My own opinion of his thinking is not that high, but anyway here is the text of his posts on this thread:

Sunday, August 29—4:45pm:

Tibor,

I have to say I find your comment both inaccurate and inappropriate.

You say that Gotthelf “excludes” the list of people you mention. Well, as I said, Gotthelf is a founding member of the Ayn Rand Society, and Den Uyl and Miller are on the Steering Committee of that organization. Is that “exclusion”? Anyway, you, Den Uyl, Badhwar, and Rasmussen have all been invited to speak at ARS—Rasmussen has been invited twice. How is that exclusion?

If by exclusion, you mean exclusion from scholarship, I find that a downright odd claim, too. Gotthelf has published one 100 page book on Rand, less than one page of which is devoted to political philosophy. By contrast, most of what you have written is on political philosophy (you can’t expect Gotthelf to have cited a book that came out after his book was released, can you?). There is an obvious mismatch between the goal of his book and extensive references to you. Everything else he’s published is on ancient philosophy. And since when is scholarship judged primarily by the citations?

As for the mathematical precision issue, isn’t it obvious that something has gotten garbled in the reporter’s rendition of what Allan said—a common and expected occurrence when a reporter for an alumni magazine is trying to digest complicated ideas in epistemology?

Finally, what “ruse” am I involved in? I personally have cited your scholarship any number of times: I wrote a long review of your Classical Individualism in 1999, I defended your work (and Rasmussen-Den Uyl’s work) in my review of Colin Bird’s The Myth of Individualism in 2000, and most recently, I cited your work on egoism in a book chapter I wrote on Islam and capitalism. (Actually, I cite your work in my dissertation, too.) I can’t imagine how anyone would see a “ruse-driven” exclusion there.

This is the second time in recent memory that someone has described my relationship to Allan Gotthelf as involving a “ruse” of some kind—as though any positive judgment of the man had to be motivated by some secret arrangement with him.(Actually, Gotthelf and I have not exchanged a word since December, and have not had a conversation since he left New Jersey more than a year ago.) I don’t understand why a bona fide piece of good news must immediately be transformed into an occasion for factional strife. Give me a break!

Sunday, August 29—6:20pm:

Well, I can’t speak to what Allan Gotthelf did in the quarrels of thirty-five years ago—i.e., the year I was born. But if he did regard your writing for The Personalist as a great sin then, it didn’t prevent him from inviting you to speak at ARS in 1999, and if you regarded his denunciation as a great sin, it didn’t prevent you from accepting his invitation, either. So I’m at a bit of a loss to grasp how a 35-year-old event is relevant to an article published in 2004, but more recent events just a few years old are somehow irrelevant.

Your claim is that Gotthelf excluded you because he doesn’t regard you as having made a contribution to Rand scholarship—to which you then remark that my pointing out that he invited you and others to ARS is “irrelevant.” The criterion of being invited to speak at ARS is precisely an actual or potential contribution to scholarship on Rand. The whole point of the organization is to make Rand academically respectable. So the idea that you can be invited to speak there—or be a part of the Steering Committee!—as part of a ruse to be excluded from recognition for contribution to Rand scholarship, is just blatantly self-contradictory. You are literally saying that by being included, you were being excluded.

Maybe it’s worth bearing in mind that the “recognizing” here is being done by the magazine of Gotthelf, not by Gotthelf of anyone else. Gotthelf is at Pitt, and the Pitt magazine is writing an article about him, mostly for a Pitt audience. I simply don’t see where recognition of other scholars is relevant here. It’s a human interest story, not a bibliograpical essay. There is no expectation that a reporter for an alumni magazine is going to hunt down scholarly references in order to do a short interview for a lay audience.

But I’m going to leave this issue here. This topic really isn’t worth discussing any more than I have discussed it, if it was even worth that.

(Edited by Irfan Khawaja on 8/29, 6:32pm)

Tuesday, August 31—8:19am:

Boy, the responses to the link I posted get stranger and stranger:

What I personally found most disturbing in this article was the statement:

Gotthelf acknowledges that he isn’t sure if Rand will ever be considered a major philosophical figure.

Gott im Himmel, isn’t that what we are agreed must happen, if the world is to have any hope? Is this philosophy stuff some sort of game?

