All Forms of Federal Religion Must End
President-Elect Barack Obama will obviously have to spend much of his time dealing with the perilous state of the U.S. economy. Americans United for Separation of Church and State is happy to leave that one to the experts to sort out, but in between debating the wisdom of tax cuts and stimulus packages, there is one church-state issue we wish Obama would tackle early on: the faith-based initiative.
President George W. Bush announced this initiative as his first domestic policy proposal. The idea was to funnel tax funds to religious groups, which would use the money to combat all manner of social ills, such as alcohol and drug addiction, homelessness, poverty and unemployment.
Congress balked, but that didn’t stop Bush. He implemented much of the plan anyway, using executive orders and regulatory changes. Eight years have passed, and the faith-based initiative has been nothing short of a disaster. Obama should clean house.
Bush’s initiative was plagued by at least three glaring defects: it promoted religious discrimination with taxpayer funds, it fostered religious proselytism at public expense and it was immune to serious oversight and scrutiny to test its effectiveness.
During a speech he delivered in Zanesville, Ohio, July 1, Obama acknowledged these flaws in the initiative and pledged to fix them. Here’s hoping he meant it.
Bush promulgated executive orders and regulatory changes to protect the so-called “right” of religious groups to accept tax money yet still refuse to hire people based on their religious beliefs or lifestyle choices. This is not right. Organizations offering publicly funded jobs should be required to follow our nation’s civil-rights laws. Imagine applying for a government-funded job but being told you won’t be hired – even though you are qualified – because you are the “wrong” religion. This type of discrimination with public funds must stop.
Likewise, all forms of proselytism and religious coercion in programs funded by federal “faith-based” money must end. It is not the job of government to endorse or promote any religion or sectarian concept. People who need services should be able to get them without being pressured to go to church, say prayers or engage in other religious activities.
Finally, we need to make certain faith-based programs work. Proponents of the faith-based concept are fond of making wild claims of success – but empirical evidence is lacking. Faith-based programs should be subjected to the same standard of review and oversight that secular programs must meet.
There are other problems with the faith-based initiative. For example, the Bush White House often used the program in a highly partisan manner. During the 2002 and 2004 elections, White House staffers appeared at religious gatherings and implied that the only way to keep the faith-based money flowing was to vote Republican. It would be equally wrong for Democrats to use the initiative to promote their party. The faith-based initiative is supposed to provide services to people in need. It must be depoliticized.
In an ideal world, Americans United would like to see the faith-based initiative shut down. A federal office that does nothing but look for ways to funnel tax assistance to religious groups is hard to square with our nation’s tradition of separation of church and state.
But since ending the initiative does not appear to be under consideration, the next best thing is to enact a series of reforms that will fix some of the more obvious constitutional defects of the plan. Obama has already highlighted three of these problems and has indicated that he will address them. Here’s hoping he follows through.
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Next, Arab-American Activist Says Barry Barak Hussein Obama Hiding Anti-Israel Stance / 16 Adar Bet 5768, 23 March 08 10:03by Gil Ronen (IsraelNN.com) Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama is currently hiding his anti-Israel views in order to get elected, according to a well-known anti-Israel activist. The activist, Ali Abunimah, claimed to know Obama well and to have met him on numerous occasions at pro-Palestinian events in Chicago. In an article he penned for the anti-Israeli website Electronic Intifada, Abunimah wrote: "The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing. "As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, 'Hey, I'm sorry I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race . I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.' He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy [and said:] 'Keep up the good work!"
Next, ever wonder why our "lame-stream" press never has any further news about the White House gate-crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi? Party Crashers' had a five-year relationship with Obama before State Dinner, why didn't the White House just say so? This is why: Obama Met Gatecrashers in 2005: According to Discover the Networks, ATFP's former vice president is Rashid Khalidi, the Columbia University Middle East Studies professor and militant Palestinian rights activist. Khalidi cites the late Edward Said as his major influence, and according to the entry cited, "As with Said before him, Khalidi's involvement with the Palestinian cause goes beyond mere support." And, "Khalidi so strongly identified with the aims of the PLO, which was designated as a terrorist group by the State Department during Khalidi's affiliation with it in the 1980s, that he repeatedly referred to himself as 'we' when expounding on the PLO's agenda." Also, according to Campus Watch, ATFP remains in full support of Kha lidi, for example, during charges of academic misconduct in 2005, at the time of Senator Barack Obama's meeting with Tareq Salahi.
Next, Barry Barak Hussein Soetoro Obama wants to be president of these 57 United States? / May 9, 2008 | 1:42 pm Ah, Oregon. The beautiful Northwest. Rain. Trees. Clouds. Rain. Friendly territory for Sen. Barry Barack Hussen Obama, the leading contender for the Democratic Party's long-disputed presidential nomination. Illinois Senator and leading Democratic presidential candidate Obama speaking to a friendly crowd."It is wonderful to be back in Oregon," Obama said. "Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it." Coincidently, comprising 57 states, the Organization of the Islamic Conference is the second-largest intergovernmental institution in the world after the UN. It is a unique body. A political organization, it pursues a religious mission. The charter of the OIC makes clear that it exists, not only to promote the economic and humanitarian goals of member states, but also to “defend” and “disseminate” Islam itself.
Where in the Constitution does it say the words "Seperation of church and state?" I've never come across it. If anyone tells me it is in the First Amendment I'm going to lose it. The First Amendment, word for word, in its entirety, is as follows, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Nowhere does it say the words, "seperation of church and state." Nor does it say it anywhere else in the Constitution. It is a myth. It does not exist, nor was it ever intended to. Faith-based initiatives and Church tax exemptions do not establish a religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof. It treats all religions equally, and doesn't stop anyone from doing worshipping any way they want. Saying that they have failed because they helped the churches to get their message out and attract members while doing the government's dirty work is innacurate. People were helped, the government got what it wanted, the churches got what they wanted, nobody was hurt, no laws were broken, the Constitution is intact. They are a complete success.
The separation of church and state is in the Bill of Rights under the First Amendment.
Bill of Rights, First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Do you know why it is there. Read up on the Inquisition. It will tell you all you need to know.
Now, if you would like to have religion run the government, why don't you have a good look at Iran for a perfect example of what religion does for it's people. Give me a break.
Let's not forget, Christianity has so many different versions of worship, if it was part of the government, which one would be right? HMMM??? Once Christianity took over, there would be bickering about which one to follow. Should it be the Methodist, Catholic, Mormon, J. Witness, Lutheran, Baptist, ect....?
I say, leave religion out of politics. Religion's "morals" don't seem to moral to me. As a matter of fact, I am more moral then any of the Abrahamic gods, and so aren't you.
Nowhere in the Constitution do those words appear. I already put the First Amendment into my post, there was no need to put it in yours. It's not in either copy. What is in there was designed to prevent a situation comparable with the Church of England, which was far less extreme than the Inquisition. That being said, any situation similar to the Inquisition is completely barred because it would be establishing a religion. Total separation is not required to prevent the horrors of the Middle Ages, which is why it isn't in the Constitution. No rational person is advocating a theocracy, least of all me. I would be burned at the stake! Again, the government picking a form of religion to be right would be unconstitutional, because of the Establishment Clause. "Congress shall pass no law respecting an establishment of religion..."
Whether religion seems moral or not to you is your business. You don't have to believe. I don't. That being said, calling into question the majority of someone you don't even know based solely on the fact that they don't agree with you is juvenile and uncalled for.
Absolutely, without a doubt "seperation of church and state " IS in the First Amendment. As a matter of fact, that's what the entire First Amendment is all about actually and it was implimented to keep America from becoming like England .
I for one, am tired of all of the so called christian orginazations out there trying to trounce on my First Amendment rights to impliment their so called " freedom of religion ". Freedom of religion DOES NOT mean you can try to take over the government to spread your hatred, NOR does it mean you should be allowed to try to mix religion and politics, go by the First Amendment and knock it off already.
This is NOT a "judeo/christian" nation, and never has been. As a matter of fact, all of the founding fathers were practicing Free Masons. The very reason why they wrote the First Amendment was to avoid the mistakes that England had made, well that and the fact that the native americans were all pagans to begin with (so a compromise had to be reached). Save the bible thumping for where it belongs, which is in Sunday school , and NOT in public school or anywhere else that involves govermnent decision making. A stop must be put to all of this religious nonsense right here and now, no further.
Practice what ever religion you want, but keep it OUT of my goverment!
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion , or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech , or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Read 'em and weep. Those words DO NOT APPEAR in the First Amendment. They just don't. People have a right to vote however they wish, they can even vote their morality onto others. That is entirely within their rights. What you are missing here is the responsibility of Congress, the President or the Supreme Court (it only takes one) to realize that implementing the establishment of a religion would violate the First Amendment. In fact, telling people that they don't have the right to vote a certain way would violate their "freedom of speech," words that do actually appear in the Amendment. So why don't you just go by what the First Amendment actually SAYS and knock it off already.
The United States is a predominantly Judeo-Christian nation. That is a fact. The majority of people are Judeo-Christian. It is not exclusively Judeo-Christian nation, nor is it a Judeo-Christian State. There is a difference.
Cause it's in there. I think where you went wrong was to have your understanding disengaged while you were reading, because a sufficient number of Supreme Court justices have seen it. A sufficient number that is to have decided that for example, prayer in public schools is unconstitutional now, after way too many years of abusing schoolchildren. Other Christian abuses (like the "wish-based" initiatives) will be on their way out pretty quick too.
Thank goodness for people who CAN read, I say.
"No results found" is all you'll find when you do a search within the constitution on this site:
http://www.usconstitution.net/constsearch.html
Which means that pretty much half the ACLU's court objections should be nullified.
I've read it. Multiple times, cover to cover, once with the sole purpose of finding it. I wouldn't have said it if I didn't know I was right. Thanks for your support, though.
Activist judges who seem to think that the Constitution is a "living document," which is another way of saying "It says whatever I want it to," can read whatever they want in there, but it doesn't make it true. It makes it the law, but not necessarily true. That being said, not even they would call prayer abusive. The point is, contrary to what a depressingly large number of people belive, those words do not actually appear in the constitution. Neither do the words, "freedom of religion." We can debate whether they are implied all day long, and it's not going to get us anywhere, but since not everyone actually reads the Constitution, it is sometimes important to point out what the words actually are, rather than the usual practice of just summarizing.
P.S. The first time I wrote this, I did lose it, but I deemed it too unproffessional to actually post, so I was forced to rewrite this one, and it took a great deal of restraint to keep it civil.
George Bush and his "wish-based" initiatives have done great damage to our society and have insulted our intelligence for far too long. It's high time people realized that if you want change, you have to do something, not just fold hands and mumble to an invisible friend about how bad you want change.
Once we firmly dispose of the idea that wishing for change is worth something, then perhaps we can have a more useful dialog about what things we would like changed. A dialogue informed by information about what is real, not what we think our invisible friend likes.
