Alfonso Jones
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Posts posted by Alfonso Jones
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Robert -
Good to hear.
Bill P (watching my mailbox in Shanghai)
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Left wing "Mediamatters.org" reports the survey as being false:
I tried the first link above. It doesn't look credible. It certainly didn't lead back to any New England Journal of Medicine citation. Nor any way to know what specific methodology or frame was used for the survey.
Bill P
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Thanks for posting this.
The current row over the pseudo-problem is disgraceful. I was discussing the situation with a senior representative of ANOTHER car company (not US-based) yesterday. Although they expect to benefit in a short-term way from the damage to Toyota's reputation, he acknowledged that he also saw no validity to the claim that Toyota has done anything wrong.
Since this is on OL, here's the quasi-obligatory Rand content: Seems vaguely reminiscent of the passage in Atlas Shrugged where the State Science Institute releases the statement about Rearden Metal which says nothing (and hence can't really be argued against!), but is extremely damaging nonetheless. The most telling difference - the current media releases says something, without foundation or documented failures. And the nature of discourse has been so debased that Toyota can't speak the open and obvious fact - - - this is almost surely a case of operator error in most cases, and possibly (in some cases) fraud.
Bill P
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Sure, but first you have to identify the proper social context for individualism and before that where individualism came from. Also, a lot of rights' reasoning is required. NIOF by itself is an atomistic theoretical rendition of morality and politics as an integrated whole each justifying the other like a hot air balloon being justified by it's human crew and the human crew justifying the balloon while all that made the flight possible is left forgotten back on the ground. This is the basic problem with libertarianism for an Objectivist. Where is the reality of the (individual) reasoning mind and morality of rational self-interest? These made NIOF possible just as Ayn Rand made libertarianism as we understand it today possible. Very few libertarians come from the left or Rand predecessors.
--Brant
Well put, Brant.
Bill P
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Robert Campbell wrote:
Historically, the epistemology was the last part of Objectivism to be developed. What's more, Rand farmed parts of it out to others (obviously several chunks got assigned to Leonard Peikoff, but the first version of the doctrine of the arbitrary assertion appears to have been Nathaniel Branden's doing) and even with their help never finished crossing all of the major items off her to-do list. I'm not claiming that these developmental considerations are decisive in themselves, but they are consistent with the case you've made.
Robert -
Do you know whether anyone has attempted to chronicle some sort of a "History of Objectivist Philosophy?" (I can see some potent obstacles which would probably preclude it's even being considered in ARI-land!) Such work would be interesting.
I know you wrote in some detail about the history of the doctrine of the arbitrary assertion in your JARS paper which appeared fairly recently. Do you know of other similar work on other threads of Objectivist thought?
Bill P
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Gentlemen:
I would insist on joint custody on existence.
Adam
do not know about Perigo or Valiant except from reading their thoughts sequences of words, punctuated and arranged in paragraphs.
However, just to be safe they would only have supervised visitation to existence.
With regard to existence: This won't work. I've read PARC. It's clear to me that there MUST be a restraining order forbidding James Valliant from wandering within 100 miles of existence.
Bill P
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Dennis,
This issue is not whether Rand kept her feelings private or not. They are now public. And private or public does not change her feelings.
The issue is whether or not Objectivists should defend Rand's admiration for Hickman as something in Rand that is OK. I don't think it's good to do that and I don't think it's OK. It was not good thinking nor was it spiritually good on any level on Rand's part. Call it her conceited jerk stage. Surely there were other antisocial beings around her to admire back then. Not a sociopathic pedophile murderer who mutilated and dismembered children--for profit, to boot. Where did she leave her brains at that time? And her soul?
The only good I see in this is that Rand, amazingly just like every human being on earth, faced her own temptations and boneheaded ideas and she made choices. She came out of that very dark place by choice. That's a good thing and I consider coming out of it to be a mark of good character.
But denying the sheer vileness of Hickman on almost every level and the weirdness and wrongheadedness of Rand admiring him makes Objectivists look like cultists to the outside world. And, personally, I think it is a trap for people who admire Rand where it is really easy to blank-out some serious facts.
I think the best argument to Rand-critics who harp on this is, "Yeah, she screwed up when she was young. She lost it for a while. Youthful indiscretion. So what? Her public does not resonate on that level when reading Atlas Shrugged. It's not even on the radar."
