Free Capitalist

I think in general, what people call 'great literature' is what massages their intellectual muscle. "He took this from that book, ohh..." "Indirectly he's referring to that other great book I read..." etc. I personally think that's insufficient to make the literature great, but this is one hallmark by which many people judge it. If it makes them think, or create intellectual connections, it is supposedly made better by it.

Whenever one needs to, in order to get in comfort with one's own inner dealings and subconscious values.

The blind opera prodigy, with that irreplaceable voice, performs his heroic Ama Credi E Vai, in native Italian and English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGmu2JyjBM4 The all-time song he became world-famous for, Time To Say Goodbye... (it has something heroic about it as well): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmS41_JdVLg Besame Mucho, the sultry and seductive qualities of which I can vouch for... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zwotxYw6Ho There are others. I hope you enjoy!

Alright, but let's dig deeper. What happened when you had a strong disagreement with Objectivism, in the earlier periods? Clearly the opposite idea seemed to you more to 'open the doors to reality' than this Objectivist idea which seemed patently false. What possibly could have kept you coming back and trying to see if the Objectivist idea was right, if an opposite idea seemed to you more likely, and more justified at the time? It must be something else; merely desiring to know is no help when differences and contradictions arise. Or else you never had a disagreement with Objectivism, and I'm speaking towards a more different kind of personal experience than you've been describing about yourself.

Seriously, so am I. Would be awesome to make it work and make the old man proud.

Scott, It's difficult to size up his values on a surface level. He doesn't initially strike one as cynical or repressed; on the other hand the warning sign of passionate atheism hints at something more than what meets the eye at the surface. I don't know how to gauge his good working relationship with reality. He's competent in his profession, and loves complicated and obscure logical riddles. On the other hand he's prone to a completely sloppy use of concepts, such as believing that each of the 'heart-warming' philosophies has embraced and championed human rights. In other words, his head flies up in the clouds, but has difficulty tying it down to the real world, or finding a reason to. And yet, those mistakes can easily be found in adolescence, and are quickly overcome by supplying a source of inspiration (which all youth need), something that forces the person to struggle through reconciling his conscious train of thought with his emotional and subconscious values which are different. It is my understanding that as a person matures and solidifies in his conscious processes, it becomes exponentially different to convince him these are wrong.

Happy b-day! Hope you know what that is! (hint: it's pre 1900's, and it bears immense significance to the world today, and to your profession particularly. No looking at image sources either.)

Thanks Alan, I had no idea you were such a Bocelli fan, and that you can even sing some of his songs to boot! Do you like Ama Credi E Vai? How about The Prayer, with Celine Dion? The way he ends that song is just chilling how human voice could be capable of such beautiful sounds.

I think I figured out what the problem is. The 'cookie' exists and lasts as long as you want, but expires immediately when you open the website from a different network. Thus if I login and stay in one place, I'm logged in for as long as I don't move to a different network (say, the home network).

I'm sorry, but your brother was not writing to you "in laymen terms". He was very clearly using technical terminology, and visibly making an exhibition of his efficacy and (supposed) knowledge in economics. It's also one of his conceits that complication and obfuscation of things with complex words is important, due to the the concepts he deals with being so rarefied and so advanced as to not admit any simplicity. I once sat in on a series of lectures by a PhD in economics, where we learned about the Classical and Keynesian economics, with the inferiority of the former and the necessity of the Federal Reserve being an unquestioned truism by this highly intelligent and educated individual. At the end I had a mini-debate consisting of simple and uncomplicated words in which I got him to completely concede all of my points, that Classical theory was far more stable than anything Keynes could offer, that his beloved Fed truly still has caused far more ill than good since its existence; and even that it caused the Great Depression. And this is a PhD, mind you. Complicated terms are not important; just don't let yourself be overpowered by them when intellegently malevolent people use them. Adequate understanding and clarity of thought are all that's needed. I'm sure that with a few weeks of Macroeconomics lectures you could answer your brother in a jiffy.

Philosophy does come before all other sciences, but it doesn't explain all other sciences. Philosophy is not a deductive field. Or shouldn't be.

Well, they wouldn't be ready to enlist and pay money, if they were already swayed by the publicity. But I do know even more than 3-4 young people that were interested, from the beginning, but the interest waned when they've seen so much hostility around it. Even I who in general supported the school's idea and thought of whether I'd enroll were I younger, I was not sure and thought I'd rather wait it out and see where the school went, believing that maybe I didn't know the whole story and maybe there truly was something nefarious about the institution that only insiders would know.

I'm sorry, this is too shocking to respond to.

Books and classes on management? I don't understand your question.

