JARS V15 N1 - July 2015


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Here is the URL for the full table of contents: http://www.aynrandstudies.com/jars/v15_n1/15_1toc.asp.

 

The following are contributions from Objectivist Living members:

 

 

The Prohibition Against Psychologizing, 53-66

Robert L. Campbell

The prohibition against psychologizing has been a source of confusion to many Randians.  Psychologizing is the practice of incorrectly or improperly inferring motives in other people instead of rendering moral judgment. Rand thought that it could manifest in two ways: inquisitorial and excuse-making. However, Rand's concrete examples are preponderantly of the excuse-making type; her bright line between psychology and philosophy is unsuccessfully drawn; and in offering extended, strongly condemnatory analyses of the supposed motives behind psychologizing, she yields to the very temptation she claims to warn against. "Psychologizing" turns out to be an anticoncept.

 

Where There's a Will, There's a "Why?":  A Critique of the Objectivist Theory of Volition, 67-96

Roger E. Bissell

The author examines the canonical Objectivist model of free will (aka "volitional consciousness") and finds it wanting, amounting to a form of Agency-Indeterminism. Employing an Aristotelian Four Cause analysis, he explores the complementary roles of determinism and free will, as well as the conditional nature of necessity and contingency, in understanding how causality operates in the human realm. He proposes an integration of what he calls "value-determinism" and "conditional free will," arguing that it amounts to a basic axiom of human choice and action, and urges its acceptance in place of the Orthodox Objectivist view of free will.

 

Reply to Marsha Familaro Enright:  Conceptual Classifications, 120-23

Merlin Jetton

This is a reply to Marsha Enright's  essay, "The Problem  with Selfishness."  My comments pertain mainly to Enright's conceptual classification, comparing it with mine in "Egoism and/or Altruism."

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