Why Do Philosophers Keep Getting Ayn Rand Wrong?
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- Опубликовано: 9 июн 2024
- In this episode of New Ideal Live, Mike Mazza and Aaron Smith discuss Mazza’s recently published article about why academic philosophers tend to get Rand’s ideas wrong so frequently and the parochialism involved in many of their critiques.
Among the topics covered:
● What Mazza aimed to explain in this article;
● Why responding to academic critics is important;
● What it means for philosophers to engage in parochialism;
● How the methods of academic philosophers are poorly suited to understanding Rand;
● The inductive structure of Rand’s arguments;
● The multiple factors behind philosophers’ dismissal of Rand’s ideas;
● Why the parochialism issue is particularly important to identify;
● Why historians of philosophy tend not to make the mistake of parochialism;
● How even Objectivists can be parochial and what they should do to avoid it.
Mentioned in this podcast are the New Ideal articles “Why Can’t Professional Philosophers Get Rand Right?” by Mazza (newideal.aynrand.org/why-cant...) and “Why Massimo Pigliucci Gets Ayn Rand Wrong” by Smith (newideal.aynrand.org/why-mass..., plus the book A Companion to Ayn Rand (www.amazon.com/Companion-Rand...) edited by Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri (specifically Chapter 1, “An Introduction to the Study of Ayn Rand”). The podcast was recorded on April 18, 2024.
0:00:00 Introduction
0:00:48 The aim of Mazza’s article
0:05:34 Importance of responding to academics
0:12:15 Engaging in parochialism
0:18:18 Limits of academic philosophers’ methods
0:25:29 Inductive structure of Rand’s arguments
0:28:07 Factors behind dismissal of Rand’s ideas
0:37:08 Identifying the parochialism issue
0:41:34 Historians of philosophy and parochialism
50:06 Avoiding one’s own parochialism
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Read Mike's article, "Why Can’t Professional Philosophers Get Rand Right?", here: newideal.aynrand.org/why-cant-professional-philosophers-get-rand-right/
Simple. The standards for becoming a "professional" philosopher have dropped so low that you're not really dealing with true pros anymore. So your question is actually a loaded one.
Imagine if the NBA hired nothing but cripples, and then I asked, "Why can't pro basketballers make a lay up anymore?"
@@williamswig Handicapper General
@@williamswigsame point for many PhD in Humanities
Because they don't want to.
Its the unnfocused mind at work.
Watch the video. Some of them do want to. Engage in the philosophic content of the video. Following it will stretch your mind, particularly if you follow such content regularly.
By and large, most people tend to look for deductive arguments. Even Leonard Peikoff, who studied directly under Ayn Rand and was sympathetic to her philosophy, said that it took him around 10 years to get rid of this tendency. He writes that he several times constructed what he thought was a better argument, only to learn that Rand said it was useless. Imagine then philosophers who are unsympathetic to her.
Yes, exactly. Most people who reject Rand assume that she, like mainstream culture, starts from arbitrary ideas and "deduces" from them. This is the method of religion and mysticism in principle. "Deduces" is in quotes because deduction is based on induction from the conceptualized senses. Symbol manipulation is not deduction. Rand systematically induces the ideas she uses. She constantly stresses reducing ideas to the concrete, kicking the epistemological tires. Peikoff warns against both rationalism and empiricism in _Understanding Objectivism. Leftists tend to rationalism (mind w/o body) and Rightists to empiricism (body w/o mind). America, we have a problem and its vastly more fundamental than mere politics. People are returning to varieties of the unfocused mind from the focused mind of the Enlightenment. Peikoff, in _DIM Hypothesis_, says we are now changing from the disintegrated mind of Leftist nihilists to the misintegrated mind of Rightist religionists. Religion is the historical default when social fantasies fail and reason is not a cultural option.
To highlight how ridiculous Nozick’s approach is he might as well have said I’m going to take Darwin’s argument in On the Origin of Species and see if I can make it deductive rather than inductive.
I hadn’t gotten to the part of the video where Mike makes the same point. 🤣
Nozick was a clown. I asked him about Rands metaphysics. He referred me to his journal article instead of answering. I said that he barely discussed her metaphysics in that article. He told me to leave the Harvard yard. Adventures in Philosophyland! Nozick was intellectually chaotic.
thanks for taking this challenge, looking forward to the article
Great talk, guys.
