[MD] critique of Randian Epistemology for my birthday

[John Carl]

>From the afterward of Scott Ryan's Objectivism and the Corruption of
Rationality; a Critique of Ayn Rand's Epistemology:



We have examined some of these features in this volume and confirmed many of
my friend's opinions.  My own view is that Rand added nothing whatsoever of
importance to the philosophical foundations of classical liberalism, indeed
what she did add is not only philosophically negligible but also positively
dangerous.  To paraphrase a remark attributed to Oscar Wilde in another
context: what is good in Objectivism is not original and what is original is
not good.


The philosophy of liberty and the economic theory of capitalism can best be
studied from other sources, and the psychological hazards of cleaving to
Rand's principles seem to me to outweigh by far any possible benefits
therefrom.  The responsibility for those hazards, rest with Rand herself.
They are merely the expression, in psuedophilosophical form, of her own
psychological tendencies and character traits.  her account of "reason" is
not only flawed, but culpably flawed; she should have known better, she had
access to the works of philosophers who did know better, and she
deliberately offered a philosophy of reason that was expressly intended to
undermine and discredit the foundations not only of theology but any
philosophical outlook that bore any remote threat of entailing theism.


In the process she undermined and discredited the foundations--and the
exercise-- of reason itself.  I can hardly think that classical liberalism
is any stronger for her influence.  Those who think otherwise should at
least be warned of the hazards of her philosophy, and I hope this critique
has in some manner helped to provide such a warning.


How he describes himself:


I am a theologically liberal pantheist, in same philsophical camp as
Spinoza, Royce and Timothy L.S. Sprigge and spiritually at home among
Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman; I share Blanshard's essential views of reason;
and among traditional religions my primary loyalties lie with Judaism.  But
for the purposes of the present study we shall not attempt to adjudicate
among these traditions but shall instead focus on what I take to be the view
roughly common to them all. Paraphrasing Blanshard, at the end of The Nature
of Thought, it is the view that a single intelligible order is in the
process of construction or reconstruction in and through all individual
knowing minds, and itself constitutes the common order in which all such
minds participate.


How i feel about him:  Good enough to add him to my amazonian bday
collection, right after BA Wallace and just ahead of J Royce's Problem of
Christianity.  Yummm...