Calling faith-based initiatives "wish based" and suggesting that they put forward prayer in the place of policy shows that either you are ignorant or that you are relying on the ignorance of others. Nobody believes that prayer is policy, and nobody is suggesting that we need to do what "our invisible friend" wants. The truth is that faith-based initiatives help to fund charities and social programs controlled by local churches, which are usually capable of doing the job cheaper, more efficiently, and with better results. For example, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, all of the government programs utterly failed. The vast majority of help going into the city was from church groups or private charities. They are the only ones who did anything. Faith-based initiatives simply take the job away from the government, and give it to the only ones in the private sector willing to do it, nameley, churches. How a more efficient way of providing aid to those who need it is damaging in any way to society or an insult to our intelligence is beyond me. Giving more power to the government, which has demonstrated an utter inability to do anything right, rather than to the private sector, has done far greater damage and insulted our intelligence far more than a little bit of funding and tools for churches to help the needy even better ever could. Faith based intitiatives have nothing to do with prayer, nothing to do with wishing, hoping, or invisible friends. They don't even have anything to do with change! They never promised change, and saying that they did is just dishonest. Do you actually know what you're talking about, and you're just a liar, or are you just going off an ill-informed and hateful knee-jerk rant against the President of the United States and religion in general
Well, the critic you take to task is not entirely wrong. Faith is the commitment to believe things about the supernatural which cannot be demonstrated by fact and logic (=proof). So, it is natural to doubt that such beliefs and such a mental (non-)procedure could produce anything of value to human beings.
The claims you allege (but don't offer even one specific detail to support) indicate something that many of us unbelievers know: there is good will toward men amongh those who accept supernatural beliefs. For some, Christianity is about love, not condemnation to hell, or accusation that one is a sinner. Good deal! More of that please. But, a person who takes ideas seriously cannot overlook the fact that Christian love, while sometimes bringing forth helpful actions, is rooted in au ntterly false view of the universe, of human nature, and of the meaning of value.
Your ending sentences express a hatred and intolerance that show you are immersed in that outlook on mankind and on your critics.
To see the only fact-based moral system in all of human history and proof that morality does not have its objective roots in religion, I point the thinking reader to the writings of Ayn Rand, mankind's greatest moral teacher and author of Atlas Shrugged, the most inspiring novel ever written...if you love your life on Earth. The title you might read first is her tiny paperback book, The Virtue of Selfishness.
Read, learn, enjoy!
"A person who takes ideas seriously cannot overlook the fact that Christian love, while sometimes bringing forth helpful actions, is rooted in an utterly false view of the universe, of human nature, and of the meaning of value."
Says who? While I personally believe that Christianity, especially the evangelical variety, is incorrect in several key assumptions, no one can be entirely sure that it is utterly false. No one can be entirely sure that anything is entirely false. It is possible that we aren't even really here, that the laws of physics don't exist, and that we are all figments of somebody else's imagination. While the burden of science seems to point away from 6-day Creation, it is possible that all of the laws of science are false, and that the world was created in six days. It is highly improbable, which is why I do not believe that it is so, but not impossible. No one can be 100% sure that someone else's assumption about the world is "utterly false."
As far as my ending sentences, what hatred? What intolerance? How is denouncing the statement that religion is worse than crack cocaine hateful and intolerant? You yourself say that Christianity fosters love and good will towards men, and has many positive effects. If anything, the orginal statement is hateful and intolerant! And what outlook is it exactly that you are referring to that you claim I am so obviously immersed in without knowing me? Be forewarned, I advise you to read a couple of my other posts before responding, I am sick and tired of explaining this.
Your last paragraph reveals a lot about you. Who are you to say that your religion is "the only fact-based moral system in all of human history?" You think that just because it is non-theistic your religion is "fact based?" You claim that Objectivism does not have its roots in religion, but you are wrong, blinded by your own bias. Objectivism IS a religion. Just because it is non-theistic does not mean that it is not religion. Buddhism is non-theistic also. Confucianism, Daoism, all non-theistic. They are no different then your religion, the musings of a prominent philosopher. Your hyperbolic, superlative statements regarding your prophet could only come from a religious fanatic. "Mankind's greatest moral teacher," "the most inspiring novel ever written..." Are you kidding me? Do you honestly believe you are being rational? If you substitute the words "Jesus Christ" for Ayn Rand, and "the Bible" for "Atlas Shrugged," you have Evangelical Christianity at its finest! They would say with just as much irrational conviction as you do that Jesus is "mankind's greatest moral teacher," that the Bible is "the most inspiring novel (they would probably say book, but it's close enough) ever written," and that Christianity and the Bible are "the only fact-based moral system in all of human history." I'm pretty sure I've had some preacher actually say those exact words to me before. You even have the trademark disdain of all other religions so characteristic of irrational fanatacism!
Richardsonkr, Please, define for us "religion", so that we can see the difference between yours and atheism?
Ayn Rand's Objectivism offers a moral system which she derived from the nature and needs of life. If you don't know what I mean by fact-based, you may digest it in her essay, The Objectivist Ethics. I have an M.A. in Philosophy and have read all the major and many of the minor philosophers in Western philosophy. I have, sir, the informational background to describe her ethics as the "only fact-based" ethical system offered to men. Is it the word "only" that makes you so angry that you can't settle down and make your case on even one of the points you raise in your reply? Well, Jesus did not come to bring a moral system. According to the Apostle Paul, morality is exactly what man cannot practice because of his sinful nature inherited from Adam. (Is that one of the evangelical, fundamentalist assumptions you reject?)
So, Jesus came, not as a moral teacher, but as a savior to rescue men from their inability to live by the Law of Moses.
As for the factuality of Christianity, one can examin the moral contradiction in God punishing Adam and Eve for eating a fruit before they had the knowledge of good and evil, the moral contradiction of an eternity in Hell in punishment for deeds that, end to end, could never add up to an eternity of evil, the factual contradictions in the 2 different stories of the death of Judas. One could closely examine the genealogies of Jesus offered by Luke and Matthew and find that 1. they contradict each other, though both say clearly they are the lineage of Joseph, 2. both lack names of ancestors during Old Testament times that are in the genealogies in Numbers, 3. both include names that appear nowhere in the OT genealogies, 4. Jesus is said to come from 2 different sons of David, and 5. when it comes to the pattern of 14, 14, 14 that Matthew claims apply to the count of generations from Adam to Jesus, we find that Matthew (or is it the Holy Spirit) cannot even count. That's only a tiny sampling of the factual difficulties the book on which Christianity is based on has inside its covers. How could one not find it utterly false?
If you were not so evidently an angry, hasty man, as shown by your writing in both posts, I'd invite you to explore any one of those issues in some detail and we could have a fruitful dialogue.
You're welcome to try again. Be aware there are other readers judging the content of your words.
Let's start by defining terms. Religion is the means by which man explains the world, it's origins, workings, and purpose, and the means by which he governs himself. It is generally characterized by a moral code, belief in a deity, deities, and/or a belief in a founding philosopher or prophet, and a group of central tenets. Fanatacism is an irrational degree of commitment to a specific religion. It generally values strict adherence to the moral code, a belief that the central tenets are indisputable fact, and is often characterized by disdain for other religions, an inability to find fault with their own religion, and a firm belief that theirs is the only way, or the best way, and that they will win out in the end and rule for eternity.
Based on these definitions, you have clearly identified yourself as a fanatic of the religion Objectivism. You have admitted yourself that Objectivism has a moral code, rational self-interest, and have debated enough as to the origin of the world using your religion that it is obvious it has a creation story, from what I can tell Evolution or something similar. It also has a group of central tenets, the Axioms, and a founding prophet/philosopher, Ayn Rand. Objectivism is a religion. Furthermore, you sir, are a fanatic, in ways I have already demonstrated, for example, disdain for other religions, belief that yours is the best and only way, demonstrated by superlative statements regarding your prophet and her writings, etc. You are a religious fanatic.
I'm not going to get into your little anti-Christian tirade, because I am not a Christian nor do I believe that Christianity is correct, other than to say that just because your religion would classify moral truths of another as moral contradictions does not make it so, though that is further evidence of your fanatacism, and factual difficulties are to be expected of an oft-translated book written in the 200 years following a man's death 2000 years ago in a time and place dominated by illiteracy and a pervasive inatention to detail. If there weren't contradictions, I would be worried. The fact that these factual inconsistencies exist and your religion declares their morals invalid by no means proves Christianity utterly false. I am not hasty, but you and your ilk have made me very, very angry, and I am determined to disallow you from preying on ignorance and spewing your religious nonsense as fact to an unsuspecting audience. I am relying on the other readers you mentioned to do this, as I don't expect to change your mind, but simply to expose you as what you are: a fanatical religious bigot.
Richard,thanks for rising to the challenge. Your definition is faulty, but at least you calmed down long enough to formulate one. What distinguishes religion from philosophy? Granted, the both offer an explanation of the world and of man's nature. With those two in hand one can logically derive an ethics which teaches our kind of being how to live in this kind of universe. From that flows a social and political philosophy, leading to the formation of institutions such as government whose struucture and purpose conforms to the needs and nature of man, for whom philosophy is formed, by whom it is formed.
Religion has a rather vauge approximation of these, but its main difference from philosophy is method. None of the issues above can be defined or discussed without a relationship to the facts (truth). The route religion prescribes to truth is faith. Faith is the acceptance of ideas without and sometimes in defiance of evidence, logic, proof.
Philosophy proceeds by the method of reason. Reason is the native human faculty of using logic to identify the material provided by the senses.
Yes, much of the history of philosophy has dwelt in a misrepresentation of what reason is, including extreme skepticism about sensory evidence, logic, abstraction from sensory evidence, even against the possibility of knowledge at all. Ayn Rand is not the only philosopher to defend the possibility of knowledge against skepticism, nor the first to defend the validity of sensory evidence. She is the first to give a thoroughly proven account of how abstractions are derived from sensory evidence.
Objectivism, contrary to your arbitrary definition and assertions, is not a religion. It rests soundly on reason and reality as absolutes, needs no faith, needs no supernatural. Allegiance to a philosophy which has done so much to liberate my intelligence and energies to achieve good things in the world where I live is not fanaticism. Defending it against sneering cynics like yourself, who are offended by anyone's loyalty to values is not bigotry. It is just refusing to yield the realm of persuasive words to someone like you who seems to hate the good for being the good and seems too tired to go ahead and live.
What will you do as the upsurge in Objectivist intellectuals in the universities in all disciplines, from philosophy to physics to education to mathematics, give confident voice to the only philosophy of your time to stand firm on a morality of objective values, including the value of each man's life in the face of the growth of omnipotent government? How will you fight the growing Philosophy of Freedom?
Your lack of understanding about how to establish proof, which young readers readily see in the writings of Ayn Rand, strips you of the ability to convince them of your arguments, which are only negatives, anyway. Your lack of a vision of positive ideals to inspire those of active minds and earthly ambitions has no chance of stopping the Philosophy for Living Life on Earth from growing in its influence in our world.
If you are not spending your time working to make the world a better place to live in, what are you doing, Richard?
You contend that religion is the opposite of philosophy because they employ different methodologies. That is only partially true. Philosophy does not have any particular methodology. I know that you described different types of philosophy (some disapprovingly), but you are being overly selective. There is a tendency among philosophers to define philosophy in terms of what it is about philosophy that they admire. The problem with that is that then you get definitions of philosophy from one individual at one time which exclude what had been called philosophy by other individuals at other times. It is akin to artists of a particular school defining 'art', but excluding whatever it is that they decide is unworthy. There is poorly made art. We should accept that there is poorly made philosophy.