Please do a show discussing the different methods of conceptualization.
Objectivism is anti-religion. Statism is a religion. Most intellectuals are statists.
What is your definition of ‘statist’?
@@KennisonDF The collective political body has supremacy over the individual
I divide philosophies into focused mind and unfocused mind. It bypasses a lot of nonsense.
Then how do you distinguish statism from collectivism?
This is exactly where Mises Got ayn rand right
I would hope that enough - if only a minority - of students have worked out that a lot of supposed mainstream academic philosophy is bad, and that being dismissed by such people is not necessarily a negative. However, to reach that point means the student already will have had to develop some ability to cut through the flim-flam.
I tried to read Kant many years ago (maybe it was Critique of Pure Reason)... could not make heads or tails of it. Even read a book about it and that person said that he thought that even Kant did not know what he was saying... still did not understand it.
Nietzsche makes same criticism. However, Schopenhauer liked Kant and I don't understand why.
Carl Friedrich Gauss, the famous mathematician agrees with you
Kant originated the technique required to sell irrational notions to the men of a skeptical, cynical age who have formally rejected mysticism without grasping the rudiments of rationality. The technique is as follows: if you want to propagate an outrageously evil idea (based on traditionally accepted doctrines), your conclusion must be brazenly clear, but your proof unintelligible. Your proof must be so tangled a mess that it will paralyze a reader’s critical faculty-a mess of evasions, equivocations, obfuscations, circumlocutions, non sequiturs, endless sentences leading nowhere, irrelevant side issues, clauses, sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, and big chunks of the arbitrary thrown in as self-evident, erudite references to sciences, to pseudo-sciences, to the never-to-be-sciences, to the untraceable and the unprovable-all of it resting on a zero: the absence of definitions. I offer in evidence the Critique of Pure Reason.
-Ayn Rand Lexicon/Kant/Psychological Techniques
I have denied knowledge therefore, in order to make room for faith
-Kant, preface,CPR, 1st edition
@@richardzellers Schopy said no to life.
This is a breath of fresh air. I've been a devout lay Buddhist for 25 years.....there is a notion she understood in her writing that Siddartha also gets to - this psychology of the human ego. Appreciate this conversation.
Great analysis and exemplification of parochialism.
Classic Mazza W
What about philosophers who take her seriously but disagree with her?
ayn herself stated why. All the philosphers (but her) are platonists.. She's an Aristotean. Plato believed that SOMEHOW, you can have your cake and eat it, too Aristotle, pointed-out that such a thing is impossible and that the wanting it to be possible is low-life, evil The attempt to divert thought from reality is an evil thing, leading only to destruction.
what about Locke?
He argues that when we learn something, we are recollecting the knowledge we gained before we were born (Plato & Gallop, 2019). In contrast, John Locke (1788) takes the position that the human mind is a blank slate (tabula rasa) and that we gain all knowledge through sense experience.
Bacon, Newton, Voltaire, Jefferson, Thomas Paine
There is a concept of "late stage Capitalism" floating around. Has the Institute ever addressed this issue, the validity of its concepts, and why it might have become such an acceted idea?
I have wonder how the thesis, that professional philosophers want analytic deductive arguements only, squares up with the Critique of Pure Reason being nothing of the sort (except the Antimonies, of course).
The only historical philosopher of note who might pass that threshold was Spinoza.
Jeff, your comment strikes me as rather disingenuous. The Critique of Pure Reason unequivocally asserts that analytic deduction unaided by synthetic induction is an impossibility. Kant, in his exposition of the synthetic a priori, delineates distinct realms of validity for these two modes of reasoning: one for empirical matters of fact and the other for purely tautological propositions. It is crucial to note that antinomies arise solely concerning the realm of the unknown, not within the bounds of phenomenal metaphysics. Furthermore, I concur with your assessment of Spinoza's approach to analytics in axiomatization; establishing clear definitions is imperative for forestalling misunderstandings, regardless of their official sanction.
@@cryptocoin5318 You entirely missed my point, inverted it even. First off, I was not making ANY comment on the content of CPR, but rather the _form_ of Kant's argumentation therein. AND I was commenting that it _wasn't_ a bunch of analytic deductive arguments - ie. of the type that this video says Ayn Rand's arguments are being "forced into".
