[quote]saveski wrote:
AYN RAND -
end of story.[/quote]
Ayn Rand was a grumpy old cow.
Although the double-entendre of atlas shrugged on this forum is pretty evident.
LaPointe, don’t be discouraged. I for one value your input…
[quote]LaPointe wrote:
whatever. it’s just opinions anyway. no one can be “right” because the right answer is wholly dependent on context. nothing is objectively true/right/good or whatever you want.
so, you like Ayn Rand and think she’s a smart lady. i think she’s a tool for shitty people to justify systematizing their shitty-ness. obviously, me saying she’s a tool isn’t going to jive with your perception of her. neither one of us is right though. objectively, all she is is worm food.[/quote]
Is it all just an opinion, that all statements are a matter of opinion and not fact? Is it objectively true and right that nothing is objectively true or right?
[quote]alexus wrote:
2+2=4.
that is a fact. whether people believe it or not it is a fact. that certain marks on a page or sounds in the air pick out or designate the numbers they do is convention, of course. it could have been otherwise (is otherwise in different cultures). it could have been that there were no marks or sounds to pick out or designate the numbers at all (e.g., if people had never existed). that doesn’t change the fact that 2+2=4 regardless of whether you or I or anybody else ever believes it or not. regardless of whether anybody states or conceives of the fact or not.
torturing an innocent child solely for fun is morally wrong.
many people think that is a fact. whether people believe it or not it is a fact. note that the statement doesn’t commit to children actually existing. it is universal (just like the math case).
the number case shows us that there can be objective facts quite aside from our subjectivity (beliefs about those objective facts). quite aside from our own contingent existence.
morality might be like that, too.
of course many people think morality isn’t like that. but they might well be wrong.
if we grant (for the sake of argument) that there are objective facts about morality (right and wrong, good and bad) then the issue arises - what (if anything) can we come to know about those facts?
ethics might be more like mathematics than is commonly supposed…
but yeah… means we gotta get our concepts in order…
[/quote]
Actually no. 2+2 is only 4 based on specific agreed apon rules humans invented. There are no such agreed rules with existance. Secondly in reality 2 and 2 is essentially never 4. In fact there never really is an exact 2 or a 4 anywhere in the universe.exact basic math is a poor parallel for anything real world.
I agree with DD. 2+2=4 is a man made symbolic representation of ideas. Math doesn’t exist. You can’t walk around and find a 2+2 in nature.
Two books I have read lately that you may find interesting are Chrispin Sartwell’s “anarchy, obsession, reality” and good old William Jamse’s “varieties of religious experience”
On the subject of maths equations I always liked that old trickster Crowley’s formula 2 = 0
Oh, the book “simulacra and simulation” by (I think Jean Baudrillard) was fascinating to me as well.
Just 2 cents hope it’s of some interest 
Actually no. 2+2 is only 4 based on specific agreed apon rules humans invented.
We need to be careful to distinguish between the human invention (the concepts or ideas that we have and the linguistic expressions that we use) and the objects that are referred to or denoted (by convention) by those concepts / ideas / expressions.
In fact there never really is an exact 2 or a 4 anywhere in the universe.
We also need to be careful to distinguish between different kinds of objects. Concrete objects (water and gold) and abstract objects (numbers). Neither depend on humans for their existence - water and gold would still exist even if humans did not have concepts or words to denote them.
That is a fairly standard view, anyway, but is not without its critics, of course.
Ethics might not be like math… But this does give us a way of seeing how it might be possible for there to be objective, mind independent facts in ethics. What (if anything) we can come to learn of them is a separate (and interesting) matter. Ditto for how we come to acquire the concept of number (since noone has ever been directly acquainted with the number 2)…
I had one philo class in college and one ethics class and couldn’t stand them because they were SO fucking confusing. Like Kant’s nonsense and all the other philosopher’s just writing TONS of obtuse sentences that I just could not follow and which seemed to have ZERO basis in reality.
yeah. that is what i like about the Nagel book that I posted a link to earlier. Philosophy gets complicated all by itself people don’t need to try and help it along by being deliberately wordy or confusing. if you try and convey the ideas as simply as possible… they are hard. if you can’t convey them in a way that a reasonably intelligent non-philosopher can understand if they put their mind to it then you do really gotta start wondering if you are full of shit. part of the problem can be reading old people, too. they didn’t write in a way that most of us find very clear to read now.
kant really is notoriously difficult to understand.
[quote]alexus wrote:
if you can’t convey them in a way that a reasonably intelligent non-philosopher can understand if they put their mind to it then you do really gotta start wondering if you are full of shit.
[/quote]
I think you and saveski are good at explaining philosophy and philosophers and not sounding like you are “full of shit”.
Ayn Rand and Nagel?
Good places to start?
The only philosophy class I took was on Reasoning, a first year class.
[quote]Charlie Horse wrote:
[quote]alexus wrote:
if you can’t convey them in a way that a reasonably intelligent non-philosopher can understand if they put their mind to it then you do really gotta start wondering if you are full of shit.
[/quote]
I think you and saveski are good at explaining philosophy and philosophers and not sounding like you are “full of shit”.
[/quote]
Thanks for the compliment but I’m not well versed in philosophy at all, except for a working knowledge of Objectivism. Unfortunately, Rand was never mentioned in my college philosophy and business ethics courses, just Hume, Locke, Kant and many other such hyper-complicated blowhards which were near impossible to understand - and I ain’t no dummy.
I agree with Alexus about simplicity - not just in philosophy but in day-to-day life. In my business dealings someone will come to me with some proposal, eg - another credit-card processing company. They start explaining something and once they lose me, I tell them - “look if I can’t follow what you’re saying, if you can’t make it simple for me then I’m not interested.”