There's been more than one problem, that's for sure. Management certainly was an issue, as well as the marketing department, as per above. But if the reception hadn't been so hostile, then a freshman class of a hundred or more, instead of less than twenty, would have been possible. We're talking about a difference of a million dollars, which the negative publicity denied to the school, and which would've made a tremendous difference. People can be skeptical, and even Stephen who was a supporter of the school seems to have had some reservations. But problems can be fixed, management can be ironed out, marketing improved in succeeding years. But you can't start a school with 12 or so students, which undoubtedly resulted from a general sense that "there was something fundamentally wrong" with the school. From the fact that the school would teach absolutely nothing contrary to Objectivism, and would embrace a very strong liberal arts curriculum, there wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with it.

But there was no question about whom the school was aimed after. They received plenty of name-recognition in the Objectivist community, and already a freshman class of sorts, even though they appeared out of nowhere just one year prior. I think that by desiring them to be better, the negative publicity killed the idea almost from the start.

A whole slew of Objectivist commentators were intensely critical of Founders College from its very inception.

This is very sad indeed. And I can't believe that so many people, who should've known better, were as hostile as they were to the idea, from the very beginning.

That's a great story, all the more encouraging given Columbia's recent problems. Thanks for posting!

By the way, I didn't mean to lock up this thread with saying that only a Greek-reading person can comment. We all can comment, I personally read him in translation, so for the intents and purposes of this thread and our conversation, a more or less basic and general knowledge of his theory is sufficient. But I've seen the interplay between Aristotle's Greek and his English, especially when my Aristotle professor years ago unpacked extraordinarily clunky English translations into vastly more insightful original. The meaning often changed so much, from what I thought he said, to what he really did, that it was scary. So if we're going to pass a definitive and final judgment on the Ethics, let's do that carefully and thoughtfully. I wasn't even thinking about that final judgment here. I merely said that the writing contained useful and insightful observations about Man, which helped me in my life. It won't help others live their lives if we throw the thing out into the dustbin, and lack reason to ever look there again.

These statements absolutely apply to Ayn Rand! You'd want some Greek 2000 years later to read her in the English language, wouldn't you? 'Course you should critique these works, I can confirm that you know English! And you yourself expect that a person knows at least a modicum of English before they critique something you wrote on the Forum, right? Anyone can try and grasp the basics of Ayn Rand, or Aristotle, but only a serious philosopher with a solid knowledge of English should attempt to provide a definitive analysis on the complex ITOE, or even what "A is A" means. She's been harangued by her enemies enough, and deserves a fair hearing from a person qualified in the language of her communication. I think it's only fair.

If you can cite me a passage where Ayn Rand describes the doctrine of the mean or the whole ethical theory as unequivocably and irrevocably terrible, I'll take it into consideration.

I don't find a categorical rejection of the doctrine of the mean in Ayn Rand. I find an emphatic statement that explicitly stating an ethical standard is important, and I find a categorical statement that aversion to extremes, and non-objective definition are contemptible contents of any ethical theory -- both statements which I completely agree with. It's possible AR found his ethics or the doctrine less useful than other parts of Aristotle, but I don't find a categorically total rejection of it, or of whole content of the Ethics, that seems to be endorsed by some of the Forum users. If we can state that the Ethics has something useful and important, and that regardless of the ultimate veracity of the totality of the Mean Doctrine there may be something interesting in aspects of it, that's all I really wanted to establish.

Not at all. It would take a patient, in-depth investigation, by a serious philosopher, versed in Greek, to make a complete analysis of all aspects of that doctrine and other aspects of Aristotle's ethical theory. I'm not averse to Ayn Rand's point that maybe some things in it weren't stated, that some perhaps were misstated, and I'm glad she accomplished important things, such as that very importantly putting to words something that Aristotle (demonstrably) believed believed implicitly. However, as I said, different people addressing themselves to philosophical issues can often address the same subjects differently. Tara Smith writes very differently from Ayn Rand, and often raises quite different issues, from a different perspective. My interest isn't to pick holes in every little thing I see, but to pick up from good men as much as possible about human nature, selfishness and virtues in man, and other philosophic insights that they've reached but I haven't. Reading the Doctrine of the Mean on my part does not make me that philosopher who's gone through all of it in the original Greek and made a final analysis; I read a translation, and delight just in wonderful philosophic observations on human nature, made 50 years and 2,300 years ago.

What it sounded like was that the absence of the issue of the standard made the whole of his writing on ethics irrelevant; especially when the likes of Jordan baited Jason into creating an artificial competition between Aristotle's and AR's ideas. I don't know about Jason but my contention all along has been that the two are in fact remarkably similar, and they ask sometimes similar and sometimes different questions, and both investigate many and interesting ethical questions using the fact of life as the ethical standard. There's a couple of interesting and unique points Aristotle makes in from within the Mean doctrine, none of which have to do with fearing 'extremes', or with lacking an objective definition of that middle. It would frankly take more than a thread to properly investigate the theory here. For Aristotle it took a book. So all we can do here, aside from each of us taking our own intelligent look at the original writing, is to discuss what obvious objections could be made against the theory. I hope it's clear that, if any objections could be made at all, at least they're not obvious.