What is common to all philosophy is it's subject matter or its aims. Interestingly (as you observed), religion (or more properly theology -since religion includes rituals and other things) meets the definition. Theology is just philosophy that relies on faith in entities which are outside of the laws of nature (or science if you rather). So, while richardsonkr was wrong when he said that philosophy is secular religion- he was not far off. The beliefs of a religion, or its theology, are non-secular philosophy :)
Welcome ockraz,
You make the most interesting claim ever to appear in these forums, interesting to me anyway. You say, "There is a tendency among philosophers to define philosophy in terms of what it is about philosophy that they admire. The problem with that is that then you get definitions of philosophy from one individual at one time which exclude what had been called philosophy by other individuals at other times."
May I ask for an example of that?
I have a Master's Degree in Philosophy and have done much reading outside of the classes I took and I don't know of philosophers offering a definition of the name of their field, except for America's philosopher, Ayn Rand. She says, "Philosophy is the science that studies the fundamental aspects of the nature of existence." Elsewhere she says, "Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man's relationship to existence. As against the special sciences which deal only with particular aspects, philosophy deals with those aspects of the universe which pertain to everything that exists." And, its purpose. "The task of philosophy is to provide man with a comprehensive view of life."
Now, it is true that the linguistic analysts regard their task as to make clear what philosophical problems mean by reference to the ordinary way in which ordinary people use words. But, aside from that perspective which has all but anhiliated philosophy (and accounts for the yawning people do when they even hear the word "philosophy", I can't think of any philosophers in the history of philosophy who would regard Rand's definition as wrong, even if they regarded it more as a description than a definition.
Can you give me an example of when a philosopher defined philosophy in such a way as to exclude other philosophies?
Rand's definition does not even exclude religion OR theology and she accepted Aristotle and Aquinas as philosophers who used reason to try to establish the exitence of a God. She regarded religion as man's first and primitive attempt to explain reality and his relationship to it. I regard it as primitive, because it simply had not learned any of the method or questions needed to get at answers. The claim about God or demons or angels or disembodied souls or spirits is the method of anthropologizing the forces at work in nature, which turn out to not be due to conscious beings at all.
One can point out that Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Berkeley, as recognized philosophers, offered reasoned proofs of the existence of God or some version of a principle above nature...by means of reasoning. Their proofs fail for a variety of reasons, but they were not assertions of faith. So, there could be a claim that theology is closer in its methodology to philosophy than to the faith-based adherence to dogma of religion. However, much of theology begins with the assertions of faith and attempts to rationalize them with "proofs", especially today.
I'm glad that this is a topic that interests you. I wrote a paper about this once. Just as there is a branch of philosophy dealing with the questions underlying science (phil. of sci.) there is also a philosophy of philosophy- often called 'metaphilosophy'. Different people have offered definitions of philosophy over the years, but as you say about Rand's example, many tended to be more descriptions of philosophy generally than actual definitions which would specify sufficient and necessary conditions
The most popular definitions seem to focus on methodology, but I think that that is a very problematic approach, because different schools of philosophy will endorse different methodologies. In your comment, you suggested for example that philosophers need to use logic. Obviously, one could argue that 'logic' widely defined might mean just being rational- but that is a fairly vague standard. If we consider logic to be something with rules, the clearly the early Greek philosophers wouldn't meet the standard because they pre-dated the study of logic. (The pre-Socratics for example came before Aristotle began to write about syllogisms.)
Since linguistic analysis has become so important in analytic philosophy, one criteria that gets suggested is linguistic rigor (that's not the term that they use- I've forgotten it). Another was being subject to something like peer-review (again not their terminology). A minimum requirement, therefore was supposed to be that it had to be written. Some people took issue with this because that meant that pre-literate cultures couldn't have philosophy. (That was a problem for people who were interested in 'traditional' African philosophy.) I thought that the criterion was silly if only because Socrates is believed never to have written his philosophy. If all of his teachings were communicated orally, then did that mean that they only turned into philosophy if one of his students wrote them down? (!)
What I argued in my paper was that methodologies aren't the defining quality of philosophy. (I never got particularly interested in eastern philosophy, but I'm given to understand to there are secular versions of Bhuddism that are certainly considered philosophy, but whose methodologies might not fit western definitions.) I believe that (aside from the use of the word "science"- I would have said "discipline") your Rand quotes got it about right.
"Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man's relationship to existence. As against the special sciences which deal only with particular aspects, philosophy deals with those aspects of the universe which pertain to everything that exists." And, its purpose. "The task of philosophy is to provide man with a comprehensive view of life."
Notice that those quotes specified a subject matter (or in the second case a goal), but not a method of study or of reaching the goal. The way I put it was that philosophy couldn't focus on those things which are -at least in theory- open to empirical justification. The sciences deal with that area. (I guess that to be technical, it would actually be 'empirical falsifiability', but close enough.) That leaves two main areas of inquiry: metaphysics (those aspects of the universe which pertain to everything that exists), and normative philosophy (ethics and moral philosophy, but also applied philosophy when it deals with questions of definitions and what is a "proper" such and such- like what is a 'scientific' rather than 'non-scientific' theory).
Religion fits this definition. Even the belief systems of pre-literate cultures fit this definition. You and I probably would agree that they tend not to do as good of a job because they rely on faith (which is ant-rational by definition) in the first case and in the second case they also lack technical sophistication. Some philosophers don't want this sort of thing to count as philosophy, but it was my contention that that was just because they were being over-protective of their field. There's no reason why philosophy needs to meet a particular standard for quality. Sometimes, calling something "philosophical" or even calling someone a "philosopher" has an honorific aspect to it- partly because it is seen as such a rarified pursuit. But arguing that it needs to be 'good' is sort of like the situation you have when professional artists look at the work of amateurs and say that it isn't 'true art'.
ockraz,
I can certainly see that you did an in-depth exploration into that meta-philosophical topic.
In the spirit of repeating one's question, may I ask what specific worded definitions of "philosophy" you found specific philosophers to offer? And, the names of those philosophers?
You mention the dead school, yet still influential, of analytic philosophy, or linguistic analysis. Your characterization of their view of philosophy seems to support the idea that differences between different philosophies are, indeed, a matter of method.
Returning to my original theme, I don't see your disagreement with me about religion and philosophy. Religion, indeed, offers a world view, answers to questions about what kind of universe we live in, what kind of beings we humans are, what principles should guide our actions in order to live well in that kind of universe, etc....as does philosophy. But, it would be an error to say that religion simply does not do it as well as philosophy, because religion does NO work to get at the truth. Its answers have no examination of reality (empirical or otherwise) and no reasoning to support them. Its ethics offers commandments for human behavior, NO explanations, no discussion of cause-and-effect from chosen action to bad results (unless you include the threat that you'll go to Hell, if you don't obey), no method the human mind can use to verify (or, did you say, falsify) those commandments. And, that approach of arbitrary assertion runs throughout all its statements of "truth".
Philosophy, on the other hand, is bound by the necessity to offer reasons. Even Kant, as utterly fictious a view of reality and man and reason as he gave, engaged in reasoning to support his conclusions. BTW, all thinking goes eventually to things one cannot see, which does NOT mean it didn't start with things one sees. Kant began with the fact of seeing, as badly interpreted by the Empiricists, and reasoned from the faults he thought were part of sense perception. (I did a paper on Kant in graduate school which had the professor offer to work with me to edit it into book form for publication.)
If a philosopher does not offer reasoning for his conclusions, he risks being thought of as a seer, even a mystical seeer, instead of a man of reason. A different way of putting this point is the observation, made in philosophical classes, that the core of a philosopher is not so much his conclusions, but the arguments (reasoning) he offers and by which he got to his conclusions. The argument can be examined and its premises or logic refuted or confirmed.
There is no mystery about what logic is, nor what its function (use) is. As Rand defines it, "Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification." Given that everything that exists has a specific (even if changeable) nature and given that the role of your consciousness is to gain knowledge of what there is in the world where you live, your cognitive task is to identify what is there. So, the epistemological tool used to make non-contradictory identifications is the method of logic, whose subtools are those of identifying and of eradicating contradictions. Why? So, that the ideas you hold in your mind correspond to what exists in the world.
Anyway, when you and I look at the world and see differences between one thing and another, our job, in heading for a definition or distinction between them, is to identify what the differences are. Notice that all definitions isolate two things which have one or more similarities (and, thus, are in the same genus) and to state what the difference (differentia) is or are between them. The difference between religion and philosophy is not the subject they offer answers for, but the method. Once one has named the difference between faith and reason and noticed that those different methods make all the difference between identifying the truth and engaging in manufacturing entities beyond what is warranted by the evidence, one can move on to ethically evaluating the two. If one's standard is life, the kind of entity which can go out of existence if the requirements of its survival are not met, one will evaluate reason positively and faith negatively. One can, then, turn to history to see that periods dominated by reason were productive of human well-being and that eras dominated by religion resulted in pogroms, witch hunts, religious intolerance and wars, condemning those who disagree as heretics, the torture and murder of helpless victims in the process of inquisition, all the things that compelled the American Founding Fathers to establish a wall of separation between state and religion.
I made the distinction I named of "subject" and "subject matter" quite clear. When science...and philosophy is one...wants to know something about realtiy, it looks at that aspect of reality. When a religious person wants to know about reality, he looks to see what absolute statements his religious authorities have said on the subject (Pope, priest, Bible, Torah, Koran, etc..). It only occurs to him to look at reality, because he lives in a culture of science which does demand verification and replication of observations and experiments (where appropriate). And, he only does it to confirm what he was told, often leaving out of account what logically refutes what he was told. There are full-grown men, now, in the 21st century who actually believe in talking snakes, because one was recounted as living in the Garden of Eden...to pick one simple example.
So, the method of using one's mind, the selection of what to look for as evidence, the application of some tool to root out blatant contradictions, the openness to revise conclusions in the face of new evidence...all do make a difference between religion and philosophy. Given that they lead to very different cultural manifestations, given that the answers they give to the fundamental questions about reality and man are irreconcilably different, one looks for the core, the heart, the source, the cause of those differences. it is a difference of method. It is the difference between faith and reason.
I love the way your observe what I say, then say things that make me sharpen my presentation of my convictions.
So.......is a copy of your paper available for one to read?
>"The difference between religion and philosophy is not the subject they offer answers for, but the method." I don't know. The method of some of the better theologians is probably better than pretty most of the pre-enlightenment philosophers in terms of logic and picturing the natural world. My position is that both have the same subject (assumptions regarding metaphysics and norms, as well as developing a world view from those assumptions), and methods are not consistently used on one side or the other, BUT the metaphysical assumptions on the religion side include things that secular philosophy always excludes.
>You could re-frame this as a method distinction, I suppose. Instead of saying, "the materialists and naturalists go on the right and the spiritualists and supernaturalists go on the right"- you could say, "anyone whose ontology is limeted by Ockham's Razor goes on the left, and anyone willing to throw in the kitchen sink goes on the right"- although even then, someone with a 'kitchen sink' methodology could put in weird non-supernatural things. Mind-body dualism is technically a violation of Ockham's Razor, but it isn't supernatural.
>"One can, then, turn to history to see that periods dominated by reason were productive of human well-being and that eras dominated by religion resulted in pogroms, witch hunts..." -
Have we had a period dominated by reason yet? I must've been napping - LOL
>"When science...and philosophy is one...wants to know something about realtiy, it looks at that aspect of reality." - If philosophy deals with (you needn't agree that it only deals with) speculation about metaphysics and normative judgments, then just what aspects of reality will verify or falsify claims of that nature?