Since when has what we wish or hope to happen become equivalent to what can be predicted to happen? Part of not playing games is acknowledging that reality isn’t malleable to one’s wishes. What evidence makes you “sure” that Rand will be “considered a major philosophical figure”? I’m sure “Gott im Himmel” has the answer, but do you? Consult your crystal ball and tell me what you see.

I hate to put it this way, but if this (the whole preceding thread of posts) is the “sense of life” evoked by a fairly innocuous acknowledgment of someone’s success, I’m not sure what “sense of life” is operating here, but it sure fucking well isn’t mine.

Ultimately, I see that what we have here is really just an inverse version of the Tribal Code of Peikoff and Schwartz, complete with its list of Forbidden Names Who Cannot Be Mentioned Without Calling Down the Wrath of the Wise Elders, the substitution of indiscriminate “passion” for moral judgment, the exercises in character-assassination sans evidence, the petty squabbling over whose name is listed where and why, the obsessive consulting of bibliographies and footnotes to gauge matters of status, and above all, the overwhelming sense of victimization and grievance totally oblivious to any sense of facticity or proportion.

The difference is merely this: instead of “David Kelley,” the forbidden name is “Allan Gotthelf,” and instead of “Judge every fact within your sphere of action,” the guiding principle of moral judgment has become “Don’t worry, it’s not a scholarly forum, so just consult your emotions, and anything goes.” Instead of the old Peikoffian-Schwartzian complaint that “David Kelley is consorting with the out-crowd!” the new Machanian complaint is, “The in-crowd isn’t consorting with me!” And instead of a peanut gallery composed of Robert “St. Just” Stubblefield and Bennett “Don’t Reintroduce the Measurements” Karp, we have one made up of Michelle and Ms. Branden, whose contributions here make the old Stubblefield-Karp routine seem thoughtful by comparison.

Progress? A new and improved sense of life? No, just another confirmation of the maxim, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose; i.e., the same song in a different key. And with that, I say: adieu. I’ll leave you all to the earnest task of publicly defecating on Allan Gotthelf’s reputation—and mine for all it matters. Have fun.

Tuesday, August 31—4:11pm:

Lindsay—

I should have been clearer. I wasn’t aiming my remarks at you or SOLO in general, but at the people posting here. I think you’re doing a great job, and I’m not angry at you in the least. But I tire of these attitudes I see here, and seeing them—and reflecting on their utter cluelessness—makes me wonder just who the fuck I’m writing for. I’m sick of these attitudes, and quite frankly, sick of the people expressing them. (And I hope they take that as personally as I mean it.) After being on the receiving end of ARI abuse when I was at IOS, having watched IOS collapse—is there any other word for it?—into TOC, watching Diana Hsieh retrospectively endorse ARI’s excommunication of David Kelley: I think there comes a point when one has to ask why one wastes one’s time on a movement comprised of such people. I asked that question seven years ago when I left IOS, and the question is now recurring loudly—with no good answer.

I have one last piece to send off tonight, which is sitting on the desktop of a computer at a different location. Then I’m done.

Thursday, September 2—9:12am:

A couple of people have sent me emails asking me to come back to SOLO, and there is a lot of consternation here about why I’ve left. I’m writing this so as not to leave too many questions and doubts about what I’ve done—to put my views on record just so that the Objectivist Rumor Mill has just a little less material for purposes of fabrication. I’m not a member of SOLO anymore, and have no intentions of returning. And as for those of you sending me private emails trying to salvage what you take to be your “friendship” with me, for God’s sake, give it up. There’s nothing to save.