Kant's style was to give explanatory arguments (aka. transcendental arguments).
Why do contemporary philosophers try to force Rand into presenting "clear valid deductions from intuitively obvious premises" but they don't do that for Kant?
Absolutely, the absence of that crucial comma led me to misunderstand your statement, completely altering its intended meaning. Kant coined the term "transcendental deduction," which is somewhat misleading. His argument was primarily grounded in inductive reasoning. It's akin to Aristotelian induction but with a more intricately detailed technical explanation. Kant's investigations weren't strictly deductive at all; he attempted it but found it impossible, hence the absence of clear-cut deductions from the outset. The term "Explanatory" in describing his approach should have hinted at this. However, with a technical flair he uses MORE inductive as spectrum to abstraction. Simply put, it was all about induction = explanatory. Lastly, when referring to her audience as "rational beings," for objecticism it seems she's targeting only the top 1 percent of the population, unless she's using the Aristotelian definition of "rational being which iam guessing she is.
@@jeffreyscott4997that is a deductive argument. What is the purpose of the concept of transcendental? To distinguish between that which can be grasped in this world vs what cannot.if such a things basis is not in this world it is function as a faith based presupposition that everything must conform to.
@@Mr.Witness I comprehend your perspective; having been in the same boat, I grasp your viewpoint. He employed inductive reasoning leading to deduction. For instance, I intend to engage in inductive reasoning within an organism, thereby elucidating its, explanatory, process, time-this constitutes induction reasoning. Kant's approach involved induction reasoning into the deduction, wherein he meticulously mapped out the categories of reason and delineated the limitations of deduction Consequently, he expunged universal truths or ideals because they surpass the limitations of induction in turn revising them into universal concepts (phenomenological AKA Trans). He subsequently delves into the explanation of antinomies after that. He states also many times both are necessary for experience but he articulates it better by stating MORE induction, More Deduction when in engaging into philosophical investigations. In the book he states is PURE reason possible? Deduction alone is not possible without experience. Just to make it more clearer after his work, and understanding it all philosophers were doing both mode of thought however he uses the word More empirical and more abstraction as spectrum when engaging into philosophical investigations. Anything that has to do with explanatory-style is more inductive reasoning. His other works like piratical judgment more deductive.
Read her praise for William Hickman and then try to argue she was not a psychopath, or at least proposed an ideology that valorized psychopaths.
Ayn Rand got Ayn Rand wrong...so many holes in objectivism reminds me of a judiciary who is a strict constructionist...simply unable to see all the holes and opportunities for objectivism to go awry...ex. Rapture etc
Mike's paper is very good... but it leaves you wondering, perhaps Rand isn't popular just because she doesn't play well with others. As I learned to publish in philosophy the overarching rule was to always anticipate how readers will take your assertions and arguments and present them with due deference to the expected hostile readers. Maybe if Rand was writing today, when people might give her grace as a possibly autistic writer, she'd have fared better with academics.
I think ARI needs to spend more time making people aware of the ideas than spending their time writing about them. What is the point of writing all this if nobody knows about it?
So what does this mean? I think there should be a more concerted effort to recruit people to ARI that then go out and actually talk to people. Just like yaron does but dozens of yarons. Maybe even like a single yaron in every single state and then they go around in their area and speak. It seems to me these ideas aren’t catching traction because they are wrong or there isn’t a plethora of them it’s just that people NEVER come in contact with them
It looks like you know about it. Some of these videos have reached over a million views. If you agree with these views, then spread them yourself. Pitch in where you see your assistance as helping. Write letters to the editor that show your knowledge of Rand's ideas. Want ARI to be more effective? Then volunteer your time.
Thanks for the detailed vid. I glanced thru the article as well. But, could we not distill the essence of the matter in 3-4 lines? I think it is same physiological reason why most ppl disliked Roark or Rearden..
The point is for you to engage in the material and distill it yourself. Those three or four lines you request would give you nothing in mental growth. Dealing with this content in a long form is more likely to train your mind. That way you would not be hungry for distillation of the content to its death.
@@RogerFusselman Thanks. But my question/comment was for ARI team. They might get what I am saying and why I am saying it. BTW AR used to distill very well. Cheers..