"Free will is an illusion." "Lying is always unethical". - Both of those are straightforward philosophical claims, but nothing empirical will establish either as more likely to be true or false. When the word 'philosophy' was coined to specify a pursuit of (or love for) wisdom, it _did_ include science, but the sciences have each peeled away from philosophy over the centuries as they developed their own methods of empirical investigation. It's like philosophy began as a thick rope or braid and strands kept splitting until we're left with the philosophy of today: a non-science field of study that examines fundamental questions without the benefit of evidence and observation.
>I think that the focus on routing out contradiction can appear in well crafted religion and be missing from poor secular philosophy.
I also submit that any world-view (weltenschauung) will incorporate faith-based ideas (or at least unfalsifiable/unverifiable intuitions) about the fundamental nature of reality. In religion, that might be, 'souls are eternal', but in secular philosophy it might be, 'the theory of epiphenominalism is false'. Once you make those faith-based/unfalsifiable metaphysical claims, then it stands to reason that they will shape your mores. You might think that Pascal's wager makes perfect sense, or you might think that if an incompatibilist view of determinism is accurate, then retributive justice may seem to be merely punitive and pointless.
>My paper was online, on an AOL homepage, but they erased it (and all the other AOL Hometown pages ) about a month ago with no warning :P
I think that there might be some of it archived on another site, but I'll have to check.
Fun corresponding with you :)
Sorry about my verbosity.
Hello ockraz,
Your comments are replies to things I said. I want to reply to each of yours. However, we are to a point at which a long treatise would be required to do justice to each reply-to-reply. Each agreement I'd have with you AND each disagreement illustrate one thing. Not only does philosophy create a frame of reference for one's thinking (and maybe a worldview), but one's view of what is philosophy is also so fundamental (bedrock, the roots) that two people can make statements they both agree on and statements that require the deepest thinking to make sense of. They can go so widely out of sync with each other that it would takes volumes to work out the differences in perspective.
Just one example. YOu say that both philosophy and religion make metaphysical assumptions and reason from there. Religion certainly makes middle-of-the stream assumptions, such as the existence of God, the non-existence of the "heavens and the earth" as a condition preceding creation, miracles as consciously induced changes in the way some natural things exist from one moment to the next.
Gads! Philosophy would be utterly embarrassed to just assume such entities, non-entities and actions as the place to start the discussion about what kind of universe we live in, etc.
You make some fairly standard statements about the nature of logic and what it is for (to test the validity of truth-statements). But, in Rand's view of the role (purpose) for reason and logic as one of its tools, this abstracted view which you repeat from teachers simply drops the context in which logic exists (as a tool in the function of the minds of a certain kind of biological being whose life is constantly at risk and requires true ideas in order to take effective actions in order to continue living). Once you get the teological, life-based view of philosophy, evidence of the senses, reasoning, logic, the use (purpose) of knowledge, the need for accuracy (validity, soundness) thoroughly inside of you, you think about those topics with less distant abstraction than academic philosophy teaching is used to doing.
I'll never forget a class with Dr. John Hospers at Cal State L.A. in epistemology. I wanted to learn how we come to know things. Yet, after a few classes, he was into the analytic-synthetic dichomomy, sentences which merely repeat the definition of a word and sentences which say something about the word that is different than its definition (backelors are unmarried men vs. bachelors seldum understand what women want). I felt let down. I didn't want to know about different kinds of sentences. I wanted to know by what method we come to know things.
>"Philosophy would be utterly embarrassed to just assume such entities, non-entities and actions as the place to start the discussion about what kind of universe we live in, etc."
This speaks directly to what I spoke of as the honorific impulse of those who think of themselves as philosophers. If I were a professional artist exhibiting my work in museums and art galleries, I might look at a portrait of Elvis on black velvet and say, "That is not Art." Incorporating a standard of 'quality' into a definition of a pursuit is ultimately not based on cool headed and dispassionate rational thinking. It is based on a desire to advance one's personal agenda. If the accomplished artist dismisses the Elvis, then will he also dismiss a child's finger-painting, or Duchamp's 'Fountain'? This is directly analogous to the situation with defining philosophy. It is not a disservice to the discipline to acknowledge that there is more bad philosophy than good- as long as the good comes from the professionals.
Your inclination might be to say that philosophy is not analogous to art, but rather to math or logic or science- wherein not conforming to rules about what is the right method disqualify one's efforts. (As 'creation science' does not qualify as science.) I believe that this is an untenable position to take. Science, logic, and math have thoroughly accepted methods because their results can be checked against observation. We accept that there is a right way to do these things because if we depart from the rules, then our results will be proven faulty when compared to reality- there is an OBJECTIVE test against which they can be measures. Philosophy is like art in that there is no such objective test. A judgment about the propriety of method or result must be SUBJECTIVE in that the criteria for judgment are themselves a product of philosophy. One must either accept some axiomatic value statement (which is itself impossible to objectively test) or else create an infinite regress in seeking further justification.
Therefore: Methodological definitions are subjected and in a large sense arbitrary, whereas definitions based on subject matter can be derived historically- even though that means there will be piss poor world views which get to call themselves 'philosophy'. Still, I don't find that disheartening because it means that everyone (with normal intelligence) has some philosophy- even if it is learned by rote or rudimentary. If everyone is already a philosopher (because everyone must have some nascent concept of the nature of the world or existence and what is good, right and important), then the calling of someone devoted to philosophy is to teach them how to reform that philosophy- adopt a proper method- and by so doing more fully engage in what it is to live like intelligent beings rather than mere animals. It is a more populist view of what philosophy is, but it doesn't mean that there is not still an elite who can lead.
>"in Rand's view of the role (purpose) for reason and logic as one of its tools, this abstracted view which you repeat from teachers simply drops the context in which logic exists"
Well now, I think that you would probably agree that logic is much like mathematics. Is a purpose essential to mathematics? I don't think it is. Number certainly is not dependent upon human goals and social context. If 'AxA + BxB = CxC' is not dependent upon context, then why is modus ponens? No- logic is independent of context, and Rand is advocating for acceptance of her own worldview when she ascribes a purpose to it. That's fine within the confines of Randian thought- but it should be recognized as a part of a particular philosophy, not a feature of philosophy generally.
>"Once you get the teological, life-based view of philosophy..."
My point exactly- this is accurate once you accept a particular teleological view of life and philosophy's role in it. That is merely one view amongst many.
>"you think about those topics with less distant abstraction than academic philosophy teaching is used to doing."
If you are working on a problem in metaphilosophy, then it would defeat the purpose if your starting point presupposed a preference for a particular sort of philosophy. This was one of the first things that I mentioned- that philosophers generally provided definitions of philosophy which were biased toward there personal views (such as those who engage in linguistic analysis and would disqualify Socrates for not having written).
One could express the same disappointment about most discussions of ethics.
Well, when Rand discusses any of the topics of philosophy, you always see, at root, how the question applies to yourself as a knowing, acting, living (mortal) being, one seeking to know how to live. She is a very technical philosopher in plain English.
If we approached the construction of a philosophy from the point of view of an adult, thinking about the very first starting points and NEVER forget that we are human beings, we think, we are the only species that does philosophy, then it is easier to actually begin at the beginning, instead of importing assumptions, metaphysical or otherwise.
As an adult human being, you can ask, OK, what IS the fact that is true of all the things I have been aware of in my life up to now? Aristotle and Rand both answer: They all exist.
Rand goes further and asks two more questions: What is true of each of those things I know about, or how to I know what kind of thing each one is? And, what is required for me to know this fact of existence and that it is true of all the things I've learned about up to now?
They have identity. I have identiy, at least as a conscious being. If I am not conscious, I can't know they exist. If they don't exist as a specific something, they don't exist at all. In other words, "Existence exists--and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists." (Rand) And...A is A. (Aristotle). When Rand says, "A is A", she continues to say, "A thing is itself. Existence is Identity. Consciousness is Identification."
You asked what I meant by those last 2 sentences when I said them. Well, to exist is to have a specific nature. The role of consciousness is to find out what that nature is. That is the exact point at which science takes off. Philosophy, based on our uniform observations (experience) tells us that each thing we encounter is existence (nature) has a definite nature. Science takes that clue and begins to do the same thing: observe...observe that thing's actions, characteristics, interacitons with other things...in an effort to determine what its nature is.
OK. But, Rand said "two corollary axioms". Are we already at the point of identifying axioms? Well, when we first open our eyes as infants and begin to accumulate the observations that we later derive "existence exists" from, we cettainly are NOT in the position to be thinking of anything so complex as an axiom. An axiom IDENTIFIES a primary, something so basic that there is no statement we could make that is more basic and needed to even state the axiom. In fact, an axiom sets the base upon which all other statements we make rest.
It is only after many simple identifications (mother, ball, crawl, walk, talk, throw, run, doggy, etc.) and then abstractions from those first-level observations (not just chair and table, but furniture, etc.) and them begin to ask questions about how we know these things (too bad our memories are not detailed enough to remind us when we first saw something and what our mind did with that observation, but, in fact, our memories don't seem to operate until we have etched lines of specific knowledge in our minds and relate those specifics to each other up to some level at which we can retain our ideas about our observations). But, being that our rational faculty is able to hold our identifications of similarities and relationships in terms of fundamental facts belonging to the things we identify as belonging to the same category/class/concept, we are able to see what is more basic and what is more complex, what our complex ideas have to be built out of (things in the world, like furniture coming from our classifying chairs, tables, etc. togerher according to their function). Finally, we can ask questions about the very most basic facts about all other facts. At that point we can see that some things are not proven, not constructed out of more basic observations. Some things are the starting points. Once we learn what is true of ALL things we have learned, THEN we can construct as axioms those most-basic facts. Yet, to be an axiom, the statement HAS TO identify something that is SO basic that it was present in our first moment of awareness as a baby opening his eyes for the first time. The baby cannot think, I see something; it exists, I am a conscious being. But, those facts are implicit in that first moment of awareness and can be stated once the young person has enough knowledge of the world, including differences among things and the actions things can take that he learns HE is one of the things in the world, but he is NOT one of those things, that HE is conscious of THEM.
oops- got ahead of myself!
You addressed my questions, but I didn't get to that part.
I always like to go through things methodically one piece at a time.
I'm one of the kids who got caught by this old trick in elementary school...
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6237686/Following-Instructions-Lab
I'll read through the whole thing now before I comment since the topic is changing and I'm no longer sure of the ultimate destination.
Hello ocraz!
You said, "With the second statement, I'm assuming that what is meant is that being conscious entails mentally 'pointing out', or referring to particular ideas?"
Actually, I mean something quite different. When you open yours, after a sleep in your sleeping bag, and you see blue above you, you are NOT pointing out or referring to ideas. You are seeing blue. It is a simple sensory experience. When you think about a new computer desk, better designed for ergonomic purposes, you are not point ing our or referring to ideas. You actually mean a desk outside your body on which your body will rest while working.
Now, I deliberately picked the second example, because it is complex and does, indeed, incorporate particular ideas. One cannot use a word like "ergonomic" without being aware that one is not "pointing at" a physical object. If you know that ergonomic means a design of furniture that makes it easier for the human body to rest and act in a way that keeps the spine aligned straight and keeps the usual movements within reach (the various designs of keyboards were all attempts to achieve that), and you want that benefit for your body, you are NOT merely referring or pointing to particular ideas, you are aiming at a real physical object outside your body on which your very real physical body can rest. And, that is true, no matter how many ideas you may have to employ from previous learning, no matter how many ideas capture that previous learning, in order to aim at getting a particular desk.
