RoR: Forum

Post 20

Wednesday, March 26 - 6:21pm

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Reply to post 18 wherein it is written

Bob, Hume offered the means to the end without ever mentioning it. That's the whole point of philosophy. It isn't an instruction manual, it's a method for getting to conclusions. Bad method, bad conclusions.

I ask:

Quote one word of Hume that ever indicated he put his ideas to use as a means to achieve collectivist ends:

Provide quotes please. If Hume did no such thing, the fact that -others- might have used Hume's thinking to that end is no reflection whatever on Hume.

If I make a knife for cutting bread and it is used as a murder weapon, it is no fault of mine. Let he used the means to achieve an end be responsible.

If you want to fault Hume, then point out a factual error that he made or falsify one of his assumptions or show he committed a logical error in one of his arguments. That is how it is done.

Alleging guilt by association is unworthy of an honest thinker.

Bob Kolker

Post 21

Wednesday, March 26 - 8:17pm

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Bob,

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Hume never breathed a word advocating common ownership of the means of production. Not a word.

Hobbes was a materialist and an atheist. How does this promote Christianity.

I think you are seeing things that are not there.
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Hobbes provided the secular validation of the Doctrine of Original Sin. Here's Jack Wheeler on that, writing in: The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (97-8), with caps replacing italics ...

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... Hobbes assumed the existence of PRESOCIAL individuals who by DEFINITION (i.e., by Hobbes' arbitrary stipulation) lack those characteristics which belong to the "compromises" of social life. The individual governed by these presocial drives--which Hobbes decided were essentially ... antisocial ... and aggressive--surrendered to an unchecked, unthinking lust to achieve his immediate, most bodily, desires. In a state of nature, the necessary result was a "war of all against all." ...

Once this view of the essential nature of the individual human being became accepted--which it was, for it fit in well with the basic position of Christianity that man is intrinsically evil by nature through original sin--it is little wonder that a problem arose as to how to reconcile this view with life in society ...

This view was the a priori, nonempirical invention of Hobbes ...
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And here's more from the book indicting Hume as one of the Godfathers of the kind of thinking that led to justification for Communists, who Rand called the Attilas or the Mystics of Muscle ...

Wallace Matson (23)
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Inside-outism has often seemed inescapable; for, after all, where CAN we begin knowledge but with our thoughts? But Hume showed that if we start inside and do not cheat, we can never get outside; and since Kant failed to rebut him, the latter-day partisans of this approach, notably the logical positivists, have been obliged ... to the great glee of ... apostles of unreason.
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Robert Hollinger
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(39)
... so many variants on "epistemological agnosticism, avowed irrationalism, ethical subjectivism." In particular, ... Logical positivism and linguistic analysis elevate social consensus to final arbiters in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics ...

Faith, belief, and social consensus are substituted for reason, knowledge, and the activities of the rational person's consciousness.

(42)
... this mechanization and devaluation of life ...

(43)
... empiricists who never move beyond the level of percepts.

... for the empiricists, reality is limited to percepts ...

"In philosophy we are taught that man's MIND IS IMPOTENT, and REALITY IS UNKNOWABLE, that KNOWLEDGE IS AN ILLUSION, ...

... these same thinkers have no answer to give to those voices out of the Dark Ages who gloat that FREEDOM and REASON have had their chance and have failed, and that the future belongs once more to FAITH and FORCE." (14)

(44-5)
Indeed, [Rand's] view--which I share--that existentialism, nihilism, behaviorism, and certain simpleminded formulations of pragmatism, utilitarianism, and analytic philosophy are in part the outgrowth of this failure of the classical tradition ... . For all these views are at bottom just the other side of the classic rationalist coin ...

(48)
"Attila, the man who rules by brute force, acts on the range of the moment, is concerned with nothing but the physical reality immediately before him, respects nothing but man's muscles, and regards a fist, a club or a gun as the only answer to any problem ..." (17)

... Plato and others ... their response to Attila--e.g., ... the seventeeth-century skeptic ...

... about human nature, Hume believed, that we do and must survive by animal instinct and not reason[.]

(56)
[Rand's] ... unremitting attack on the practical ramifications of bad ... epistemologies that lead to nihilism and a closed society ...
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Ed

Post 22

Thursday, March 27 - 3:49am

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Ed writes:

(43)
... empiricists who never move beyond the level of percepts.

... for the empiricists, reality is limited to percepts ...

I ask:

Is this how you would describe Ernst Mach, who forgot more science and mathematics in his old age than you ever knew?

Mach was a strict empiricist. He was also mistaken about the nature of scientific theory. But he did get beyond percepts.

Percepts are like raw food. To be of use to the body the raw food must be chewed and processed by internal workings before it can be used by the body. That same true of knowledge. Raw knowledge (sense data) is the starting point. But we have to "chew" what we say and here to make sense out of it and to put it to use. That does not make things one bit less empirical. Everything we know, believe, suppose and hypothesize starts with what comes through the senses. There are no innate ideas, just as Locke said.