Michael
Exactly. Rand didn't stay there, in the same state she had to be when she wrote the portion of her journals re Hickman. This is the same lady who in her maturity consistently and eloquently maintained that there should be no initiation of force - something which condemns Hickman.
Bill P
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Blanshard wrote an excellent monograph titled On Philosophical Style. The text is available online at:
I wasn't familiar with the anthonyflood.com site before I located the Blanshard article mentioned above. Many other articles by Blanshard are available on this site as well. See:
http://www.anthonyfl...m/blanshard.htm
You should also take a look at the main page. Articles by many authors, such as Rothbard and Barnes, are available.
http://www.anthonyfl...exofauthors.htm
Lastly, two book reviews by yours truly might interest some readers on OL. One is a review I wrote in 1977 (and had completely forgotten about) of Blanshard's book The Uses of a Liberal Education:
http://www.anthonyfl...rdeducation.htm
The other is a review I wrote in 1990: Nathaniel Branden's Judgment Day: Reviewing the Reviewers.
http://www.anthonyfl...mithbranden.htm
Ghs
George -
Thanks for sharing the meta-review (review of the reviewers of Judgment Day). I missed that the first time. I'm glad I've read it.
NB did a lot of things which he now regrets, and he has said so, in print. How many of his critics have engaged in similar behavior?
Bill P
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This thread has taken a wrong turn. People are recommending songs on grounds of the didactic messages they preach, a move Rand would never have made. Her criteria were sense of life first and technical quality second. These are songs; listen to the music.
The only one that even might pass the test is Downtown in #3. I don't know if, literally, AR liked this song or not (seems to me she would have said so if she did), but at least the suggestion is on sense-of-life grounds.
Well put, Reidy.
Bill P
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Good post, Adam.
Scroll on down to the commentary - it's not at all obvious that many of those writing have any understanding of the cause of the economic difficulties.
Bill P
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Thanks Bill, that sounds like what I was thinking. I'm still trying to jog my memory: sounds like she was saying generally that such words as nothing are negations as opposed to concepts.
Back to the donut hole, here's a quip: a donut hole is a dough-not! And a donut whole has no donut hole and is therefore just dough!
I suspect it's the second quote I posted which you will find most on target.
Bill P
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In ITOE, what if anything did Rand say about the word "nothing?" Memory recall suggests she said it denotes absence but is itself not a concept, or some-such, however I can't remember the specifics. I'm sure she had said something about nothing...
(I'm really serious though... what did she say about it?)
Here's another passage, from the seminars portion (second portion) of the book:
Prof. D: "Nothing."
AR: That is strictly a relative concept. It pertains to the absence of some kind of concrete. The concept "nothing" is not possible except in relation to "something." Therefore, to have the concept "nothing," you mentally specify—in parenthesis, in effect—the absence of a something, and you conceive of "nothing" only in relation to concretes which no longer exist or which do not exist at present.
You can say "I have nothing in my pocket." That doesn't mean you have an entity called "nothing" in your pocket. You do not have any of the objects that could conceivably be there, such as handkerchiefs, money, gloves, or whatever. "Nothing" is strictly a concept relative to some existent concretes whose absence you denote in this form.
It is very important to grasp that "nothing" cannot be a primary concept. You cannot start with it in the absence of, or prior to, the existence of some object. That is the great trouble with Existentialism, as I discuss in the book [page 60]. There is no such concept as "nothing," except as a relational concept denoting the absence of some things. The measurements omitted are the measurements of those things.
Prof. A: Does the concept of "non-existence" refer only to an absence? Is there no valid concept of sheer non-being, of something that never was and never will be?
AR: That's right. Non-existence as such—particularly in the same generalized sense in which I use the term "existence" in saying "existence exists," that is, as the widest abstraction without yet specifying any content, or applying to all content—you cannot have the concept "non-existence" in that same fundamental way. In other words, you can't say: this is something pertaining to the whole universe, to everything I know, and I don't say what. In other words, without specifying content.
You see, the concept of "existence" integrates all of the <ioe2_150> existents that you have perceived, without knowing all their characteristics. Whereas the concept of "non-existence" in that same psycho-epistemological position would be literally a blank. Non-existence—apart from what it is that doesn't exist—is an impossible concept. It's a hole—a literal blank, a zero.