All of those ideas are identifications of the things you learned about the world outside your body (and, even about your body and what spinal alignment is best for your overall health). The desk, your body, your spine, the affect of pinched nerves on your health, the reach needed for your arms to place your hands at the keyboard and mouse...all these are things that exist in the world. Next is the mental act of you looking to see what the characteristics of each are, so that you can choose a design for the desk. Those mental acts are acts of identification. The thing outside you has an identity, you form ideas of those characteristics and their relationship to the thing. (The desk is hard and unmoveable, while the keyboard yields to the touch of your fingers and the chair may move on wheels). That formation of an idea is the mind's act of identification. The idea is not the characteristic (the identity) of the thing in the world. The thing in the world is not the idea. Their relationship, as two different things, has to do with the equal existence of both consciousness and existence in any claim of knowledge.
Let me refer to another thing you said in order to clarify that relationship. Your response to Rand's statement about "existence exists" was to compare it to DesCartes's "cogito". And, that is what Rand had in mind when she made her statement. You'll find Rand's statement in Galt's speeck in Atlas Shrugged. And, Galt says, "...reversing a historical error, I am, therefore I will think."
Descartes starts with an impossible position. There he is in his study, sitting in his chair, fully clothed, well-fed, at ease enough to have some time for thining...and he decides to doubt all that, seeking to prove that he exists. He posits an act of consciousness ("I think...") before he admits that he exists (therefore, I am").
This ignores the fact that he must exist as a being with a consciousness before he can perforn any actual thinking. Now, if it really were true that the very first thing he noticed in his life was the fact that he was thinking (am impossibility, as I said), then he might start with that. But, by the time he was in the context I referred to in my last post here, as an adult...he would have to organize his ideas in an order of necessity. He might have noticed thinking first, but then would have concluded that existence must precede any thinking. Otherwise, what was doing the thinking? and what could it be thinking about?
So, you see, he omitted the real-world context in which he, or anyone, would be doing philosophy, in this case, thinking about the fact of his thinking. Context-dropping is one of the most pervasive errors in the history of philosophy.
His second mistake is a formal distinction in philosophy. It exists widely, but in spite of the fact that philosophers are supposed to quetions unseen assumptions, this distiction was not identified in philosophy until Rand did it. It is the issue of the Primacy of Consciousness vs. the Primacy of Existence. Is consciousness the more basic thing and existence is a product of consciousness? All religions side with this position and far too many secular philosophies. Or, is existence the basic fact and consciousness is one of those things that exists. In fact, doesn't it exist as one phenomenon in nature, and not even pervasively? By that question I mean the straightforward obaservation that in nature we see a great very many kind of inanimate things, from suns and planets to soil and plants, things on a microscopic size scale and a mega-macroscopic size scale. In the presence of all those things, and on one planet, we find living things, including one-celled plants and animals up to giant redwoods. But, they do not have the brain or nervous system that is characteristic of those living things that have consciousness. Among all the living things, some of them have sensory organs, nervous systems and brains of some size, giving them the natural capacity of consciousness.
So, we can say that we are not entitled to speak of consciousness at all, except in so far as we have evidence of it. We do have evidence of it in some living beings, suitably equipped, not in other living things and not in inanimate things at all. From this we can conclude that consciousness is well withing, inside of existence.
(This epistemological identification of how we come to know about consciousness and of where it exists naturally, has theological implications. It is a thinking error, context-dropping again, to take our idea of conscioussness out of the natural context in which we know of actual consciousness itself and, then, attirbute that characteristic to the Universe as a whole or to some "person" behind, above, outside of, inside of the universe: God. The creation of a Universal Mind of whatever description is the result of a thinking error.)
As you can see, the fact that sciences broke off from philosophy as each defined a subject matter and scientific methodology suitable for each does not mean that philosophy is not still tied to science. When we philosophize (think about the most fundamental facts of reality), we do not leave out the material, the truths we are philosophizing (seeking to explain) about.
OK. Aristotle did not make an explicit statement about the Primacy of Existence (PE) principle vs. the Primacy of Consciousness (PC) principle, even though his teacher, Plato’s philosophy is largely based on PC. Aristotle was a naturalist, in the sense of studying nature, as a scientist. I’m not saying that made him emphasize PE in his philosophy, More likely the philosophical principle governed his mind-set, his approach to reality in both types of investigation. But, he did not identify the issue itself, at least not in writing.
Rand’s philosophy can arguably be said to be the first totally PE philosophy from start to finish. It sounds like I’m merely complimenting her when I say that hers is a totally reality-oriented philosophy (and it is a compliment), but I mean it descriptively and on a comparison basis to all the others. I do have an MA in Philosophy and underwent those studies after being out of school for 7 years, precisely because I wanted to see how her philosophy stands up in comparison to the history of technical philosophy. My conclusion is that she ranks with Plato, Aristotle, and Kant in terms of addressing and offering a totally-new approach to the most basic questions. In relation to Descartes, she argues that by adopting skepticism and then positing the existence of his thinking activity as the basis for the proof of all else, he placed himself squarely in the PC camp.
As an aside, let me mention a book by Alan Kors which I just finished reading. It is titled Atheism in France. It is hard to find and costs a huge amount. I waited for 2 years, looking on Amazon and Ebay until I found a copy for $35
It asks, how did atheism arise in a culture totally immersed from bone barrow to skin in Christian theology. His answer, after exploring about 80 years of French literature is that the Church created atheism. It did that by arguing against the sinner whose soul was so blinded by its sin that it could actually deny what was self-evident to everyone else: the existence of God. But, then, as the Enlightenment enabled men to explore other cultures, the Church found instances of entire cultures that did not have an idea of God as a person. This called in to severe questions the argument from Universal Agreement. Then the educated Church fathers took atheism more seriously and constructed arguments against it, even though there were no atheists to be found arguing FOR atheism. After Aquinas, it was thought that, if you did not start your theology with a preamble which proved the existence of God, well, you left room for doubt. THEN came Descartes. What I never learned in any of my university studies is that at least half of the Christian universities took Descartes argument for the existence of god from the conception of him as the perfectly existing being as their orientation. The Jesuits held that Aristotle’s arguments, as perfected by Aquinas, were sufficient and that the conscious-oriented (ontological?) approach of Descartes was atheism. The Cartesians argued that Descartes’s approach made God prior to all of existence/matter and, thus, was more noble, more spiritual. The Jesuits’s counter-arguments come very close to identifying the flaw in Descartes’s approach as PC, but not quite. If one knows Rand’s distinction between PE and PC, one can see how the Jesuits arguments nearly identify that distinction against Descartes.
(The rest of that story in Kors’s book is that by the time of the Enlightenment, the doubters, theological skeptics, agnostics, atheists did not need to invent any arguments against the existence of God. The Church had already done that for them.)
Anyway, Rand is correctly regarded as correcting the PC beginning point of Descartes by showing that knowledge, proof of any kind depends on the existence of existence AND consciousness. Over-emphasize or delete either one and knowledge and proof are not possible. Whether or not one agrees with her, this places her in contention with the foundational philosophers of all time, providing an argument at the very beginning of metaphysics, one which ripples throughout all the rest of the branches and questions of philosophy. Admittedly, this is a conclusion statement, not a proof statement about Rand’s Objectivism. One can explore it in other books. One can start with Professor Andrew Bernstein’s book Objectivism in One Lesson or Aristotelian scholar Allan Gotthelf’s book Ayn Rand. One can take on the twin books by Dr. Tara Smith of University of Texas, Austin, one on meta-ethics, the other on normative ethics, Viable Values and Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics, respectively. But, the towering work of scholarship is by Dr. Leonard Peikoff, who was personally associated with Ayn Rand for 30+ years, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.
She certainly is a popular novelist .Her non-fiction is written in crystal-clear, plain English (well, her book, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology does have some technical terminology in it) and, so, one could regard her as a popular philosopher…and she certainly is popular. But, she takes on all the knotty questions of technical philosophy and solves some thought impossible. How many times have you heard that there not only is NOT an connection between facts and value, but CANNOT be? Well, read her essay, The Objectivist Ethics in the little paperback, The Virtue of Selfishness and tell me this. If there was a connection between the facts of the world in which we live and the ethics that are supposed to guide our actions there in order to live well, what would that theory of values look like? Does Rand have an unanswerable case in her identification of Life as a dependent form of existence, as the only thing in existence that fits the broad characteristics of what value is supposed to be? Hers is the hard version, that no value terms have meaning apart from the nature and needs of living things. Read it and see how she transforms all the discussions of the past in their attempt to ground an objective moral system. I think that you’ll find Tara Smith’s book the best-argued polemic for Rand’s teleological view of values and against all the opposing schools of value theory.
Having said that, here’s a questions for the detractors of Rand as philosopher. If she is just a populizer (sp?) of a philosophical bent of mind, not a technical philosopher, how is it that well-educated university professors are finding her works seminal in a new set of approaches and answers to age-old philosophical questions?
This time I hope I did a better job of replying to the heart of what you wrote.
>"I'll never forget a class with Dr. John Hospers at Cal State L.A. in epistemology... the analytic-synthetic dichomomy... I felt let down. I didn't want to know about different kinds of sentences. I wanted to know by what method we come to know things."
Poor Dr. Hospers! One needs to start somewhere, but after you do theory of knowledge and get an idea about the relationship between truth and knowledge, then you can take philosophy of science and actually talk more concretely about a dependable method for coming to know things- which, from the sound of it is what you wanted :)
>None of my classes ever covered Rand (and I took all of the classes offered). I was given the impression that she was a 'pop-philosopher', rather than a rigorous academic philosopher. I'm willing to grant that the picture I was given may have been unfair. I know that academics is prone to trends and fashions and can be dismissive of things based on what will only in retrospect be seen to be factional conflict and professional maneuvering for influence. For example, 'system-building' seems to have gone out of fashion sometime around WWII and been replaced by strict specialization. Also, identity politics has worked its ideology into the universities so thoroughly that truly universalizable bases to philosophies are now often seen as old fashioned or provincial!
Still, I have to admit that I am a bit skeptical of Rand- even the professors who were not dismissive of her for an alleged lack of intellectual discipline still tended to compare her to Nietzsche, who is far from one of my favorites. I'm not trying to throw cold water on what you're saying, I just want to be up front about the fact that I am starting off with some preconceptions. Nonetheless, I'm perfectly willing to evaluate a philosophical view on its own terms and try my best to be impartial.
>"A is A"
No problem there- that's just the reflexive property.
>"Existence exists--and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists." (Rand)
Hmmm. This seems a bit like the 'cogito'. Even if one could doubt that one exists, then the act of doubting would establish one's existence. It's similar, but your position is that thinking (about existence as such or just about things that exist- I'm not clear) entails that you exist and are conscious. Okay.
>"Existence is Identity. Consciousness is Identification."
This may be more problematic. Strict identity? Loose identity? Personal identity? Numerical identity? Are we talking about what it means for something to exist- or merely about qualities inherent in the existence of mind?
With the second statement, I'm assuming that what is meant is that being conscious entails mentally 'pointing out', or referring to particular ideas?