Ayn Rand does not appear to have grasped any of the philosophers she cited.
I think her main problem is that philosophers recognize that she just serves a week-old stew of Aristotelian eudemonism and common-sense anti-Kantianism. Show me something we haven't already heard... I say this as a former engineer.
I'm not necessarily pro rand but
The problem my laymen notices is that objectivism gets in the way of lines of measure that require realism over anti realism to be anounced or otherwise its just ( idealism vs physicalism) that push subjectivity into the other.
Id say even objectiveness gets miss identified itself at times.
Something like biological population species that hyper splits and blurs things where everyone talks past each other ends up being the major teaching of ordering and categorizing skills that gets transferred into so much .
It's sloppy built in plausible deniabilty open to interpretation embedded . But I imagine rand wouldn't be very objectiveness in many avenues like this.
The common time period mistakes as needs & demands of 1900s are truly anomalous in the history of humanity and its becoming easier for the greater world to share foresight on its stepping stone makes much of whats phylosphized in older Europe was installed in America. The very duslistic desputes that was never really an American uk deal .
What little i know the 1900s structuralism adopted so much 1800s European political scale that socio-economics split the actual orientation & direction of American core decendants with the more prayer logic conservative whatsboutism vs cursed rationalism progressive interventionism.
This has dominated the academics and mainstream of everything.
The
What is, or even can be, more realistic than "Existence exists"; i.e. "the primacy of existence; i.e. reality. The only thing Objectivism does, or even CAN, get in the way of is ANTI-realism
@SpacePatrollerLaser yeah, but how can you talk about a time 6 billion years ago when the earth doesn't exist nor go around the sun ? Or talk about feilds and waves as over time ?
I'm very pragmatic common sense personally and would love to utilize our objective eqaul measure in idealism, subjectivity on par with physicalism and be more precise and accurate, but we always run into picking and choosing when it suits the cause of agendas.
And obviously the greater worlds dualistic nature drives so much .
@SpacePatrollerLaser the objectivism combed over the inspiration behind postulations can even change phylosphy
@SpacePatrollerLaser organically allowed computational future infrastructure may eventually end this top-down statism vs. top-down old world religious environment where plausible deniabilty & loopholes puts everyone at risk giving rise to more objectivism.
Even physicalism is subject to change without further notice in this future lol
Objective truth is a ...
Because their cultist grift compels them to do so ...
Because many philosophers are left writers.
That doesn't explain it. Being on the left by itself would not do this. Listen to the video and you can understand why.
I have cataloged before on this channel my experiences with professional philosophers' assessments of Rand which was generally positive. If your contention was true, at least one of them would have been discernibly negative. And the one that said she was not "deep in metaphysics" could be forgiven since she did not delve deeply therein publically and the publication of her notes would show that she was as good as any, But those had not been released in 1974.
There is also other material that I have put here:
1. My description of an event involving the "Post-Existentialism Intelligentsia", in 1958, "trading Existentialism for Nihilism" becasue "Esistentialism did not provide 'answers' [No Schnitt, Sherlock; Were you asleep when the Existentialist told you we were on our own and you had to somehow cobble together your own answers based on 'whaterver floats your boat'?']
2. Which could only, and did, lead to the "Pro-Choce"'ers stock answer as of 1989, when asked if the fetus was a living thing, "We don't want to get involved in philsophy"
Now, where does all this lead to? Well, where is the only place it COULD lead to? The bassackward world of pet parents, tiktok and the 30-second attention span, playdates -- With all that implies about scripted, highly-controlled childrens' interaction, and massive indebtedness in the inhabitants of the range-of-the-moment mentality world that is the rule.
How could the dwellers of the land of shfiting, multiple truths, glimpsed only in a blurry, fog-shrouded way do anything but get Ayn Rand wrong? If you remember the full story I told about my visualization upon finding the definition of Nihilism, which terrified me: a searchlight tracing a circle in the sky with its circle of light, then gradually dimming until it was gone and all was darkness. It was not as if a light was being turned off, but, since I have to feed it to you; LIGHT was being turned of; i.e. endarkenment. How long before that reaches even the upper levels of a culture? Even here, after bemoaning how Pig Business has gone woke, you then decide to defend them from the DOJ's attack, rather than saying "Brother; you asked for it". If the rot has gotten here, how can I expect conventional philsophers to NOT blow it out their bubble pipe when I saw the process begin 66 years ago
There is no such thing as a Professional Philosopher, there are only paid Propagandists & Sycophants. Modern Publishing & Academia has usurped and perverted the definition and content to serve it's masters, to such extent that modern philosophy is reduced to a role of moral security blanket for apologists. Rand was a Social Engineer pushing Hyper-Capitalisms no-one mistook her message save the institutionalized, who needed to justify their paychecks by refuting something.
