RoR: Forum

It is quite simply, a matter of life versus death. Choose reason, celebrate man, embrace reality, and you will flourish.
Good article, Lindsay.

John

Post 1

Monday, November 1, 2004 - 3:28am

"Logic has nothing to do with reality," [say the modern philosophers]. There is no reality.
And the tax-paid people who approvingly teach this stuff will consider themselves cool & modern & sophisticated.

And don't they just! They parade their sophistic sense as a way to hide the lack of a soul within themselves - and to make them feel better too many of them seek to destroy youing students who have the souls they don't, but not the 'sophistication.'

What sick, soulless empty human beings these tax-paid tenured toadies are. And how crucially important to be philosophically armed against them before sticking one's own head in their noose.

Post 2

Monday, November 1, 2004 - 12:43pm

Lindsay,
I do enjoy the principles of Rand, and have great regard for her prodigious effort at promoting the individual against philosophies that subverted the ego to the state. However, I also find her work limited, for example her ideas on social development are naive lacking any serious effort to review social causality, she had a limited psychology, and did not always see the essential underpinnings of the ideas she so often so tirelessly pursued. In many regards I see her as heir to both the work of Marx and of Adam Smith, she assumed core failings of both, and both have outlived their usefulness. We need better models that take us beyond where any of these writers reached, this the essence of progress. Pursuing Rand is useful only in regard that much of the world have not even got close to where she reached, the danger in such a fast moving world is that we can fight to bring all to there, only to find we left behind, although I happily concede that much as progress indeed. So, question: is this the place we seek and review new ideas, derived from but not wedded to such as Rand? What is it you wish for?

Post 3

Monday, November 1, 2004 - 10:17am

I'm actually writing a book on this topic. It's not so much that "logic has nothing to do with reality" but that reality is so complex that logic can only grasp parts of it, and that ideas formed using logic have to be tested to come to realistic conclusions about their utility. It is easy to come up with a nice sounding theory that captures the part of reality you think is important, but which is ultimately wrong when subjected to scientific scrutiny via controlled experimentation.

Post 4

Tuesday, November 2, 2004 - 8:29pm