| | Great! I along with "many many Solonaughts" now have an "agenda to substitute slogans and catch-cries for reason." Yeah, motive-based argumentation is best for reasoned debate. To get back "on the right track," I would expect more objectivity and less griping.Theological constructs are superior to truism because they at least have honest dealings with questions and answers A truism is not dishonest - it is simply a statement of an obvious truth. For the quote above, a fundamental truth. Your assumption of dishonesty is based on another motive-based argument: that since the current replies haven't satisfied you, we must simply be evading your "challenge." Let's leave the motive-suppositions aside, shall we?
Theology is dishonest. It posits the supernatural to provide ontology, while leaving the question of the supernatural's own ontology unanswered. The whole enterprise begs the question of what is metaphysically true, then tries to escape reason via "faith." Incantations, rituals, and rapture, however satiating as emotional substitutes for conviction, do not provide truth. I'll get back on this a few paragraphs down.
If you want to start a formal objective system for building a reason-based understanding of "Life, the universe, and everything," you have to start with truisms - just as mathematics have to rely on postulates. Only on the bedrock of obvious truths can solid foundations of philosophy be laid.A tautology like the one you've quoted above is simply a positive contradiction and every bit as bad- to my mind.
Contradictions in all forms are always worse since it is for the sake of these that we judge theology to be bunk.
"A is A"
Oh my Galt... the horror! Due to the "positive contradiction" of this tautology, Objectivism is "bunk!"
From wikipedia: In logic, a tautology is a statement which is true by its own definition. All true statements of logic and mathematics are tautologies. Also, outside logic and mathematics, sometimes means a useless tautology, ie, one that is uninformative. This definition is imprecise, as all statements are informative in some context. [Since we're discussing philosophy, we have to take the 'logic' definition.]
What do you mean by "positive contradiction"? That phrase sounds, well, contradictory. Please provide a definition outside of theology or Hegel. We wouldn't want to smuggle question-begging concepts wholesale through the backdoor of the undefined. 'Contradiction' has a precise meaning in Aristotelian thought: the simultaneous assertion of a statement and its negation. Given this, a tautology cannot be contradictory of itself.
Metaphysics can be seen as a very dry subject. Its purpose is to provide a non-contradictory and non-superficial basis for explaining the nature of reality. It is not the purpose of metaphysics to somehow provide us transportation to the bliss of existence. That would be more akin to aesthetics. The aridity of the subject's exposition in no way bars us from any emotive component of living life fully.
Ciro D'Agostino, we are agreed that Rand profited from the conflict of her philosophy with Marx's; both in the added motivation it brought her and in the actual negation of his ideas. That much is readily apparent in her polemical style. However, my personal perspective of Objectivism per se (as a philosophy divorced from the personage of Ayn) is as a modern development of Aristotelian thought. Any perceived "answer" is merely a by-product of other philosophies' floundering on the shoals of logical rigor. Objectivism is more 'asserting rightness' and less 'development through conflict.'
My personal perspective again: The psychology expounded in Rand's non-fiction is probably the weakest point of Objectivism. Too much of the obsolete tabula rasa remains - while science has advanced with more accurate ideas of human nature. Her condemnation of homosexuality springs from this flaw. It remains to be seen how much science can inform, and eventually reform, the philosophy; the current 'orthodoxy' may be much too closed to care.
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There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
