[MD] critique of Randian Epistemology for my birthday

[118]

OK John, I think it's your fault this time.  I got adds for the Holocaust
Tour through some www site on the side of my gmail account, when I opened
your post.  Please stop using so many commercial producing words.  Your post
is obviously full of propaganda judging from all the adds I got with it.  I
get the add for Ayn Rand Egoism, but I'm still trying to figure out why
google is trying to sell me a Decision Making Tree, must have something to
do with Quality...  So,  Godoogle is trying to lead me down some corrupt
path and the temptation is hard to fight sometimes.  Stick to discussing
beaches or cowgirls, so that I get some useful adds.  :-)

Mark

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 9:48 PM, John Carl <ridgecoyote at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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...
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