Our brains "chew" (analyze and make abstract) the data we take in, but they do not add knowledge. They expose what is there in the raw material. This starts in early infancy, when the visual cortex re-inverts the inverted image of the world projected on the retina by a simple lens (Optics 101). That way we get to see what is up on top and what is down on the bottom. That is as empirical as it gets.

Bob Kolker

Post 23

Thursday, March 27 - 3:58am

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Ed T. wrote:

In a state of nature, the necessary result was a "war of all against all." ...
This view was the a priori, nonempirical invention of Hobbes

It was not a priori and nonempirical. His political view in Leviathan was heavily influenced by the English Civil War. His earlier political view in The Elements of Law was not. See for example the Wikipedia entry on Hobbes.

Post 24

Thursday, March 27 - 4:26am

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Reply to post 25

Hobbes saw government as it was; a necessary evil. The lack of government could only lead to chaos and bloodshed. Hobbes was one of the clearest thinking political philosophers ever.

Bob Kolker

Post 25

Thursday, March 27 - 5:15am

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Merlin,

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It was not a priori and nonempirical. His political view in Leviathan was heavily influenced by the English Civil War. His earlier political view in The Elements of Law was not.
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You missed the point. You don't get to get to a state of nature by observing a war somewhere.

Ed

Post 26

Thursday, March 27 - 5:31am

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Ed says:

ou missed the point. You don't get to get to a state of nature by observing a war somewhere.

I reply:

It wasn't a war "somewhere". It was where he lived and Hobbes saw the state of nature up close and personal.

Living in England under a Catholic monarch (Charles I) was a life that was nasty, brutish and short for many people. Hobbes wisely relocated for the duration. He lived to be 91.

Bob Kolker

Post 27

Thursday, March 27 - 5:37am

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Ed writes:

(43)
... empiricists who never move beyond the level of percepts.

... for the empiricists, reality is limited to percepts ...

I reply:

Einstein in his younger days was very much under the empiricist influence of Ernst Mach. When he formulated the Special Theory of Relativity (or has he called it -The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies-) he was very much the empiricist. I daresay Einstein was well beyond the level of percepts even in his younger days. Einstein was also a big fan of David Hume, by the way. Einstein got his idea of event synchronization in a very Humean manner, by paying attention to what it is that we see.

I have learned, empirically, to disregard just about everything that Rand and Peikoff have ever written concerning science and mathematics.

Bob Kolker

Post 28

Thursday, March 27 - 6:25am

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Ed T. wrote:

You don't get to get to a state of nature by observing a war somewhere.

That's true to some extent. It takes abstraction. Hobbes abstracted from what he observed. So did Ayn Rand in her "state of nature":

"These two figures�the man of faith and the man of force�are philosophical archetypes, psychological symbols and historical reality. As philosophical archetypes, they embody two variants of a certain view of man and of existence. As psychological symbols, they represent the basic motivation of a great many men who exist in any era, culture or society. As historical reality, they are the actual rulers of most of mankind's societies, who rise to power whenever men abandon reason.*
The essential characteristics of these two remain the same in all ages: Attila, the man who rules by brute force, acts on the range of the moment, is concerned with nothing but the physical reality immediately before him, respects nothing but man's muscles, and regards a fist, a club or a gun as the only answer to any problem�and the Witch Doctor, the man who dreads physical reality, dreads the necessity of practical action, and escapes into his emotions, into visions of some mystic realm where his wishes enjoy a supernatural power unlimited by the absolute of nature" (FNI).

Was that a priori and nonempirical?
(Edited by Merlin Jetton on 3/27, 6:46am)

Post 29

Thursday, March 27 - 8:05am

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Merlin,

When you ask about whether the conditions under which Rand's acquired knowledge of Attila and the Witchdoctor were "a priori" (conditions not reliant on further observations), then I'd say: yes -- i.e., her achieved level of integrated observation had reached the point where further observation became unnecessary (in order to really and truly know what it was that she had discovered about man).

But we may talk past each other here, so we need to define the term: a priori. Were you speaking about Kant's impositionist view of a priori (where certainty stems from imposing mental forms or structures onto reality), or were you speaking of Aristotle's reflectionist view of a priori (where certainty stems from reality "imposing" forms or structures --i.e., real relations -- on the active, non-evasive mind)?

Ed

Post 30

Thursday, March 27 - 8:40am

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Ed T.,

Replying to post 29. Regarding a priori and nonempirical I used them to mean whatever Wheeler and you did. I assumed Kantian meanings or very similar.

I personally reject Kant's meanings, but nevertheless think the terms do have legitimate and useful meanings. You may read more about that here in Part III. Note particularly on page 81 and about a priori I use an idea similar to yours -- conditions not reliant on further observations (my emphasis).

Post 31

Thursday, March 27 - 10:39am

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Merlin,

Then my answer is changed to: No.

In discovering the truth about Attila and The Witchdoctor, Rand did not use the same sort of "arbitrary stipulation" or "nonempirical invention" which Hobbes did, when he claimed to have "discovered" the (evil) nature of mankind.

Ed
[p.s. I'll take a look at your work when I get to a better computer -- this one wouldn't load the hyperlink in a reasonable amount of time to wait (for such a thing)]