Saturday
November 26, 2005 |
 Vegetative Robots and Value
by Stephen Boydstun
Thought experiments are notorious for pre-packing the point to be demonstrated into the setup to be contemplated. In an essay in The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (1984), Charles King raised just that sort of objection to Rand’s robot gedanken: "if the robot neither knows nor cares [what happens to things around it], the example seems uninteresting." I do not agree that the robot gedanken is without interest if the robot is devoid of thought and feeling. I will here extend Rand’s gedanken in such a way that it can inform the concept of purely vegetative value. (Read more...)
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Wednesday
November 23, 2005 |
Why Limit Government?
by Marty Lewinter
There is only one way to safeguard rights: limit the power of the state—that is, limit the power of the group over the individual. (Read more...)
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Ayn Rand at the West Virginia Philosophical Society
by Fred Seddon
The West Virginia Philosophical Society met on Oct. 21-22 and celebrated, in part, the hundredth anniversary of her birth. Six of the twelve speakers, including the keynote speaker, addressed topics on Rand. (Read more...)
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Daily Linz 15 - This Cheek's Not For Turning
by Lindsay Perigo
Michael wants to do his bit in ushering in the age of the soft-sell and bringing an end to religion-“bashing.” Well, if he were advocating clarity without dogmatism, KASS without hysteria, reasonableness without appeasement, I would agree with him. But as far as I can tell, he’s pitching for an Objectivism that is New-Aged to the point where it is not only unrecognisable as Objectivism, but is antithetical to it. (Read more...)
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To Turn or Not to Turn - A Question of Cheek
by Michael Stuart Kelly
Are religious principles like turning the other cheek really anti-Objectivism? There goes that little child inside me again. He tells me that Ayn Rand’s heroes turned the other cheek all the time in her fiction. (Read more...)
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Values are Not Universal
by Craig Haynie
Any attempt to universalize value precludes any possibility of real value, because such attempts separate value from the valuer. All values are personal. And that's a fact. (Read more...)
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Wednesday
October 12, 2005 |
The Backbone of Benevolence
by Andy Postema
Objectivism gives benevolence a backbone that has little to do with being nice and everything to do with being rational in an irrational age. (Read more...)
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Daily Linz 7 - Sense of Strife Objectivists?
by Lindsay Perigo
I hope that SOLO will continue to be a repository of open debate among the factions, without ceasing to be a scourge of such evils as postmodernism, relativism, Political Correctness, the Cult of Uncertainty and all the rest of the ghastly contemporary sewer whose pusball representatives I finally flamed here recently. I hope that it will continue to accommodate dissent without blunting its polemical edge, the KASS factor. I hope that its vision, set forth in the Credo, will survive and prosper from all the tumult and the shouting. I hope that the end result will be a noisy world full of Objectivists, all talking animatedly to each other whatever their disagreements! (Read more...)
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The Passion of the Critics of Ayn Rand's Critics
by Lindsay Perigo
I was one of those who resolved not to read James Valliant’s book, The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics, openly touted as “The case against the Brandens.” Still, I got talked into reading it in a thread right here on SOLOHQ. And I’m glad I did. (Read more...)
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Understanding Addiction -- One Objectivist's View
by Michael Stuart Kelly
The universal aspect of all addictions is that the sense of identity has been contaminated and the faculty of volition has atrophied. In the case of drugs and alcohol, there is a chemically induced craving. These are the parts of the mind and body that need to get better. Then the rest will follow. (Read more...)
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 All or Nothing: Philosophy with Degrees (Part 3) - Objectivism's Solution
by Joseph Rowlands
How prevalent is the all or nothing approach? Keep your eyes open and you'll see plenty of examples. But the important point to take away is that degrees really matter. They may require more thinking. They may be more difficult to explain or to utilize. But they're a basic part of comprehension and you can't avoid them without sinking into blind ignorance. (Read more...)
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Saturday
September 3, 2005 |
All or Nothing: Philosophy with Degrees (Part 2) - General Reasons
by Joseph Rowlands
The all or nothing view, whether caused by rationalism, intrinsicism, or just mental sloppiness, cannot see important relationships, or maybe just doesn't care. It's not concerned with degrees, and can't deal with them. It draws very clear boundaries, and you have easy, definitive uses. It doesn't matter how close you are to the boundaries, the results are the same. (Read more...)
