 "Must We Mean What We Say?"
by Tibor R. Machan
The tile of this column is the title of an early book and the title essay in it~by Harvard University philosopher Stanley Cavell. Cavell’s work was to me fascinating because it argued, putting it very roughly, that when one uses words with widely understood meaning, one may not expect that one’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the words should override the former. And there is pretty plain evidence of the acceptance of this in how we treat each other’s utterances. If someone calls you a fool and you take offense, it is no good for the person to say, "But what I mean by ‘fool’ is ‘wise and sensible’." When one says "fool," one must mean what "fool" means. If one fails to realize this, that is a failure indeed and no one can escape the consequences by pleading ignorance. (Read more...)
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Ron Paul on "Blowback"
by Tibor R. Machan
During the Republican presidential candidate debates Ron Paul insisted that 9/11 can best be understood as an instance of "blowback," meaning the expected reaction of those in the Middle East to the US government’s interventionist foreign policy. To this Rudi Giuliani said he has never heard anything so ridiculous. (Read more...)
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Buchanan on Ron Paul’s Debate Point
by Tibor R. Machan
Shortly after the South Carolina Republican presidential hopefuls’ debate I wrote chiding Ron Paul for suggesting that 9/11 was a blowback in response to the fact that the US government had been in the Middle East for ten years or so. As Paul put the point, "They attack us because we've been over there, we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East…." My point was that however ill conceived, even evil, US foreign policy in the Middle East may have been, it would not serve to justify the blowback of murdering 3000 innocent working people in the Twin Towers on 9/11. (Read more...)
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An Open Letter to a Catholic High School
by William Scott Dwyer
The following letter, written in 1983, was sent to the principal of my high school in response to the school's request for donations and its invitation to a 25-year class reunion. I am including it here, because it exposes a facet of Catholic education that most non-Catholics are probably not aware of, namely, its extreme violence and brutality, which serve to illustrate Rand's archetypes of Attila and the Witch Doctor -- the unholy alliance between faith and force, which characterizes the rejection of reason. (Read more...)
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Soft Pedalling Coercion
by Tibor R. Machan
All those of us who travel by air have probably come across those announcements in airports about how smoking is forbidden. If airports were private facilities, I would have no problem with this. And, in fact, since I don’t smoke, I am not personally put out by those bans, either. (Read more...)
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Toward a Paradigm for a Free Society
by Edward W. Younkins
What can we learn from a survey of political and economic philosophies throughout history? Can we put them together by drawing from many or all of them to construct a powerful emergent libertarian synthesis that is a true reflection of the nature of man and the world properly understood? Is it possible to reframe the a... (Read more...)
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America's Government School Woes
by Tibor R. Machan
The removal of banners in a high school, which had the words "God" and "Creator" on them, placed there by a school math teacher, have led to a lawsuit against the Poway Unified School District in San Diego. Most people take this to be a confrontation between religion and secularism but it isn't. What it is, however, is a confrontation between government and private secondary education. (Read more...)
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Free Will or Not?
by Tibor R. Machan
Sure enough, some topics resurface quite naturally in the wake of certain types of events. The Virginia Tech massacre has brought out the gun control champions, as well as those who anticipate their histrionics and warn that banning guns can do more harm than good in just such circumstances. Also, the issue of whether perpetrators of such heinous acts are helpless or in fact possess free will and are therefore responsible for their actions has come up (notably in a recent missive by New York Times columnist David Brooks.) (Read more...)
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Solving the Pregnancy Question
by Steven Thomas Druckenmiller
Pregnancy should be the responsibility of the woman alone. (Read more...)
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Homework for Brian Doherty
by Dennis C. Hardin
In his impressive and fascinating history of the libertarian movement, Brian Doherty would have been better served to take a closer look at Atlas Shrugged and those who presume to speak for its author. (Read more...)
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Ayn Rand, Libertarianism, and ARI
by Tibor R. Machan
In a recent letter to the editor to The Los Angeles Times, Jeff Britting of the Ayn Rand Institute writes as follows:
"Ayn Rand did not write novels of "uncompromising libertarianism." In her view, libertarianism has no philosophy to uphold uncompromisingly.
Libertarianism rejects the need for a consistent, objective, philosophic defense of liberty and regards politics as primary. Rand was a defender of reason and recognized that political freedom requires a philosophy of reason and egoism. That is why Rand repeatedly condemned the libertarian movement, regarding herself, instead, as a "radical for capitalism." For further explanation, see Rand's novel of uncompromising objectivist, not libertarian, ideas — "Atlas Shrugged" — celebrating its 50th anniversary this year." (Letters, March 30, 2007) (Read more...)
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Four Freedoms
by Michael F Dickey
"Liberty and Freedom, you can make a distinction between them. Liberty perhaps being political rights, freedom; not being enslaved. The ancient Athenian had only one word "Eleuthera" …and to him it was the noblest and defining character of his nation. To be free." – J. Rufus Fears – “The History of Freedom” Lecture... (Read more...)
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Organized Labor: Fascist Looters
by Michael E. Marotta
During the so-called "Great Depression," labor unions attempted to seize control of the steel mills. The result was a series of pitched battles. One of these was the Chicago Memorial Day Massacre of 1937. (Read more...)
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Property Rights Redux
by Tibor R. Machan
A little while ago I had occasion to spend time with some fine legal minds. For one thing, they were all convinced that the right to private property is central to a just legal order. And many of them were involved in striving to get this idea established and strengthened within the American legal system, in the various ways that’s possible to do through the legitimate avenues of advocacy, litigation, scholarship, and so forth. (Read more...)