True philosophers would never publish nor be caught dead in a University.
Philosophy is the MATURATION of ones views over time, which can only be achieved through experience and correct understanding.
Because they want to.
Watch the video.
in the first five minutesit was clear that this conversation was bumbling and unconstructive. What the hell is wrong with ARI! You are the reason I stopped donating hundreds of dollars a year some 10 years ago! The Ayn Rand Institute does not understand the ideas of Ayn Rand!
Rand brought this on herself with her brash fiction and scathing rhetoric, and frankly poor ability to understand other thinkers. If she'd spent her career writing restrained philosophical treatises, she'd be regarded very differently. Of course she also wouldn't have been famous that way, or had any cultural impact.
Rand was too ahead of her time and still is. To say that selfish action is the most moral, and altruism is not moral, is so on the nose and so far ahead of even todays zeitgeist. People can’t unhear her words, and will take a long time to really sink in to collective society.
That fact that two people who really should know better think that the majority of philosophers are subjectivist in terms of ethics, and that analytic philosophy was the only philosophy taken seriously in the 20th century, should hint why people don't Rand and her followers seriously. There's no problem with saying there's different kinds arguments. Philosophers argue in different ways all the time. The problem is she has not coherent arguments what so ever. She doesn't argue like a scientist. Scientists make coherent argument based on evidence. Rand simply has stories.
Thank you for proving their point, and that critics of Ayn Rand are in fact dishonest imbeciles. Their point was -or one of them at least- that academic philosophers lie about the truth of her arguments or doesn’t even provide one. That is exactly what you did when you claimed she didn’t provide arguments and that she only tells stories, dishonesty ignoring that she wrote 7 non fiction books and three extensive journals. I ask everyone who reads this to notice the deceitful lies her critics constantly promulgate. It has become truly pathetic at this point.
Roy Child's open letter to Ayn, way back in 1969, was never answered by the objectivists. It cannot be, since Roy used her own words.
I remember looking into this almost a decade ago. There have been a good few responses in fact. Even Roy himself was said to have denounced anarchism on his deathbed.
I'll look into it. He probably used her terms to an exent, but he also probably had an intrinsicist basis for morality.
We have to answer every anarchist crank out there? Life is short. An honest critique of Objectivism never occurred in Rand's lifetime. I'm sure Miss Rand herself was disappointed in how evasive and dishonest the critique was.
I very much agree with and like Ayn Rand and her philosophy. However I don't support the Israeli state, or Hamas. They're in contradiction to objectivism. I agree with Ron Paul on that issue.
ARI has been around nearly forty years. Why can't they persuade professional philosophers?
It's not our job to persuade them.
It is our job to persuade any rational, honest person.
Then they would be "unemployed". ( the professional philosophers as in "who needs them?")
@@jgalt308 McDonald's?
@@RandFanOne That's a convenient excuse for failure, as if philosophers are all irrational and dishonest.
@@williamswiggood ideas take a lot of time. Radical good ones even longer. Extremely radical and novel ones even longer. That she even gets as much attention as she does should be surprising given the nature and presentation of her insights. It may be centuries before she gets the appreciation she deserves.
boring
It is because her own words are doublespeak. She intentionally makes it impossible to nail down anything concrete. And her personal behavior was atrocious.
Could you provide an instance of her making it impossible to nail down anything concrete?
I can tell you have never actually read her work, that's too bad. If you have read her work and still think your statement is true, then provide an example.
What was her atrocious personal behavior?
I have never had a problem understanding exactly what she said.
Rand systematically and explicitly bases all her ideas on concretes. See the online Ayn Rand Lexicon for many examples.
How could an irrational mind set up understand the rational objective mind?
on 🔥
Because ARI also gets her wrong - they did to Rand what the Catholic church did to Aristotle