This should make it clear that axioms (is that what you mean by assumptions? Or, do you mean "arbitrarily posited"?) are not arbitrary, may not be posited at random, are not hypotheses. And, they cannot be complex ideas, such as entities or non-entities, or actions. They must be absolutely basic, present in the first moment of awareness, and the absolutely bare miminum needed for any other statement of knowledge. IN otherwords, given that we are human beings, have an identity, have a form of consciousness which has an identity, that our sensory information is the basis for our identifications of what there is in the world, our first sights are not axioms, but our axioms must name what we are aware of in those very first sights. Our axioms cannot start any other "place", in the building of our hightest reaches of knowledge, than that process of knowledge begins, itself. It begins with you seeing and with what is true of what you see. It exists, you are conscious. There are NO other axioms possible, IF we are talking about what all HUMAN knowledge is build upon.
Now angels, or God? How do they hold knowledge? A different epistemology would have to be defined. If there were any such beings. But, being as you are a human being, what is the evidence and the process of cognition by which you came to the conclusion that there are such beings?
Do you see what I mean by never losing your grip on what the CONTEXT is? You are human, you have a consciousness of a certain function, what you claim to know must come from that cognition (knowledge-gaining process), or what you claim to "just know" is NOT knowledge. It is not possible to discuss cognition/epistemoloty without specifying what kind of conscious being you are attributing knowledge to. That is the context. Just as what a thing IS determines what it can DO, so what kind of consciousness you have determines what you can know.
OK. I suspect that unless you can get your head immersed in this perspective on what knowledge is, how we get any, how we use identifications such as the starting ones (axioms)...then, my account, which is that of Aristotle and Rand, will only generate many more questions. But, if so, then my questions are, Don't you know, from your own experience, that the process by which I said we get our awareness of basics is how you got them? If you don't agree that those are the basic, then what DO you say are the basics on which all our knowledge is built and how do we get THOSE basics?
A bit wider. If you don't agree that reason is a native capacity in human beings who are biological, mortal, capable of keeping or losing their lives through well-chosen actions, and that reason is the biological tool for gaining knowledge of the world in which you find yourself and of using that knowledge to guide your actions so that they are well-chosen, so that you may keep your life...then, what do you think the context (natural setting) in which reason exists? And, if you do agree with the characterization of reason I've given, then how could any philosopher be justified in discussing reason and its function is so abstracted a way as to fail to see its biological role? And, can you see how the monads of Leibniz or the Noumenal world of Kant, not only make people think philosophy is irrelevant to their lives, but actually ARE irrelevant to (don't help with) the living of our lives?
As I said, Whew!
The philosophy of philosophy, meta-philosophy is so foundational that any difference in what one thinks the purpose of philosophy is, what its natural context (a tool for the living of one's life) is, and what its method or process needs to be to fulfill that purpose (derive ideas about the world in which we live from our observations of the world in which we live, so that we may live well there, instead of losing our lives through error), then it is almost impossible to communicate with someone who has a different view of what philosophy is. The only hope for communication between them that connects in both their minds, is to start at the very beginning. In experience, the beginning of all one's ideas is one's first sensory impressions of the world. In the construction of a philosophy (as an adult), the beginning is a set of givens, unquestionables, axioms that identify what our minds start with.
If it is not possible to connect with another person by beginning at those points, well, then we can live in the same world, but we do not understand the same world.
>I don't agree with your characterization of religion. I was raised in a family that was half Catholic, and I always liked the priests who were Jesuits. I respected them even though I disagreed with them about all kinds of things. I don't think that they'd see themselves in your description- nor do I. If you look at the sort of writing that supports the Papal Encyclicals, it is not without nuance. There is a great attention paid to ensure that the arguments will be valid. (IMO, they can't be sound because of their supernatural premises, but they do seem valid.)
It also does not fail to take into account observations in the real world. For example, the Vatican has its own science academy to help it keep its teachings in step with current discoveries and theory. For example, I believe that they stopped insisting on creationism about 50 years ago. They maintain that evolution is compatible with the church's teachings and (cautiously) observe that literal interpretations of the bible will be problematic because much of it is derived from "contemporary notions about the natural world."
>I'm curious about what you mean by 'start' when you say, "all thinking goes eventually to things one cannot see, which does NOT mean it didn't start with things one sees." Do you mean it as a sequence of the thoughts as they occurred to the philosopher, or do you mean that one proceeds from the other in a line of reasoning?
>As Rand defines it, "Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification." -
You're certainly a big fan of Rand's aren't you :)
I'm not clear what the word 'identification' means here. Logic (as I was taught) is the discipline which allows us to be sure that our arguments are valid- ie, our arguments are "truth preserving" in that if our premises are true, then our conclusions are guaranteed to be true well.
If you want your arguments to be sound, then science can improve (but not ensure) your chances of having true premises regarding empirical matters.
My way of defining philosophy suggested that the two major kinds of premises which were left (metaphysical speculation and statements regarding normative judgments) were the subject matter which defined what philosophy is.
>I'm concerned about relying on logic and 'being rational' as methods to _define_ philosophy rather than arguing that they are methods which will make you more successful in any study _including_ studies of philosophical questions. Aren't there philosophical questions that can be answered (badly) by uninformed people? Are their answers not philosophy because they don't know how to think critically or employ logic? Are their answers non-philosophy or just poor philosophy for lack of the best method?
>If we want to arrive at a definition of a term, then don't we want to look at all of the things to which the term applies, and then list the criteria which have to be common to all of those things? The individual 'necessary' conditions, when taken as a whole, are the 'sufficient' conditions which give us our definition.
I felt that what was common to all philosophy was that it dealt with the two aforementioned types of premises. I don't see a common method, because I think that people who use awful methods in dealing with questions about those subjects are still doing philosophy- only (IMO) badly.
This is fun! By comparison, a lot of the other discusions are going to seem like drudgery. I'm going to get spoiled if I'm not careful :)
>On specific names and quotes: I'd have to go looking- not off of the top of my head. (To be honest, one of the things I always have liked about philosophy was how little demand there tended to be for specifics- things tended to focus on relationships, patterns, and abstractions so much that remembering quotes or dates or names was relatively unimportant.) If I have time, I'll see if I can find my old papers over the weekend. I should say, however, that (most of) the specific descriptions/definitions (save one in particular) tended to be like Rand's- not particularly systematic and arguably aspirational (which fit in with the notion that those in the community wanted it to have an honorific connotation). Ordinary philosophy reference works usually have them if you just look up the word 'philosophy'.
[Minor point: 'Analytic philosophy' in my experience doesn't refer merely to those positivists views that want philosophy to concern itself only with linguistic analysis. It can include original speculation as long as it still is influenced by the early Analytic emphasis on logic and empiricism. Analytic is contrasted with Continental, which seems to be preoccupied with the 'subject quality of experience' or 'personal consciousness' and all sorts of other mildly anti-scientific mushiness.]
>I agree that a good way to distinguish between philosophical schools is by methodology. OTOH, it works less well as a way to differentiate between particular philosophies: which may share methodologies, but differ only in particular positions or assumptions made. I believe that this can extend to 'secular philosophy' versus 'religion/theology'. Is the important distinction one of method or of metaphysics? You have acknowledged Augustine and Aquinas as being philosophers because of their method. I'd say that they were philosophers because of the subject matter (which is common to philosophy and religion), but theologians because they assumed a 'supernaturalistic' metaphysics. In your view, can they be doing philosophy instead of religion because of their more rational approach? They certainly thought that they were working on religion. My schema allows for them to have been doing both.
Nevertheless, you offer backup for my statement that religion and philosophy differ in method, when you say, "Theology is just philosophy that relies on faith in entities which are outside of the laws of nature (or science if you rather)."
In the operations of a human mind, in the ability to construct an argument which could justify one's conclusion, in the ability to connect the knowledge gained by reason to other knowledge humans gain, the difference between the method of faith and the method of reason is so profound that it cannot be obliterated by saying that religion and philosophy address themselves to the same subjects. They do, but not to the same subject matter. The matter to which reason directs its attention is observable reality, often drawing conclusions that are far from observable (in the realm of the sciences). While the subject matter of religion or faith is the say-so of others. One may think that say-so is from God, but it is always from another human being who claims to have it from God. And, that human being uses the term "faith" as a definition of goodness of heart, because he does NOT want to put up with the human capacity for creative question-asking, or the simpleness of children who look at cartoons about Santa Claus and conclude, as did my daughter at age 3, that God was just as unevidenced and, thus, fictional as Santa.
So, it is true that religion and philosophy are concerned to explain to man what kind of universe he lives in, what kind of being he is, and then deduce what principles should guide his actions so that he lives his life (here or in the here-after) well. But, their method for exploring the evidence and arriving at answers offers men exactly opposite methods for using his mind. And, there is no more crucial kind of advice one could offer those conscious beings in possession of a rational faculty than to set that faculty aside, lest he fall into pride, and simply accept what his priest or preacher or rabbi or mullah tells him to believe OR to use his mind actively to question everything and inspect the evidence himself and draw conclusions tested by logic and all the evidence that unrolls over the course of his life.
It is a moral issue, because his very life depends on knowing the nature of the place where he lives. To hold ideas for which one does not have one's own evidence, which does not pass the tests of comparison to all the evidence and the rigor of logic is immoral, because it risks giving oneself a "picture" of himself and his world which is false and, just as a map with false lines on it, can lead him over a cliff to the waste of his life.
Now, if you don't regard a man's life as his highest, most valuable possession, the one for which he does have responsibility, the one he will keep or lose, well, then, you must regard my perspective as odd and, then, you have the ethical responsibility of proving what you do think is the starting point of values.
Thanks for your thoughtful contribution and giving me the chance to partially disagree with it and to surge on at this very length.
First, I agree that early religion was a fairly primitive attempt to answer the questions of modern philosophy, and that when more formal reasoning was applied to theology that that was a definite improvement. I also happen to agree with you that eliminating faith in the supernatural (or irrational metaphysics - ha) is a good idea. That's why I call myself a bright.
http://the-brights.net /
I disagree when you say that religion and philosophy may have the same subject but different subject matter (actually, I have to admit, I'm not sure how to parse that part) because religion deals with the say-so of others rather than observable reality. When Kant wrote of the noumenon, he was writing about something other than observable reality- and he was definitely doing philosophy.
When you suggest that religion is immoral (because of its method) as opposed to 'secular philosophy' (since I consider theology to non-secular philosophy, I won't say as opposed to 'philosophy')- that is of course a normative and a philosophical claim. It is a claim of moral philosophy though, as opposed to metaphilosophy. In other words, if it is correct, it would only mean that religions have immoral philosophies, but not that they don't have philosophies at all.
I must reiterate that just because you claim fact as the basis of your philosophy/religion does not make it so. Many Christians would say that the Bible to be absolute fact. The Bible is to many Christians as the Axioms are to you. If the Bible is absolute fact, Christianity is fact-based. If the Axioms are absolute fact, Objectivism is fact-based. If the Koran is absolute fact, Islam is fact-based. There is no definitive proof that any of these are fact, however. To say that they are requires a leap of faith. I admittedly am not an expert in Objectivism, as I don't have the time to get an M.A. in letting others think for me, (striving to better the world is time consuming) but I understand the first Axiom to be, and correct me if I am wrong, "I am aware of something," (emphasis on I) and "I am aware of something." (emphasis on something) The fact of the matter is, there is no way to prove that is true. You believe that it is true, but that does not make it so. Your religion/philosophy most certainly does require faith.