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What Would Ayn Rand Say?
by Fred Seddon
Since 1911, Sweden has been the paradigm of the welfare state. Given Rand’s pro-capitalist anti-welfare state philosophy, it isn’t too difficult to imagine what she would say to Sweden. Start decontrolling. (Read more...)
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All or Nothing: Philosophy with Degrees (Part 1) - A Survey of Errors
by Joseph Rowlands
I’m going to talk about a widespread pattern of philosophical errors, which I refer to as the “all or nothing” mentality. The basic problem is an inability to see things in terms of degrees. Instead, everything is viewed as all or nothing. It’s either 100 percent, or 0 percent, with nothing in between. (Read more...)
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The Ontology of Space
by Adam Reed
Does the concept of space correspond to a real existent? The naïve answer would be "no:" to the non-scientist, space denotes emptiness, the absence of existents. And of course absence is not an existent. Fortunately, this naïve view of the ontology of space is wrong. (Read more...)
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The Three Central Tenets of an Objective Philosophy of Science
by Ed Thompson
There are three things that philosophy must do in order to generate, or sustain, the special sciences. These are: to provide statements of contextually-absolute factual relations (definitions), to constrain unbounded possibility (arbitrariness), and to outline "the rules by which you can claim knowledge." (Read more...)
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Axioms: The Eightfold Way
by Ron Merrill
The axiomatic method of reasoning is more than a technique of argument useful for refuting philosophical skeptics. It provides us with a method of grounding fundamental truths about reality. (Read more...)
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Implied Axioms
by Fred Seddon
Part of my celebration of Rand’s hundredth birthday has been to reflect on some of her writings that are either central to Objectivism, or which have meant the most to me. I was thinking about Rand's two "corollary axioms" and came to realize that Rand could have added more axioms to this list. (Read more...)
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Dystopia and Utopia: The Story of The Two Johns and Other Such Randian Jewels
by Manfred F. Schieder
Ayn Rand's life and works contain many surprises, symbols and moving oddities. A few examples show how masterfully she spun connections and injected symbolism into her work. (Read more...)
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The Ontology of Emergence
by Adam Reed
An emergent property is a non-reductive property—that is, a property that cannot be "reduced to" (computed or deduced from) the measurements of the attributes of the separate components that compose the system. Emergent properties require emergent attributes, that is, system attributes whose measurements cannot be reduced to the measurements of the attributes of the system's components. Do such attributes exist? (Read more...)
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Holding Court - July 21, 2005
by Barbara Branden
Ayn Rand Interviews: Part One (Read more...)
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The "Problem" of Initial Acquisition
by Peter Cresswell
Philosopher and academic Gerald Cohen has a problem with how values come into the world, with how they came to exist. He calls this "the problem of initial acquisition." I call it trivial idiocy, but he and his supporters set great store by it.
(Read more...)
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Objectivism and Determinism
by Roger E. Bissell
What is implied by basic Objectivist metaphysical premises is “self-determinism,” the view that one’s actions (including the act of focusing one’s awareness) are determined by one's values/desires/ideas. For short, I call it “value-determinism.” And although it does not qualify as “free will” in the sense of “could have done otherwise,” that is not valid, anyway. But it does qualify as “free will” in the sense of one’s being the originator of that action, absent environmental duress and physical or medical impairment. (Read more...)
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The Ontology of Information, and Hard Atheism
by Adam Reed
In view of the new knowledge acquired since the time when Ayn Rand wrote on the subject, "soft atheism" is obsolete. We humans now know, in the same sense in which we know anything at all, that an entity with the attributes traditionally ascribed to a God cannot exist in reality. (Read more...)
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Existence, Relation, and Measurability
by Luke J. Morris
As I was re-reading Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology a little while back, I came across an intriguing argument that hadn't struck me before, put forth in a single paragraph: If everything exists in relation to something else, then everything must be (in principle) measurable; there can be no immeasurable entities. (Read more...)
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