Reidy

PS to previous:

"Category" is a technical term in Aristotle; "element" wouldn't be an example. Categories are the broadest possible classes. Entity is the primary category; action, state, attribute and number are some of the others. One explanation I've seen is that these are the end points of any chain of "what's that?" questions. Point to somebody and keep repeating the question:

My neighbor Betty

A woman

A person

An animal

... and so on up to

An entity

Or:

Cerulean blue

A shade of blue

A color...

An attribute

Peter

Here's a translation I found at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphys...ysics.5.v.html:

Element means (1) the primary component immanent in a thing, and indivisible in kind into other kinds; e.g. the elements of speech are the parts of which speech consists and into which it is ultimately divided, while they are no longer divided into other forms of speech different in kind from them. If they are divided, their parts are of the same kind, as a part of water is water (while a part of the syllable is not a syllable). Similarly those who speak of the elements of bodies mean the things into which bodies are ultimately divided, while they are no longer divided into other things differing in kind; and whether the things of this sort are one or more, they call these elements. The so-called elements of geometrical proofs, and in general the elements of demonstrations, have a similar character; for the primary demonstrations, each of which is implied in many demonstrations, are called elements of demonstrations; and the primary syllogisms, which have three terms and proceed by means of one middle, are of this nature.

What do you mean by "equivocate?" The word is equivocal (it has more than one meaning, in Greek as in English), so he gives more than one; the quote above covers only the first of the senses he lists.

Nobody defends Aristotle's mechanics, chemistry or cosmology these days, but you can abstract his point (an element is an irreducible part) from the examples he gives.

Peter

Allan Gotthelf points out that the merger that created the Remington-Rand brand didn't happen until several years after Rand came to the US. (Maybe there was just a "Rand"?) He speculates that the origin of the name was that, if you spell her original name out in Cyrillic characters, it looks like "Ayn Rand" in English. (Got that?) Barbara Branden replies that the Remington-Rand story was AR's own account.

Peter

When I was your age I read nothing but Rand. Keep posting so I can find out what I missed.

Your English is fine - no mixups between possessive and plural, no "literally" when you mean "figuratively" and not a single "hopefully" or "homophobic."

Peter

Air-conducting has deep Objectivist roots. Peikoff reports that it's the first thing AR did when she came home from her surgery. Dagny used to listen to records of Halley's music after a hard day's work; I can't imagine that she never gave into the urge.

Peter

Why do you bring this up in the Politics section? It's a question about employment policy. Objectivism's political message, briefly, is that most questions shouldn't be political, and this is a case in point. It's not a difficult question, either. Let him try it and see if he can attract and keep good people.

Peter

I've never had this dish. What does the vodka do for it? Vodka has no flavor or aroma of its own, so I don't see what you'd gain by putting it in and then letting the alcohol evaporate. On the other hand, alcohol left in a dish, unless the dish is a dessert, is usually unpleasant.

If the answer is "try it and see," my question in turn is: have you tried a blind tasting?

Peter

Years ago they could have sent Carmen Miranda to get all the Jihadists to put down their weapons and start dancing the rhumba.

Peter

Walker's book was a disgrace. The best review was Bradford's in Liberty, aptly titled Ayn Rant. Their site seems to be reorganizing at the moment, so it's not online, but it may be back up eventually. See also the 1999 postscript to http://www.objectivistcenter.org/showconte...aspx?ct=24&h=53.

I'm inclined to give more credit to Rand than to Sciabarra for her emerging academic respectablity, which was getting underway well before ARRR hit print (on the other hand, her hostile, unscholarly tone gets some of the blame for the fact that it took so long). The book was clearly an attempt to market her to leftists and postmodernists. If it had been a big influence, they'd be the ones jumping on the Randian bandwagon; I don't see much evidence of this (come to think of it, I don't see any).

Peter

Whatever the label on the typewriter in question, I doubt that Rand brought it with her. She'd just started learning English, so she probably wasn't at the point where she would have had use for an English typewriter or been able to afford one. If it were cyrillic, she wouldn't have anticipated much use for it in the US. Finally, I doubt that one from this era would have been practical to carry in her luggage. They didn't have laptops in those days.

Peter

Sounds like ARI.

Peter

The Journals also prints the testimony that she didn't get to give, and her notes in preparation. Robert Mayhew has written a book about it, for sale at aynrandbookstore.com.

Peter

More on recovering Objectivists:

I've observed a pattern with a lot of them, so frequent that I gave it a name - post-Objectivist wild oats syndrome. It was endemic in the first few years after the Branden excommunication.

Intellectually-inclined people virtually always go through a phase of granting serious attention to fairly silly skeptical and solipsitic notions, as when they ask whether they exist or not. Most get this out of their system at eighteen or nineteen. Some, though, were too dogmatically Randroid at that age, and they go through it, to everyone's embarassment, a decade or two later. It's like stories one hears about people who went steady with the same partner all through high school and got married not long thereafter. Five, ten or twenty years later they find themselves divorced and playing the field for the first time, looking ridiculous as they do.

Peter

Building on Bissell's of the 5th:

I'm not so sure that Rand's remarks in We the Living contradict what she later said. If I remember the passage correctly, she was talking about book design, a decorative art, in the earlier passage, not about fine art as she was later. In fact, in one of her 60s essays she opines that representation is just what we ought to avoid in decorative design.

If she'd thought it was a contradiction she would have edited it out, as she so famously edited out Kira's bloodthirsty Nietzschean sentiments.

On the other hand, decorative art usually trickles down from fine art, and these designs she enjoyed probably couldn't have happened without cubism or futurism.

Peter

Worth a look:

http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry2...00602210811.asp

Peter

To judge from the article, this course is what we used to call a mickey. It will entertain the students, and it might do some of them some lasting good, but it won't do anything for the academic prestige of the authors read, and, The Fountainhead notwithstanding, that's what this discussion has been all about.

Peter

In reply to Barbara Branden, Sat Feb 04, 2006 10:18 pm:

Alas, I don't remember where this interview ran. If I find out I'll let the OLs know.

Peter

About 60 miles - freeway close, in local parlance. A tolerable commute if you only have to do it for a week.

Peter

This is a bit off the subject but still worth passing along. After the movie had shown, Helen Mirren recollected to an interviewer that she'd tried to read Rand in preparation for the role but found the material impenetrable. American schools must be excellent, she concluded, if high schoolers can understand it.

Peter