You might wonder why I took Tibor’s comment “so hard.” It was not, contrary to Cass, that I have spent so little time dealing with Objectivist forums. On the contrary, it is because I have spent so much time on them—so much fruitless, wasted, unremunerated, and frustrating time on them that takes a lot out of me without giving me anything in return. I was active in David Kelley’s IOS from 1991-1994, and active with MDOP and any number of Objectivist lists and forums. By 1997, I thought I had had enough of the neuroses of the Objectivist movement, and I was for a variety of reasons disappointed with TOC, so I left TOC and the movement generally, sticking to the strictly academic circuit, with occasional forays into non-Objectivist classical liberal forums here in the US (Reason Papers, LibertyFund, etc.). I recently decided, tentatively, to join SOLO on the hypothesis that things might have gotten better, and on the hypothesis that SOLO was a relatively neutral location, distinct from ARI and TOC—institutions with which I don’t do business. But this Gotthelf flap convinces me that either my absence from the movement has made me much less tolerant of its neuroses, or they have gotten worse with time. Nor is it a matter of institutional neutrality: you can go to ARI, TOC, or SOLO, and you’ll face the same problems. It is a problem with the movement and its “leaders”—and their followers—not purely a function of institutions. I do not mean Lindsay. Principally, I mean Tibor—and his followers here.

Tibor describes what has taken place here as a “disagreement.” Please note how this fatuous description abstracts entirely from the moral character of what the “disagreement” is about. You will also note that it abstracts from the fact that apart for his apology for casting aspersions of my character, he has not answered a single argument I made. He has flailed about, shifting ground all over the place, offering one dumb, dumber and yet dumber speculation than the last, but point for point, I have outargued him and I cannot imagine that a professional philosopher of his stature—who so loudly demands recognition for being one—could fail to “recognize” this.

Stop for a minute, step back, and ask yourself what has happened in this exchange. Without praising ARI, what I have done is to praise Gotthelf’s achievement and the recognition that someone else is giving him. The University of Pittsburgh has the best graduate philosophy department in the United States—better than Harvard, better than Princeton, better than UCLA, better than Notre Dame, where I went. It is not every day that an Objectivist professional philosopher gets recognition of that kind. And since I know Gotthelf—he was my boss for five years—I know that he deserves it.

This recognition doesn’t take away from anyone else’s achievements. Nor is it an endorsement of ARI. (If it were, don’t you think I’d have become a member by now?) Nor does it hide the fact if we go by page length, I have devoted a greater number of pages to Tibor’s work than to Allan’s. (Those “send ups” and defenses of Tibor are on the web. Look them up, if you have more of an inclination to doing research than Professor Machan.) Nor incidentally, does it hide the fact that I have never badmouthed any of the people on whose supposed behalf Tibor makes his grievance, so that it is really unclear why my post should be the place to discuss the topic Tibor brings up. I consider many of the supposedly aggrieved people he mentions as my friends, and have cited their work, discussed it favorably, etc. Gotthelf has indeed been critical of many of them, as some of them have been equally critical of him.

But that doesn’t take away from Gotthelf’s achievement, either. Tibor has not given me a single cogent reason why Gotthelf should have cited his (Tibor’s) work in his book. Nor has he cited a single other place where Gotthelf would have had reason to cite him. (When was the last time Tibor published a paper on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics and its relation to the Parts of Animals?) Nor has he so far successfully explained his own invitation to ARS, or that of the “aggrieved” parties he mentions, much less their place on the Steering Committee of that organization. Forced to come up with something, anything, to justify having traveled so far down this road, he reaches back to an obscure event in 1969, and even here he has no answer to why it is that in 1999, both he and Gotthelf seem by mutual consent to regard that episode as ancient history. Nor does he have anything remotely resembling an answer to why that ancient history should now be pertinent. He describes as “crumbs” his invitation to ARS, thereby insulting every other contributor to ARS—including me (was my presence crumbs when I spoke there?) and Gotthelf, who was his co-panelist on that supposedly “crumby” occasion in 1999 when Tibor spoke.

Here is the place to bring up Neil Parille’s little contribution to the debate:

From my discussions with ARI members, they take the position that it isn’t inherently wrong to discuss non-ARI authors such as yourself, so long as the author isn’t: (a) “immoral”; or (b) “unscholarly”. Funny, most non-ARI people fall into that category.

Notice the mindless rationalism here. A few conversations with unspecified ARI members becomes the basis for what everyone associated with ARI must necessarily think. Ignoring all the actual citations to non-ARI scholars in works by, say, Tara Smith (what does actual evidence ever mean?—that would just get in the way), the first factoid becomes the basis for a second factoid, equally spurious—and lo, a new myth is created. What is this but the Peter Schwartz-Robert Stubblefield method of moral judgment, except executed with less competence than them?