Again, I would refer you to AR herself in the youtube videos. Her philosophy is consistent with reality and to me it makes perfect sense and mankind would be better off if they understood her philosophy.
In the film The Deer Hunter, DeNiro held up a bullet to John Cazale and said -
“You see this Stanley? This is this. This isn’t anything else, this is this.”
- which is a neat distillation of Objectivism.
[quote]hlss09 wrote:
I agree with DD. 2+2=4 is a man made symbolic representation of ideas. Math doesn’t exist. You can’t walk around and find a 2+2 in nature. [/quote]
One of my very politically inclined friends like to challenge me to a game of “Find Government.” I am still looking. It’s actually a useful tool sometimes in teaching people how government is an abstract concept- a contract, as it were, between citizens, rather than these big imposing institution that somehow reigns over us.
The Stoics.
[quote]byukid wrote:
One of my very politically inclined friends like to challenge me to a game of “Find Government.” I am still looking. It’s actually a useful tool sometimes in teaching people how government is an abstract concept- a contract, as it were, between citizens, rather than these big imposing institution that somehow reigns over us.[/quote]
As far as law and morality go, I agree with your friend.
People who live “outside” of the law seem to pretty much understand that the world is what it is and that there really are no rules that bind you to anything to a certain extent. If you don’t believe in god or the law, have no moral hang-ups with certain acts deemed immoral by most people and are smart enough to get by the “authorities” who outnumber you…what’s to stop you from being as free as you can imagine?
A simple example would be two men about to fight.
One believes in what people refer to as a “fair fight” and the other fights to win.
The latter has no rules in his mind to follow during the course of the fight to prohibit him from taking advantage of a weakness that will help him win. The previous, good luck.
Then again, maybe I am misunderstanding what you are talking about and I just wrote a bunch of gibberish.
you are right that you ain’t no dummy.
it is hard to explain things simply. some people have a gift for it (make very good teachers) and others, unfortunately, do not. I found Nagel’s book beautiful in its simplicity (it was my first intro to philosophy aside from Plato). Similarly ‘Sophie’s World’ for a history of philosophical ideas beginning with the lego block (atomic) theory of matter
i was lucky to have had some good teachers who managed to explain some of Locke and Hume and Kant’s etc ideas in ways that were fairly clear and understandable. Some teachers are too stand-offish (I reckon) with respect to leaving you on your lonesome to flounder through difficult language. Some teachers seem to delight in being wordy and convoluted which unfortunately only makes things worse. I never got the opportunity to study Nitzche, Heidigger, Hurssurl (I can’t even spell them!) Sartre, chinese philosophy, eastern philosophy… So much I never had the opportunity to learn about. Depends very much on what the focus of your academic department is.
I’ve never read Rand. I know someone who was attempting to elaborate or expand her egoism into a viable ethical position, though. Most people think you need to choose between Kantianism, Aristotelianism, or Utilitarianism. He tried to develop her egoism. Apparently it was a bit unusual for someone to take her seriously in academic philosophy - but not unheard of. His doctoral thesis was accepted so she isn’t totally shunned by academia.
Government is a good one. But now we need another distinction - objects that require humans in order to come into being but can go on existing without humans. For instance, pens and artifacts like that can go on existing even if all the humans vanished tomorrow. There wouldn’t be any pens if humans hadn’t made writing implements, though, so they are dependent on humans for their existence in that sense. Governments are trickier because if all the humans vanished tomorrow there wouldn’t be any government. Government seems to be an abstract object that requires humans in order to come into existence and also requires humans for its ongoing existence.
Other abstract objects (aside from number) that don’t require humans at all? Things like centers of gravity of objects… Triangles… I can only think of mathematical examples.
God? Can of worms… Best not go there…
But… There can be facts about government (e.g., that such and such a government was founded on such and such a date) that are true or false quite apart from what people believe about the government and when it was founded. Everybody would be wrong about when the government was founded.
So here is a case of an abstract object (government) that requires humans in order for it to exist, that requires humans for its ongoing existence, and yet there are facts about it quite aside from what humans think about it.
Maybe ethics is like that instead?
[quote]saveski wrote:
LaPointe wrote:
no one can be “right” because the right answer is wholly dependent on context. nothing is objectively true/right/good or whatever you want.
Lapointe, if NOTHING IS OBJECTIVELY TRUE, does that include your above statement? That is, if nothing can be objectively true how can your statement possibly be true?
(Hiss - I’m a radical capitalist but happen to run a restaurant. Not a teacher, but did go to some fancy schools and have a masters. I was VERY religious, having been brain-washed all through Catholic high school and Jesuit college and then pulled my head out of my ass after a Libertarian wake-up (at USC!). In high-school I’m sure I would have disagreed with Rand. Actually ran for US Congress as a Libt but of course there wasn’t a chance.)
Smartest human that ever walked the earth - put this in your pipes and toke it:
[/quote]
If there is objective truth, Ayn Rand’s philosophy falls apart.
[quote]hlss09 wrote:
There truly is no right or wrong action.
[/quote]
Well than this statement is wrong.
[quote]hlss09 wrote:
I agree with DD. 2+2=4 is a man made symbolic representation of ideas. Math doesn’t exist. You can’t walk around and find a 2+2 in nature. [/quote]
Wow…denying reality. Go back to second grade…you have two apples and you had two apples, how many apples do you have? Do you have 3, 4, or 5…or are apples symbolic representation of ideas, and Apples do not exist, too?
[quote]Simon Adebisi wrote:
The Stoics.[/quote]
St. Paul used the Stoics and I find there stuff very interesting and insightful.
Nothing is true and everything is permitted, consciousness is all.