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Thoughts on Free Will and Determinism
by Joseph Rowlands
The debate on Free Will vs. Determinism rages on over the years, even the centuries, without an end in sight. Objectivists are not immune to the topic. And surprisingly, even with a philosophy aimed at clarity and objectivity, it seems to be one giant muddled mess with people talking past one another. (Read more...)
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Foundation of all Axioms the Axioms of Consciousness
by Frank De Silva
A description of consciousness leads to a contradiction with the postulation from special relativity that there can be no connections between simultaneous event. Consciousness consists of two distinct components, the observed U and the observer I. The observed U consist of all the events I is aware of. A vast majority of these occur simultaneously. Now if I were to be an entity within the space-time continuum, all of these events of U together with I would have to occur at one point in space-time. However, U is distributed over a definite region of space-time (region in brain). Thus, I is aware of a multitude of space-like separated events. It is seen that this awareness necessitates I to be an entity outside the space-time continuum. With I taken as such, a new concept called concept A is introduced. With the help of concept A a very important axiom of consciousness, namely Free Will is explained. Libet’s Experiment which was originally seen to contradict Free will, in the light of Concept A is shown to support it. A variation to Libet’s Experiment is suggested that will give conclusive proof for Concept A and Free Will.
(Read more...)
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Is Free Will Incredible?
by Tibor R. Machan
As someone who became convinced early in my life and even more so in my career as an academic philosopher that human beings normally possess free will, I have been fighting something of an uphill battle about the issue despite how ubiquitous the assumption is that we indeed do have this capacity. Anytime we hold people responsible, or urge that they alter their conduct, resist a temptation, battle some bad habit, and so forth, the free will idea lurks in the background. The criminal and even tort law, of course, assumes people could have done otherwise than they did, all things being equal. Politics, with all of its blaming and praising, is in the same situation, as is personal morality where none of it would make sense unless we had the capacity to choose how we act and thus can be faulted for failing to do what’s right. As the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant said, "ought" implies "can." (Read more...)
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Abortion Debate Redux
by Tibor R. Machan
Sometimes a debate or discussion goes completely astray because concepts are used that are entirely confusing. The abortion debate is a case in point. (Read more...)
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Revisiting Human Nature
by Tibor R. Machan
False alternatives are often presented as if there is nothing else to choose—like, love me or hate me, or being kind or mean. But in most cases there are many other options. (Read more...)
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Unauthorized Government is Wrong
by Tibor R. Machan
What has been most horrible about the bulk of political history is that some people have ruled others, often to the point of using them entirely against their will, even sending thousands and thousands of them to their deaths or using their lives for purposes they had no part in choosing. The big deal about the American revolution was the idea that one owns one’s life—the Lockean idea of the unalienable right to one’s life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. This was so radical a notion—although here and there expressed by earlier thinkers but never really given official endorsement—that even now most folks just don’t get it. No one owns you—not your country, not your family, not your neighborhood, not your community, no one. You are the one who owns your life and properly gets to say what will be done with it. To reiterate what Lincoln so aptly said about this, "No one is good enough to govern another without that other’s consent." In some respects everyone has an inkling of this idea—it is entirely unacceptable for a doctor to operate without the patient’s consent, or for an auto mechanic to work on your car without your giving permission, and so forth. Plain as anything can be! (Read more...)
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Lexus Parallel Parking not For All
by Tibor R. Machan
One of the annoying elements of advertising is that it often treats us all as if we were just one person. So, for example, because some people may benefit from a product--say Lexus's new automatic parallel parking device—it appears to be suggested in the ad that this is something for us all. Of course, very few products or services being promoted to us are really for all of us. But back when advertising used to come mainly from the radio and TV industry, and both of these were oligopolies, ads were indeed usually addressed to millions of people all at once, with no differentiation among them possible. With diversified commercials now possible, targeting people in markets whose interests it is possible to anticipate, this apparent one-size-fits-all assumption in ads has subsided. (Read more...)
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The Individual and the General in Our Lives
by Tibor R. Machan
Often people who speak out on various issues will do so as if they knew what is true about all of us. This is the source of all the "we" talk in public discourse. "We have such and such rights," "We need this or that vitamin or exercise or educational program." Medical science certainly weighs in with such pronouncements all the time, claiming that coffee is or is not healthful, that cholesterol must be lowered or a certain ratio of age to height to weight is right for everyone. (Read more...)
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Very Soft on Islamic Terrorism
by Tibor R. Machan
The New York Times magazine has a feature called "QUESTIONS FOR," and the other day it was "the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens," now named Yusuf Islam (as of his conversion to Islam), who was being questioned by Deborah Solomon. (Read more...)
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Wednesday
January 10, 2007 |
The Anti-Imperialist League and the Battle Against Empire
by Thomas E. Woods
In April 1898 the United States went to war with Spain for the stated purpose of liberating Cuba from Spanish control. Several months later, when the war had ended, Cuba had been transformed into an American protectorate, and Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines had become American possessions. (Read more...)
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Assumptions of New Year's Resolutions
by Tibor R. Machan
So, often people think they are free of philosophical assumptions. Many think they are just practical people and look with some disparagement at the heavy thinkers, as if they were useless eggheads. Yet, all of us go around with various assumptions about the world which could use some exploration, analysis, and verification. (Read more...)
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