It is precisely on the fundamental level of equating existence and non-existence as some kind of opposites that the greatest mistakes occur, as in Existentialism.
Bill P
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In ITOE, what if anything did Rand say about the word "nothing?" Memory recall suggests she said it denotes absence but is itself not a concept, or some-such, however I can't remember the specifics. I'm sure she had said something about nothing...
(I'm really serious though... what did she say about it?)
You may be thinking of the following passage from ITOE regarding Reification of the Zero:
One of the consequences (a vulgar variant of concept stealing, prevalent among avowed mystics and irrationalists) is a fallacy I call the Reification of the Zero. It consists of regarding "nothing" as a thing, as a special, different kind of existent. (For example, see Existentialism.) This fallacy breeds such symptoms as the notion that presence and absence, or being and non-being, are metaphysical forces of equal power, and that being is the absence of non-being. E.g., "Nothingness is prior to being." (Sartre)—"Human finitude is the presence of the not in the being of man." (William Barrett)—"Nothing is more real than nothing." (Samuel Beckett)—"Das Nichts nichtet" or "Nothing noughts." (Heidegger). "Consciousness, then, is not a stuff, but a negation. The subject is not a thing, but a non-thing. The subject carves its own world out of Being by means of <ioe2_61> negative determinations. Sartre describes consciousness as a 'noughting nought' (néant néantisant). It is a form of being other than its own: a mode 'which has yet to be what it is, that is to say, which is what it is, that is to say, which is what it is not and which is not what it is.' "(Hector Hawton, The Feast of Unreason, London: Watts & Co., 1952, p. 162.)
(The motive? "Genuine utterances about the nothing must always remain unusual. It cannot be made common. It dissolves when it is placed in the cheap acid of mere logical acumen." Heidegger.)
Is that the passage?
Bill P
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Good to hear of this. I'll be looking forward to hopefully seeing the text of the speech on OL.
Bill P
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Peter:
How can you continue to post at that length. I did not read a word past ...A letter to my daughter who smokes...
Adam
Posts that long, and so poorly organized, should be skipped.
Imagine delivering that post while standing on one foot!
Bill P
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David -
Welcome to OL. Browse around, there's a lot of good content up here.
Did you do graduate work in psychology?
You will find a few academics on OL.
Bill P
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Best wishes, Chris.
Bill P
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If Leonard Peikoff had been writing this passage, he wouldn't have hesitated to call the notion of "competing governments" (really, Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism) arbitrary. After all, it is allegedly "devoid of any contact with or reference to reality." Imputations that positive claims about anarcho-capitalism are meaningless would have quickly followed, along with firm conclusions that anyone who advocates a system of "competing governments" instantly makes himself dumber than a parrot.
So here is yet another passage in her published works where Rand, had she been following the doctrine of the arbitrary assertion, would have used the A-word ... but she didn't.
Robert Campbell
I've met some anarchists and Objectivists who are devoid of any contact with reality, but I wouldn't say that about their ideas.
Ghs
Still another reason I'm glad you're posting on OL, George.
Bill P
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There is a story about an early episode of the Tonight Show, when Johnny Carson had Mrs. Arnold Palmer as a guest.
When Carson asked Mrs. Palmer if she did anything before a golf tournament to bring her husband luck, she replied, "Sometimes I kiss his balls."
After waiting for the audience laughter to subside, Carson replied, "That must really get his putter going."
According to the account I heard, Mrs. Palmer was so offended that she threatened to sue Carson over this incident, but nothing ever came of it.
I never saw this episode, but I once talked to someone who claimed he did. So is this story one of those urban legends or not?
Ghs
George:
Try Snopes to clarify that it is an urban legend.
http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/kissballs.asp
Bill P
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Golf is a mental disorder - - Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Bill P
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Just checking - anyone frequenting OL who is very familiar with Barcelona? It turns out I'll be spending about 8 days in Barcelona in early March this year, and am looking for sightseeing or dining recommendations for a first-time visitor. I'll probably be staying very near IESE.
Bill P
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Pass the word around - - - DON'T GIVE HER A SURPRISE PARTY!!!
Bill P
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The making of U.S. Federal Budget projections: Evidence of possession of a rich fantasy life...
Bill P
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Yes.
Bill P
The OL "tribe" and the Tribal Mindset
in Rants
Posted
About that fun to read, also. I scan the thread periodically to see if there is progress. To no avail.
Bill P