Your "loyalty" to said religion/philosophy goes far beyond arguing for it in a reasonable manner. You use it exclusively to argue for points, you refuse to accept that it may be wrong or have flaws, you continue in your delusion that it will one day grow and hold sway, and continue to believe that it is impossible to debate you unless it is on the terms of Objectivism.
There will be no upsurge in Objectivist intellecuals. Objectivism is not the only religion to rely on objective values. Islam, Christianity, and virtually every religion in the world holds objective values, though none of them, Objectivism included, stand firm. The "value of each man's life in the face of the growth of omnipotent government" does not require any religion/philosophy or writings. Objectivism is not "the growing Philosophy of Freedom." If it were I would have no desire to fight it. Freedom requires the freedom to think for yourself and question authority. Objectivism does not have that. You and the only other person of the Objectivist persuasion I have encountered, another user on this site, username of "Wendy" have voted with the Ayn Rand institute on every issue, like carbon copies. There is no disagreement, the beacon of rational people thinking for themselves, of true self-interest. There is a communal effort to push the agenda of Objectivism. The philosophy of Freedom has no name but Freedom, and it has been around for a lot longer than Ayn Rand. You mock my "lack of understanding about how to establish proof," which apparantly can only be done using the writings of Ayn Rand, showing that even still you believe that the only way to go about estabishing proof is by using the Objectivist Axioms.
I'd like to disagree with you on that, but also with pbeaird's position. Philosophy is not a secular euphemism for religion- rather, religion is merely non-secular philosophy. I'll say more above.
I already said that, while both religion and philosophy strive to offer a view of the world, of man, of his relationship to reality, the actual difference between the two is one of mental method.
Religion demands faith as a way of assenting to the tenets of the religion and as the only method of being a good person. Philosophy thrives on the opposite. It fulfills what you say you want. It acts to question every assumption.
If you don't know that already, read Plato's account of the life and career of Socrates (in The Republic, for instance). Then, when you have a basic understanding of Plato's hierarchy of the Good, from the material world, up through abstractions, up through mathematics, finally to the realm of the Forms, well, then read his student Aristotle, who disagreed with Plato in every particular, including his method of inquiry and proof. Then, keep reading in the history of philosophy and see how each succeeding philosopher found a way to question the conclusions of the previous philosophers. The fact that each philosophy offers a specific way of looking at the world, at man, at reason, at evidence, at proof and draws conclusions which make that philosophy a specific worldview does not mean it is a dogma, nor a religion, nor that it fails to ask questions.
So, the method of philosophy is exactly the opposite that of religion. It is the contrast between the active, questioning mind and the passive, accepting mind. If you don't know what every person who has come out of religion knows, as have all such people for centuries, then what religious writers or philosophers have your read?
The thing about a world view and a thinking method is that they become the way you looka t everything. You object to that. You have such fixed habits yourself, in case you don't grasp what it is you are doing in each and every one of your posts. Why wouldn't a person approach everything else from the perspective of the worldview and thinking method he is convinced is correct? Is it supposed to be a whole different universe every time you wake up? How are you to make sense of even your eyesight, if you have no method of using your mind to process the evidence? Do you actually think YOU don't have a fixed method you use? One element of your method is to look first to see how you may disagree with everything anyone says. Not a very intelligent way to approach others, given that they may know things you do not.
Your rendition of what you think the axioms of Objectivism are is so far off from what they are that I'm amazed you aren't honest enough to keep your mouth shut, instead of holding yourself up for the embarrassment that you criticize ideas without even hnowing what they are. Read, learn, enjoy!
Axioms are what you begin your prsentation of a philosophy with, not the way you learn the evidence in the world that causes you to formulate the philosophy and its basic ideas. The difference is between learning, then presenting what you learned. Axioms are the starting points which must be true in the direct experience of a conscious being before he can begin to build proofs. Some axioms make proof impossible (your radical skepticism for instance). Some axioms are needed for any proof to be possible. An example. If God knows all, he never needs proof, in fact, the method would not even occur to him. He doesn't even look and see all, since that would be a method of gathering evidence. He already knows all. That starting point makes proof irrelevant.
So, you treat axioms, which are the base of proof, as though they are acts of faith, because they themselves do not require proof. When you open your eyes and see the world, proof is not called for. How do you know there is something out there? You see it. That is the starting point. What it is that is out there, what its nature is, what kinds of things there are, how they behave, what their characteristic are, are all to be learned by a perpetual asking of the questions: What is it? How is it similar to other things? What does it do and how? Too simple for you? Well, that is the nature of starting points. They seem self-evident and are the basis for all further proofs.
That is the method of reason and is conclusive proof that axioms are NOT taken on faith. They are experienced directly. If you want to know the conclusions a belief leads to, look closely at those starting points.
Religion, instead, demands as proof of your worthiness and spirituality (proof of your willingness to submit your head in conformity) that you accept very complex ideas (the infinite, that consciousness lies inside or behind the universe, that you are a sinner, etc.) just because they are told to you by some human being, either in writing or in speech, by means of a commitment to the ideas with NO evidence, no logic, no proof...which is the method of faith.
If your knee-jerk skepticism blocks you from grasping this, then you have no chance. Reality is in front of your face, yet the mental tools for identifying it which you were born with have been turned OFF.
Now, it is not hopeless. Get Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and read it, with special attention to the chapter on axioms. If you approach this with sincerity (which means the willingness to be taught by another person who has been down the path before you), you will be able to see what others see in Objectivism.
BTW, the upsurge in Objectivist scholarship and teachers isn't a future event, as you imply. It is already happening. Go to Amazon and look for the names Leonard Peikoff, Harry Binswanger, Tara Smith, Andrew Bernstein, George Reisman, John Lewis, Yaron Brook, Keith Lokitch, Lisa VanDamme, Robert Mayhew, Thomas A. Bowden, Tore Boeckmann, Peter Schwartz, Michael Berliner, David Harriman, Shoshana Milgram, Edwin Locke, ONkar Ghate, Michael Paxton, Mary Ann Sures, Jeff Britting, John Ridpath, Allan Gotthelf, Gary Hull, Robert Tracinski, Debi Ghate, Richard M. Salsman, Craig Biddle, James Valiant, Amy Peikoff, Jerry Kirkpatrick, Linda roark, David Kelley, Brian Simpson, Andrew Lewis, Eric Daniels, C. Bradley Thompson, Robert Garmong, Adam Mossoff, Daryl WRight, Dina Schein Federman, Greg Salmieri,Edith Packer, Ellen Kenner, Susan Crawford, Pat Corvini, and a growing number of others, as they graduate from ARI's OAC and look for the names of those who win the annual scholarship essay contests on Rand's novels for high schoolers.
Did you say NO upsurge in Objectivist intellectuals? Well, as it happens in front of your eyes, you might ask yourself what it is in Ayn Rand's ideas that inspires the intelligence and career choices of so many intelligent, well-educated people. In fact, if one were to study the history of technical philosophy, as I did, why would he find such conviction that all the arguments and worldviews of past philosophers leave unanswered questions that Rand answers so convincingly.
To stand on the outside of all this and take potshots that only show you don't know the thing you are criticizing is to miss the excitement, the inspiration, the idealism of those intent on making the world a better place to live in, Richard.
Using your mind to understand what we are talking about does not make you a carbon copy. I'd be glad to work with you through a simple study of Objectivism, if you can approach it with an open mind. Can you?
The point of this entire debate was to demonstrate to you that your worldview (I like that word. Much less emotional baggage than religion or philosophy. Kudos) was not obviously superior to that of your opponent's and to call another's worldview "utterly false" is preposterous. I was in no way attempting to disprove or challenge your worldview, as that would be equally preposterous, but rather to knock you off of your high horse. Sorry, elitism bugs. My argument against all inflexible worldviews remains, however. It matters not whether your worldview was the product of active thought or of faith, if it results in someone else doing your thinking for you. When's the last time you interjected something into the philosophical spectrum? You talk about how all philosophers question the one before him, but where is your questioning of Ayn Rand? It doesn't matter if she came from a long line of independent thinkers if you follow her like a lemming. After all, Christianity, especially the Catholic variety, has similar lines. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Pope John Paul II, there are more, I just don't know hem all. I never said I didn't have a worldview, I just didn't think it was terribly relevant to the conversation, other than to point out that it was neither Objectivist nor Christian. I suppose my worldview is that the best way to determine truth is to think for yourself, and once you have developed your opinion, the best way to test it is against the opinions of others. That's why I like this site so much. I am one of those people who thinks he is never wrong, because if I think I am wrong I change what I think.
While I appreciate your invitation, I unfortunately have no interest in being initiated. I like my little worldview, and while there is certainly no problem with standing on the shoulders of giants, I cannot abide standing in their shadow.
Thank you for a more sincere tone. I am led by your comments to ask: If you prefer a "flexible" worldview, what would that look like. Since each thing that exists is what it is and not something else, how can a worldview or any identification of a truth be "flexible"? You must mean something by that term other than the commonsense meaning. So, I'm asking what you mean by that word.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not unaware that in the world of philosophies there is one that talks that way. It is called Pragmatism. It wa first formulated by the American Charles Pierce, championed by William James and the philosopher of education, John Dewey. However, as Dr. Tara Smith pointed out in her speech and article, The Menace of Pragmatism, it is more a method of thinking than a metaphysics or worldview. It is characterized by a refusal to think in principles, distrusting anything longer away from the immediate moment than a concern with short-range advice about what actions might "work". Its advocates are seen constantly expressing skepticism about the views of all others, habitually saying, "Not necessarily". Richard, this sounds too much like your conflating religion and philosophy together as authoritarian and inflexible.
If you suspect that, in spite of having never read a Pragmatist philosopher, this may be an accurate description of the way you think and shrink away from anyone's ideas that you did not originate yourself, may I suggest that you at least dip into the subject by looking at Tara Smith's Menace of Pragmatism. You can find it at www.theobjectivestandard.com or in video stream on the site of www.aynrand.org .
If you only knew the history of Western philosophy and western religion, you'd have some idea of just how much Ayn Rand, the only voice championing independence of thought, had to question literally pillar of Western ideas in order to provide the valuable proofs of moral philosophy she had endowed us with.
You ask whether or not I've questioned her views. Of course. It is not a dogma, sir. One literally cannot end up in agreement with Rand unless one follows her evidence, logic and proofs with a constant eye on the world in which one lives, asking questions at every one of her startling conclusions. If you read the writings of several of the names I provided of well-educated folks who are writing to apply Rand's philosophy to their fields of scholarship, yoo'll find independent minds AT WORK.
Richard, the only alternative to the learning from others that you reject so totally is to reinvent the culture in which you live and the whole history of philosophy. I do not mean it as an insult when i say that you are not up to the task. No one is. Rand, herself, gave credit to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as deeply-thorough pioneers in the analysis of what reason and reality are, though she disagrees with both in key ways. So, it is not copy-cat sychophantry vs. total creation of the world. You learn from others and use your judgement to verify or refute their specific ideas. As for my own ideas, I'm working on a book entitled, You Are Not A Sinner. I won't begin a descriptin of it, just to say that I see people robbed of much of the enthusiasm and productivity of their lives because the take the disapproval of others far too seriously, and that scorn for all others originates in religion.
