged not to buy my book(s), so I expect no less from you. :P

REB

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13 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:
15 hours ago, Roger Bissell said:

Aren't "temporary wartime expedients" wonderful? My favorite is the federal income tax withholding, which was invented by Milton Friedman as a way to help the federal government jump-start the financing of our participation in World War 2. If Trump's not careful, he's going to wind up making "America First" as unpopular as it was back in the 1940s. Trump = the new Charles Lindbergh? 


I liked your first two sentences. The second two don't make any contemporary sense.

Charles Lindbergh led the "America First" campaign, trying to keep the U.S. out of the European War, and was smeared as a Nazi sympathizer once Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. It was all the rage to think of ways to be patriotic, once we entered the war, and Uncle Miltie's withholding gimmick was one. We were promised they were temporary, but obviously they were too juicy to give up, once the war was over. Trump is trumpeting his ersatz brand of economically ignorant "patriotism" as "America First," and he's going to end up discrediting genuine patriotism *and* destroying another big chunk of the free market by his protectionist policies.

REB

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On ‎7‎/‎19‎/‎2017 at 2:50 PM, Roger Bissell said:

Charles Lindbergh led the "America First" campaign, trying to keep the U.S. out of the European War, and was smeared as a Nazi sympathizer once Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. It was all the rage to think of ways to be patriotic, once we entered the war, and Uncle Miltie's withholding gimmick was one. We were promised they were temporary, but obviously they were too juicy to give up, once the war was over. Trump is trumpeting his ersatz brand of economically ignorant "patriotism" as "America First," and he's going to end up discrediting genuine patriotism *and* destroying another big chunk of the free market by his protectionist policies.

REB

I saw an article recently that insisted Lindbergh was a Nazi and not so secretly since he fathered three pure Aryan children with Nazi German frauleins, supplied by Hitler. Then he clammed up with his "Seig Heils!"  when the war began.   

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1 hour ago, Peter said:

I saw an article recently that insisted Lindbergh was a Nazi and not so secretly since he fathered three pure Aryan children with Nazi German frauleins, supplied by Hitler. Then he clammed up with his "Seig Heils!"  when the war began.   

There are a lot  of  Lindbergh was a Nazi stories around.  I don't know if there is evidence that "would stand up in court".  

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11 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

You will think. There is no choice between thinking and not thinking. The choice is what to think about. The choice is also one's level and type of focus. How well you think is another and ancillary matter.

--Brant

In How We Know #9, I quoted from Chapter 5: "Thus, negative propositions do not refer to some supposed "negative facts." Everything that exists is something. To be non-P is to have a positive identity, but one that is different than P" (179).

Applying this to 'to think or not think', the latter does not mean a void or do nothing. Ayn Rand wrote the following, which is quoted in Chapter 10. 

"Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one's consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality -- or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make" (VOS, 22).

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2 hours ago, merjet said:

In How We Know #9, I quoted from Chapter 5: "Thus, negative propositions do not refer to some supposed "negative facts." Everything that exists is something. To be non-P is to have a positive identity, but one that is different than P" (179).

Applying this to 'to think or not think', the latter does not mean a void or do nothing. Ayn Rand wrote the following. 

"Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one's consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality -- or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make" (VOS, 22).

 

Classic Ayn Rand, but while far too many people--mostly hoi mental polloi--don't think her ideal way, it's not the only way and tends to work against creativity with its force-think. It did enable her to be highly productive and without that her magnum opus would never have been written. Note her animadverting upon much of the creative process itself with vulgar, implicit moralizing. I'd guess, without knowing, that she's talking about the people who surrounded her in Russia. She filled up Atlas Shrugged with such--this I know--having come to America with them in her head. Her ideal (American) man was her answer to the ideal Soviet man if not the Nazi superman. Even though John Galt declined to rule, there was Judge N. at the end of the novel working away on a revised US Constitution, getting rid of its flaws with no understanding it wasn't the flaws, it was the people, whom, one might suppose, were now mostly dead. She was merely setting the country up for a repeat, this time with "the rule of the airmen." (Things to Come [film])

She was a top-downer with John Galt on top, declining to work with those who weren't good enough to associate with him. Her perfect man, the human God. While reality is perfect humans are not and cannot be. That's why they need a Supreme Being so they don't go secularingly off into massive genocide in extremis wiping out the present for the sake of the future. (Actually for the sake of power and ego.) That's why I'm a pantheist. My "God" is the God of Reality which is everything, you, me, the sun and the moon, the rocks and the trees and all the electricity. There is the perfection we imperfectly try to deal with. Except for brain surgeons, humans should be humble about what they know--and most know next to nothing, but for most that's enough. For philosophers, that's not enough but most go way overboard and turn out conceits. Philosophy, properly done, is so simple it doesn't need a profession except to deal with all the philosophers and all their philosophizing mistakes, like Kant, the most evil man who ever lived. Yeah, right.

At least Ayn Rand got the basics right plus she integrated the basic principles of Objectivism from top to bottom with her human individualistic approach. Properly working off the ethics and politics needed much more knowledge than she had. I'm not complaining about that. In the context of her times she was The Man and the Nathaniel Branden Institute the fulmination of her philosophy's propagation as she wanted it to be understood, begun with AS. Then--1968. Objectivsm lost its momentum and never got it back. It won't until it's understood Objectivism and the philosophy of Ayn Rand are quite different things. The former is perfection; the latter, imperfection.

--Brant

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3 hours ago, merjet said:

In How We Know #9, I quoted from Chapter 5: "Thus, negative propositions do not refer to some supposed "negative facts." Everything that exists is something. To be non-P is to have a positive identity, but one that is different than P" (179).

Applying this to 'to think or not think', the latter does not mean a void or do nothing. Ayn Rand wrote the following, which is quoted in Chapter 10. 

"Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one's consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality -- or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make" (VOS, 22).

That is the fundamental, leaving up to oneself the choice of ~what~ to think about. The range is infinitely vast, from attention to immediate or recent or anticipated, existents in reality -- to the examination of the existing contents of one's mind -- and -- integrations of the two states. So much more information incoming, there's hardly enough lifetime! ;) To be obvious, this underlines the criticality of one's conceptual process. "Thinking is man's only basic virtue..." AR

Thanks for this series, merjet. You've summarized it well, for those like me who probably won't read the original (not enough time).

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