Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Rand, Ayn

  • Peikoff on the Supernatural

    Top o' the Stack. Disciple on the left, master on the right.

  • When Rand Met Oppenheimer

    A Neglected Opportunity

  • Ayn Rand’s Misunderstanding of Kant

    Substack latest. The piece ends:  So I persist in my view that Rand is a hack, and that this is part of the explanation of why many professional philosophers accord her little respect. That being said, I'll take Rand over a leftist any day.

  • Trump’s ‘Bloodbath’ Remark

    Outdoing themselves in hyper-ventilatory TDS-fueled rage, Joe Scarborough and the rest of the mendacious insanos at MSDNC (aka MSNBC) and at other lamestream media outlets have seized upon Trump's bloodbath remark as if to illustrate Ayn Rand's point about context-dropping. Although I am no fan of Rand or her acolyte Peikoff as you can readily…

  • Ayn Rand on C. S. Lewis; Flannery O’Connor on Ayn Rand

    Here, via Victor Reppert, who cleverly speaks of Rand's  "Jack-hammering": Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-meta­physical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.” (I suspect Lewis would have particularly relished the last of these.)…

  • Memories of the Moscow Trials

    An important 1984 essay by Sidney Hook.  Related: The Trial of Kyle: The Show Trial Comes to America See also:  Sidney Hook Reviews Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual Sidney Hook on Freda Utley

  • Rand and Peikoff on God and Existence

    Substack latest. Wherein I analyze the Objectivist battle cry, "Existence exists!" Ayn Rand is worth reading, mainly on political and economic topics: she is a corrective to the destructive lunacy of the collectivists. I am not suggesting that she is wholly correct, but that she is useful as a corrective, especially now, to the extremism…

  • Smokers as Contemplatives?

    Now that's a stretch to elicit scorn, but this article does make some good points pushing back against the extremism of the tobacco wackos. The most absurd view of smoking known to me is the one that was the party line of the Rand cult. See Is Smoking a Moral Obligation? wherein I quote Murray Rothbard.

  • Rand and Peikoff on God and Existence

    The following is by Leonard Peikoff, acolyte of Ayn Rand: Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics . . . . Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you…

  • Peikoff on the Supernatural

    Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Meridian 1993, p. 31: "Supernatural," etymologically, means that which is above or beyond nature.  "Nature," in turn denotes existence viewed from a certain perspective. Nature is existence regarded as a system of interconnected entities governed by law; it is the universe of entities acting and interacting in accordance…

  • A Curious Mode of Refutation

    Here: To begin with, the idea that “existence exists” excludes the idea that existence doesn’t exist. It denies the subjectivist, pragmatist, postmodernist view that reality is an illusion, a mental construct, a social convention. Obviously, people who insist that reality is not real are not going to buy in to a philosophy that says it is real.…

  • Creation, Existence, and Extreme Metaphysical Realism

     This entry is a continuation of the ruminations in The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation. Recapitulation Divine creation ex nihilo is a spiritual/mental 'process' whereby an object of the divine consciousness is posited as non-object, as more than a merely intentional object, and thus as a transcendent reality. By 'transcendent reality' I mean an item…

  • A Note on Ayn Rand’s Misunderstanding of Kant

    Ayn Rand has some interesting things to say about the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in her essay, “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World” (1960) in Philosophy: Who Needs It (Signet, 1982, ed. Peikoff, pp. 58-76). Here is one example:   He [Kant] did not deny the validity of reason – he…

  • Harry Binswanger’s Conversion

    It's an old story.  An adolescent adrift reads or hears Ayn Rand and suddenly has something to live for.  (Via Objectiblog)

  • Sidney Hook Reviews Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual

    From The New York Times, April 9, 1961.  Excerpt: Since his baptism in medieval times, Aristotle has served many strange purposes. None have been odder than this sacramental alliance, so to speak, of Aristotle with Adam Smith. The extraordinary virtues Miss Rand finds in the law that A is A suggests that she is unaware…