Ikiru wrote:
Comparing objectivism to astrology is an absolutely biased comparison. Arguing whether or not man has rational choice and free will or the universe is deterministic is like arguing whether or not the world is flat -- one of the choices is absolutely false. Man cannot be deterministic and have free will.

So comparing objectivism to the rest (some) of philosophy, you have to make the analysis of whether objectivists are arguing that the world is flat, or whether they are being persecuted by those who believe the world to be flat.

zephos wrote:
Rand herself runs into this very problem. Mans' actions are a rational extention to accomplish a selfish desire. Mans' ultimate desire is that of prolonged survival [and possibly reproduction.] This very instinct of survival is not a rational decision. The self-presevation urge is not always rational and is not a decision whether to embrace or not. Instead it is instinct, urge, determined. So if the fundamental driving force of my entire being is not rationally chosen by me, then in what sense are the 'rational' decisions I make to follow this drive rational?

Faith and Force and Excerpts from 'Atlas Shrugged' wrote:
"Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch -- or build a cyclotron -- without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.

"But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call 'human nature,' the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival -- so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think.'

A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. 'Value' is that which one acts to gain and keep, 'virtue' is the action by which one gains and keeps it. 'Value' presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? 'Value' presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.

There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence -- and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its life is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions it encounters, but there is not alternative in its function: it acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.

An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil. It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions where its knowledge proves inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.

Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Why are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An 'instinct' is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer -- and that is the way he has acted through most of his history....

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice -- and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man -- by choice; he has to hold his life as a value -- by choice; he has to learn to sustain it -- by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues -- by choice.

A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, to your mind, and I say: There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man's Life is its standard of value.

All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.

Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being -- not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement -- not survival at any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's survival: reason

Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose. If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man -- for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.

JHBowden wrote:
For instance, with the issue of universals, one can defend either a one-tiered ontology or a two-tiered ontology. There is no intermediate position; either universals exist or they don't. Rand also called herself a "rationalist" but contradicted three properties ascribed to Reason --the formation of a priori concepts, the intuiting of necessary and universal connections between properties, and the power of drawing inferences from premisses. One certainly can deny a priori knowledge in logic, mathematics, and in ethics, but subsequently calling oneself a follower of "Reason" is demented.

Wikipedia wrote:
A priori is a Latin phrase meaning "from the former". In much of the modern Western tradition, the term a priori is considered to mean propositional knowledge that can be had without, or "prior to", experience. It is usually contrasted with a posteriori knowledge, which requires experience.
For those within the mainstream of the tradition, mathematics and logic are generally considered a priori disciplines. Statements such as "2 + 2 = 4", for example, are considered to be "a priori", because they are thought to come out of reflection alone.

"Kant Versus Sullivan" wrote:
Concepts are the products of a mental process that integrates and organizes the evidence provided by man's senses. Man's senses aree his only direct cognitive contact with reality and , therefore, his only source of information. Without sensory evidence, there can be no concepts; without concepts, there can be no language; without language, there can be no knowledge and no science.

Definition of Objectivist philosophy wrote:

The problem of universals

Objectivism offers the foregoing account as the solution of the problem of universals. This problem has throughout the history of philosophy been regarded as a problem of metaphysics, but Objectivism asserts that its proper resolution lies in epistemology. Traditional solutions to the problem divide generally into realism and nominalism. Objectivism regards the first as "intrinsicism" (the view that universals are "intrinsic" to reality) and the second as "subjectivism" (the view that universals are arbitrary creations of the human mind). The proper resolution, Objectivism says, is that universals are concepts, created to meet the unique cognitive needs of the human mind, but objective so long as they are validly formed.

Rand believed capitalism is a direct result of the behavior "rational" individuals, as if market forces function only in the presence of rationalistic ubermen. In reality, capitalism is superior to command economies because it addreses human ignorance by systemically coordinating dispersed, limited knowledge

JHBowden wrote:

You are familiar with the law of the excluded middle, no? Either properties exist or they don't. The view quoted above states a token is an instance of a certain type just in case someone's concept applies to the token. Nothing innovative about it, this is class nominalism, a close cousin of predicate nominalism. Under this view, for a proton to have charge is for someone to apply their concept "charge" to the token. It implies that unnamed undiscovered scientific properties do not exist. You will be hard-pressed to find many arguments in defense of the external world which state pterodactyls were undifferentiated, structureless blobs before homo sapiens thought of them. Again, one would know all of this by reading an introductory text about metaphysics.