To be absolutely blunt, there is something wrong with a person whose first response to an achievement is to bring up quarrels—and quarrels of the whining sort that Tibor has brought up. And there is something wrong with people who encourage this behavior instead of questioning or condemning it. What is remarkable is that besides me, not one person has seen fit to criticize Tibor here. Either Tibor is being encouraged in his scattershot condemnations, or people are bringing up side issues. But as for the central moral issue involved, what we have here is universal indifference.

People have objected to my likening of Tibor’s methods to those of ARI. I suggest that you go back and re-read “Fact and Value,” where you will discover Peikoff’s teaching that not only should we judge every fact in our sphere of action, but that every such judgement should have the feel and sense of sensory perception accompanied by intense passion. Look at the number of references here to unbridled “passion” and ask yourself what material difference there is between Peikoff’s doctrine and what you have seen here. But what is even worse than Peikoff is the method of moral judgment one sees here. For years I have heard people deride the Peikoff view on the grounds that it is too “judgmental.” Well look at the sorts of speculative moral judgments people have allowed themselves to make here. “I guess...” “Perhaps...” “I wonder...” “I speculate...” What are these but smokescreens for a total unwillingness to constrain one’s moral judgments by evidence? What are they but blatant rationalizations for blatant violations of the primacy of existence? Read carefully and ask yourself: do you see here what David Kelley called “the judicial temperament” at work?

Let me give you one small example of what I mean. Tibor says:

But then there is the fact that Gotthelf has never acknowledged Rand’s influence on him in his books on Aristotle—he kept silent about it there, probably as a matter of prudence (in the bad sense of it, like being politic).

Dwell on this a moment, and let it sink in. It is a public act of character assassination. What Tibor is saying—without having the courage to say it—is that Gotthelf is a coward who hid his Objectivist views from the scholarly community. Before you consider the counter-evidence please grasp the sort of claim this is. It is a slap in someone’s face offered without a single shred of evidence in its favor, while simultaneously being offered as a ‘probability.’

As it happens, if Tibor had bothered to do about five minutes of research, he would have seen just how idiotic and insulting his claim is. In fact, Allan does refer to Objectivism in his Aristotle scholarship. There is one reference in Gotthelf’s essay in a book edited by R.F. Hassing on Aristotelian teleology published by Catholic UP, and I believe there is one in his paper “Darwin on Aristotle” in Biology and Philosophy, 1999. I don’t have more exact citations handy, but I think the honors of getting them really ought to be Tibor’s.

But let’s pretend that there were no such references. Gotthelf is president of the Ayn Rand Society, which has a website. Is the website somehow hidden from the profession? Look on the website, and see who has spoken there—Susan Haack, Jaegwon Kim, William Bechtel, Richard Janko. All well known philosophers, the last an Aristotle scholar. Did Gotthelf invite them and then swear them to secrecy about his Objectivist leanings? Richard Kamber, invited to speak in the mid 1990s, is now chair of the department at TCNJ. Was Gotthelf desperately trying to keep things a secret from him? ARS’s program has been printed every year, for 15 years, in the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division Program with Allan’s name emblazoned right there in black and white. Would any sane person regard that as a mode of undercover work?

Read what’s on the website—a letter to Edward Craig, editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, from Gotthelf about Ayn Rand, referring to a previous letter to Craig on the same subject. Craig is one of the best-known philosophers in Britain. Does this public letter on a website read like someone keeping a secret about his affiliations?

I was a student in 1990-91 at Princeton of the well-known Aristotle scholar John Cooper, essentially considered one of the founding fathers of the field. Gotthelf’s Objectivism was known to Cooper then. A secret? It is also known to Martha Nussbaum, even better known in the profession than Cooper, with whom Allan had conversations about Objectivism. More secrets?

Do a Google search for Gotthelf. Does his Objectivist affiliation seem like a secret?

Gotthelf wrote a book on Rand in 2000. Would a person who wanted to keep a ‘politic’ secret do that?

