| | After having told SOLO HQ readers a couple of times he isn't ever going to return, Irfan just isn't willing to resist yet another reply. This time, of course, it is a frontal verbal assault on me, with ad hominems galore, claiming I am immoral in various ways--I don't wish to list them all, they are too silly to dwell on. (This does recall for me encounters I've had with Rand, Binswanger, Peikoff, folks at The Intellectual Activist, etc., none of them pleasant, all of the just the sort, having that now famous finger-wagging tone, that alienated quite a few civilized folks from the movement.)
But here is a passage worth some scrutiny:
"...But that doesn't take away from Gotthelf's achievement, either. Tibor has not given me a single cogent reason why Gotthelf should have cited his (Tibor's) work in his book. Nor has he cited a single other place where Gotthelf would have had reason to cite him. (When was the last time Tibor published a paper on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics and its relation to the Parts of Animals?) Nor has he so far successfully explained his own invitation to ARS, or that of the "aggrieved" parties he mentions, much less their place on the Steering Committee of that organization. Forced to come up with something, anything, to justify having traveled so far down this road, he reaches back to an obscure event in 1969, and even here he has no answer to why it is that in 1999, both he and Gotthelf seem by mutual consent to regard that episode as ancient history. Nor does he have anything remotely resembling an answer to why that ancient history should now be pertinent. He describes as "crumbs" his invitation to ARS, thereby insulting every other contributor to ARS--including me (was my presence crumbs when I spoke there?) and Gotthelf, who was his co-panelist on that supposedly "crumby" occasion in 1999 when Tibor spoke...."
Notice this, please, carefully: I did beef that Gotthelf & Co. don't give much credit to others for spreading the good word about Rand--and Irfan is a prime example of the others. But I have never said or even intimated that Gotthelf "should have cited" me, anywhere, anytime. Nor did I complain that Irfan hasn't cited me in scholarly forums. I was observing that Irfan considered Gotthelf's achievement of giving a course on Rand/Objectivism at the University of Pittsburgh something "remarkable" and disagreed with this assessment and gave my reasons for doing so. (The bit about Gotthelf not mentioning Rand in works he got accepted by the very prestigious publishers of his books on Aristotle came late in this exchange but still had nothing to do with Gotthelf not citing or mentioning me. [It is a diversion to make it all look like I am complaining about having been slighted by Gotthelf rather than what I was doing, namely, complaining about Irfan picking Gotthelf's feat as somehow special while not mentioning anyone else's regarding bringing Rand into the academy.]) That is what gave me cause for complaint, since it is not remarkable, if that means worth making special mention of. Professors everywhere, especially senior ones, get ample opportunity to give special courses on their favorite people and/or topics. (When I visited at the US Military Academy in 1993-94, I gave a semester long seminar on the developments in classical liberal thought to the entire philosophy-literature faculty and didn't consider it remarkable, didn't make announcements about it, just did the job, period. And, yes, Objectivism was very much part of this lecture series.)
It is Irfan's selectivity of picking Gotthelf's gig--and its having been a subject of an inhouse interview at Pitt--as remarkable that was the justification for my complaint, not any supposed failure on Gotthelf's part to mention me or anything. (Gotthelf, after all, wasn't posting on SOLO HQ, Irfan was.)
Having made this correction, I leave all the rest to readers to sort out if that is what they consider worth doing with their time. In my opinion--and I would need to know far more about Irfan and his life to know this--something very personal was being touched in my initial reply, having little relationship to the actual statements I made (which have been forgotten in all this heat--they were about the alleged "remarkable" achievement of Gotthelf at Pitt, nothing else). Nothing else seems to me to justify all the anger and nastiness that has arisen here. Nor is there much meat to the claim that I have been outargued--which, in any case, amounts to elevating this informal exchange beyond the degree of rigor that it merits ("context, context," as so often one hears Objectivists warn everyone).
By the way, when one reads and posts on SOLO HQ, does one "belong" to something, as one may when one gets to take part in ARI activities? I don't think so, so it seems the idea of quitting SOLO HQ is a bit like quitting writing letters to some publication. (I have stopped writing letters to The New York Review of Books--because they have never published any by me so far--so have I quit them now, stopped being a member or something?)
(Edited by Machan on 9/02, 2:49pm)
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