If you are an original thinker, we are waiting for what you have to tell us someday.
Didn't this whole thing start when you attacked someone else's worldview as being inferior. That's the whole point. A worldview, yours, mine, or theirs, is what it is.
In defense of my worldview, I do not absolutely reject other people's thoughts. There is nothing wrong with standing on the shoulders of others. (I think I've said this already) The problem starts when you stop there. Also, what I meant by "flexible" is the ability to change or modify your opinion or worldview in light of new evidence. Though I have employed extreme skepticism in the above comments, it was a theoretical designed to get you to understand your hypocrisy, not an expression of my worldview. I agree that to function, humans must assume that their perception is reality, though I recognize that this may not be the case. Also, a worldview, be it religious, philosophical, or something else entirely, should never be justification for scorn of others, which is the basis of your book, and the basis of my argument against your scorn for others.
I think I see your approach better after your explanation.
1. When you adopt extreme skepticism in order to make your point, you risk making it look like you have adopted the rejection of all worldviews, leaving you standing nowhere. A moderate tone is best, expecially in Internet text, for not creating a misimpression about where you stand.
2. Confidence in one's point of view. We all probe at each other, digging for something deeper than peronsal opinion. Only as we learn what constitutes proof (and refutation) can we move out of the realm into the realm of proof. Then, we are in the arena of withstanding objections to our proven conclusions. That tests how well we have observed what really is evidence and how well we have employed logic to sort out contradictions and how well we have considered other evidence that might conflict with your conclusions. I think that process of testing each other's iedea is what comes closest to what you mean by flexible. Right?
So, if you discover or verify for yourself someone else's demonstration that 2 + 2 = 4, how much lack of confidence are you supposed to display in the face of someone who insists that 2 + 2 = 5?
Does your idea of flexible, including holding an "open mind" about a thoroughly proven conclusion? Does it mean being Andy-Griffith polite about asserting that the 5-man is absolutely wrong?
Now, I see that you have completely forgotten what my original statement was. And, forgetting it plus NOT asking me to provide proof, you have moved over into the position of attributing to me an attitude that I do not have and did not display: hypocrisy. You dropped the facts of my original statement and now substitute your personal evaluation of the meaning of my words. Seems you may be guilty of the very thing you are accusing me of, by skipping facts and inserting your personal evaluation.
I said that the religious world view was completely false. You didn't ask me what I meant by that, what it is false about. You didn't ask me to provide any proof of what I meant. I did, in fact, offer you some evidence and you openly said you didn't care about the Bible as a source of Christian beliefs. In short, did not recognize that I was offering evidence to support my contention AND you were not prepared to examine the proof I was offering.
It is not true that all points of view are correct, nor all worldviews. A thief's point of view that among hunman beings there are the hunters and the sheep and he's entitled by this "natural law" to take from you what you have not securely protected is NOT true, correct or justified just because it is his point of view. We refute such a self-justification with ideas of morality, individual rights, including property rights and we organize government and law enforcement to deal with such self-declared "wolves".
Another example on a larger scale. The Communists of the 20th century conquered numerous countries based on a worldview created by Karl Marx and expanded by Lenin. They put to death hundreds of millions of human beings based on the unsuitabiltiy of those persons in the worldview of the Communists. In the end, Communism couldn't even feed its own captive peoples and its multi-nation empire fell to its knees One can examine Marx's writings and detect its factual errors and illogic and many did that in his own time. One can look at the history of Communism and see its opposition to all that gives concepts of value their meaning (human lives). One can review its later history and see why robbing society of the free function of most of the minds in that empire guaranteed that production of basic human needs could never keep up with the bare minimum needed by the populace. The worldview of Communism is false, always was and one has to wonder about the motivation of its exponents and enforcers.
I conclude that it is NOT true aht all worldviews are equal and deserving of equal respect.
Now, I called the religious worldview totally false and I mean it. I do have confidence in that conclusion from decades of careful and close esxmination of the Bible, its modern day spokesmen, its most intellectual apologists. You rejected even the simple and clear evidence I offered, not because you had a refutation to offer of my arguments, but just on the claim that all worldviews deserve equal respect. They do not. Some offer proof, some require faith, meaning have no proof to offer...only threats (an eternity in Hell), moral scorn (you are guilty of the worst sin of unbelief), and rejection from the group love of the conformists (you are not of the Fold, you are an unbeliever).
I am at work on a book that focuses, not on simple factual contradictions in the source book of Christian religion, but specifically on moral contradiction.
There was no hypocrisy in my claim. I offer proof, if you are willing to base your thinking and accusations (of hypocrisy) on evidence (which you say a flexible mind is always open to), logic and proof.
I spelled euphemism wrong. As soon as I hit the button the title came up and I thought to myself, "somehting ain't right." I apologize, it's been a long day. Also, Christians would say that the Bible is, not that the Bible to be. An error in editing on my part. Again, my apologies.
The truth is, that those church agencies take federal money, and use it to do a half-assed job of helping people, while paying rather more attention to the task of spreading their propoganda.
For example, apparently helping to fight AIDS in Africa consists of forcing aid agencies to spend a 3rd of the money they would have spend on supplying condoms, on pamphlets telling African adults to just say no to sex.
In this country, the abstinence program for teenagers, personified in "virginity pledges" have resulted in a rise in both teenage pregnancy, and sexually transmitted disease.
I looked, but couldn't find a link to a newspaper article I saw recently that talked about how an agency that fed homeless folks was thrown out of a church for not making hungry people say prayers before feeding them.
Since churches are not required to open their books to anyone, we'll probably never know how much of those federal dollars - my taxes! - was routed through the Mormon church to help pass prop. H8.
I could go on, but you can certainly find your own examples of what a self-righteous, small minded bunch Christians are. (not that I think any other religion is better, if that makes you feel better)
Oh, wait, I can't quit without pointing out that your saying that churches were the only ones to help in the wake of Katrina is hardly a defense of your precious war criminal president. (personally, I'm looking forward to seeing him in handcuffs)
And "religion in general" is the reason that there is war in the middle east.
All I'm saying is that as a government, the US needs to get out of the religion business. It's worse than crack cocaine.
I've given up all hopes of coming to an understanding with you, but you are so crazy I've just got to keep you talking, in the hope that other rational people are watching a get scared away from every position you hold. In an effort to do that, I'm going to mow down every straw man you propped up for me, and hope that nobody thinks I have two accounts going, one to prop up the straw men and another to mow them down.
1. Condoms do not prevent AIDS. Condoms protect against bacteria, but viruses like HIV are small enough to slip through the weave and spread infection. The only 100% shot you have of not spreading AIDS is not having sex. While the phamphlets might not convince everyone not to have sex, not everyone wears the free condoms either, and I'm liking the odds of keeping it in your pants at preventing AIDS.
2. There is no proof that abstinence programs have directly lead to a rise in teenage pregnancies and STDs. Furthermore, this has nothing to do with the faith-based initiatives, nor is there any reason abstinence programs can't coexist with courses that teach safe sex.
3. How convenient. Even if this did happen, there are abuses of every system, and a few examples of individual wrongdoing is hardly an indictment of the system as a whole.
4. The people have voted, and the results are in. You can complain about them all you want, and make as many cute little words out of the proposition title as you want, but it's not going to change anything. Just like it didn't when George Bush beat Al Gore in 2001. Yay, Democracy!
5. You are obviously a very opened minded and reasonable person, as you have demonstrated in your numerous hateful comments.
6. The fact that churches were the only ones to help in Katrina is not at all a defense of the President, who happens to be your President, too, according to the little flag after you username, it's a defense of faith-based initiatives, and it's a good one, whether you are willing to address it or not. Based on the remainder of this statement, I'm going to go out on a limb and say thay you believe that 9-11 was an inside job, and poke fun at you by suggesting that you belive Bush summoned a hurricane with his evil Global Warming powers to destroy New Orleans because he's a racist, knowing full well that you only believe that he's a racist who destroyed New Orleans because he didn't do enough to stop Global Warming. The failures of Katrina are an indictment of Big Government solutions to Private Sector problems and the placement the city, which has been leveled by hurricanes before, not of the President, who really had very little control over the whole thing. (Remember, he's not a king) He has committed no war crimes, nor had any ordered, and so you will never see him in handcuffs, though he is hardly precious in any way other than in being the Commander in Chief.
7. Actually, the prevailing wisdom would say that the problems in the Middle East are more of a cultural thing combined with anger about their exploitation by the West in general, primarily Britain. After all, we wouldn't want to say that Islam promotes violence, would we?
8. Finally, religion is worse than crack cocaine. I don't think I even need to say anything about this one, the crazy really speaks for itself.
1) You are doing a disservice to your readers and the world by stating that condoms don't prevent HIV. You are incorrect. If you do your research you will find out differently. I recommend everyone to research this and don't listen to this religious nonsense. Think about it. STOP misleading the world through your biblical glasses.
The problem with aids will not go away by denying people of Condoms and teaching them to keep their pants up, skirts down,& legs crossed. We are animals and have urges to breed. It is going to happen whether your religious or not. KEEP IT REAL. Catholics are partially to blame for the spread of AIDs in Africa by it's ridiculous, unrealistic, teachings. Do your research from more then one source.
2) There have been studies done since the "absence programs" have been started. It DOESN'T show that there is a rise in teen pregnancy and STD's, within the kids who have made the pledge, but does show there is NO difference in the rates since it was started. Kids who have taken the absences pledge have the same rate of teen pregnancy and STD's as kids who didn't take the pledge. Again, do your research and DON'T use one source for it.
3) Abuse of the system, Let's have a look at Intelligent Design on Trial. Dover Pennsylvania. You can find it on Documentaries 4 U. And of course their is Prop. 8. George Bush Sr. & Jr., Sarah Palin, Ted Haggard, the Catholic pedophiles. ect.....
4) Yes, the people have voted and I am so pleased that Elizabeth Dole, the BIGOT of Godless Americans, has been taken DOWN along with McSlain and his delusional side kick Palin.
5) The only "open minded" people I know are the ones who don't get their information from one source. They are smart enough to do a little work called research. They don't check their brains at the steps of the buildings of worship.
6) The reason why the hurricane wiped out so many people was because of the structure of the levies. The levies were built to withstand a level 3 hurricane, not a level 5. NOW..people who have studied hurricanes and knew about the levies, predicted this would happen if a cat. 5 hurricane came through. This was brought to the attention of our leaders only to have it fall on deaf ears. By the way, Christians weren't the only who to helped the victims of this disaster. As a matter of fact, Atheists also donate to the Red Cross in many ways including but not limited to blood. We just don't feel we need to carry a chip on our shoulders. Christians are NOT the saviours of the world.
7) All of the Abrahamic religions DO promote violence. Just read the Old Testament of the Bible. Look at the Koran & Torah. Great examples, Gaza, Iraq, 9/11. All religious.
8) The Abrahamic religions have a track record of horrific crimes against humanity in the name of their "god" with out one shread of evidence it exists. They go by their holy books that promote such things. Again read the Old Testament from front to back.
Religious people are delusional. The meaning of delusional according to Webster's College Dictionary is as follows.
Delusional:
1: an act or instance of deluding
2: a false belief or opinion
3: a false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact (This one sums it up rather nicely.)
People, do your research. Stop using ONE book to get your information. Get educated.
Churches need to start doing their part to help the economy. Start paying taxes.