As I’ve said, I knew Gotthelf for years. The one thing he could not stop talking about—to anyone, anywhere—was Objectivism. His students knew this, his colleagues knew it, and even his colleagues’ spouses knew it. Nobody didn’t know it. That doesn’t prevent Tibor from “speculating” out loud. Ask yourself why a person of Tibor’s stature—a person who was complaining the whole time that no one had recognized his professional contributions—would make a claim, in public, about a professional colleague that was so immoral, so easily refutable, so wildly at variance with the facts. Don’t excuse it by saying, “Oh, he was going ballistic,” or “It may all have been false, but it was so impassioned!” or “Oh gee, well that’s our Tibor, chuckle chuckle!” or worse yet, “Oh well, it’s just a disagreement: one guy’s saying that Gotthelf is a chickenshit coward, and the other guy is saying he ain’t; six of one and a half dozen o’ the other, who can judge?...” Ask yourself how you would feel if people went around engaging in whispering campaigns of rumor and innuendo about you. And then ask yourself why I am supposed to tolerate it or take it in stride.

Now look past Michelle’s futile attempts to soft-pedal her claims and appease and flatter me and Gotthelf ex post facto. After piling on to Tibor’s initial post—fueling his fire—she later tells us that she cannot help but “wonder” whether Allan Gotthelf gets his scholarly marching orders from ARI’s Central Command. Actually, anyone with free will can help doing most of the things they do, including help but “wonder” about someone’s moral character in public when they have no idea what they’re talking about. It wouldn’t occur to Michelle to get some actual evidence of this before she shot her mouth off about it. That’s what objectivity would require. No: there is apparently no problem about speculating, in public, that a scholar would violate the virtues of independence and integrity and transform himself into the scholarly equivalent of Peter Keating or worse, when you lack the evidence of this. You can just engage in the rationalistic deduction that anyone associated with ARI must be a second-hander; Gotthelf is associated; hence he is a second-hander. How many times have I heard this syllogism from the mouths of ARI robots? Is it justified or excusable when it comes from non-ARI mouths?

Finally, let me dispel one last insinuation I keep hearing. I have heard more than once that I defend Gotthelf only because I am some sort of Gotthelf disciple and that he is my “favorite Objectivist philosopher,” or better yet, that I am merely currying favor with him. Before you entertain this thought, let me suggest you review the evidence for it very well. Because the fact is, I have defended many reputations in print: Bernard Lewis (twice), Roxanne Euben, Irshad Manji, Christopher Hitchens (many times), even Norman Finkelstein. You may not have heard of half of the people I’ve defended. Some are conservatives, some far to the left, others somewhere in between; none are Objectivists. Do you think I’m the disciple of all of them, and that I defended their reputations for that reason? Isn’t a better explanation that I truly despise unfounded rumors and innuendo and will defend almost anyone, even my adversaries, if they are on the receiving end of one? Incidentally, you might want to check your premises if you think that the act of defending a friend, i.e., a value beneficial to you, necessarily distorts your cognitive procedures. Kant may not have said that, butI suspect that you got that idea from him.

Enough. I’ve gone on at more than enough length to explain where I stand, and more than discharged my obligations on that score. I acknowledge that there are lots of wonderful people here that I’ve liked. But you’ll have to pardon me an excess of disgust at this point that prevents me from spending any more time here. I was better off, selfishly, when I was out of “the movement” than in it, and a lot better off when I wasn’t spending hours of the day writing self-defensive justifications like this one (which is the only way, however inadequate, of forestalling another train of rumor and innuendo). Ultimately, it is not worth it to me to put effort into writing even for worthy people when unworthy ones are so proximate, so aggressive about promulgating nonsense, and so blind about the unworthiness of what they say. Just ask yourself what you think of people who make a big show of their “openness,” and “inclusiveness”—and scream bloody murder at those are insufficiently “open” and “inclusive”—but exhibit an approach to moral judgment like the one you’ve seen here: random, speculative character-assassinations that flout the evidence and then get retracted—when their authors belatedly realize that they can’t get away with them this time.

Read them and comprehend what they are saying before you describe me as leaving here too hastily. Then ask yourself if you would find it worthwhile to write in this climate—and why. If you think you would, try it for awhile and see how far you get. If you get farther than I have, I salute you. If you don’t, welcome to the club.

(Edited by Irfan Khawaja on 9/02, 9:19am)

(Edited by Irfan Khawaja on 9/02, 9:30am)