It is now "conventional wisdom" over there in the hallowed halls of Analytic Philosophy (like there's something in Analytic Philosophy that isn't "conventional wisdom"?) that Harvard's Willard van Orman Quine was probably the most significant philosopher of the last half of the 20th century. This is due more to "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) than any other Quine article, and it is that very article where the traditional analytic-synthetic distinction comes under attack. It also happens that Leonard Peikoff wrote an article attacking the distinction, "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy," (1967) in The Objectivist, which was under the editorship and squarely under the philosophical guidance of Ayn Rand. The basic Objectivist package-deal here - a good package deal, as it happens - is Ayn Rand's theory of concepts and Peikoff's essay on the analytic-synthetic distinction. If Rand and Peikoff basically do the same substantive work that Quine did, then they deserve every bit a spot up there among the most significant philosophers of the century.
I've read Peikoff and Rand and understand their arguments quite clearly. I've tried to read Quine and gave up trying to understand after a few pages. Here lies the fundamental difference between Objectivism and Analytic Philosophy. The practitioners' brains are simply wired/habituated to think, argue, and write differently. Academic philosophy journal articles excel in being highly technical and obscurantist. I think the model promotes a certain kind of elitism that essentially cuts off a lot of professional philosophers from rabble out there the Ayn Rand-types would appeal to. So the academic "conventional wisdom" is that it's hard to take Objectivism seriously unless or until its proponents put their ideas in academic peer-refereed journals - an effective device for separating the worth-taking-seriously from the "cranks."
Now that Objectivism is beginning to make notable inroads in the academic publishing realm, the infrastructure of the academic "conventional wisdom" on Rand is beginning to crumble. Further, Objectivism isn't the only philosophical movement that has leveled significant and notable criticisms against the analytic style of philosophy; Continental and Existentialist philosophy have also noted the detachment of analytic-style philosophy from the concerns of everyday people and life. The compounding factor here with Rand is that whispering she's an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism (/whisper), and the CW says that's a no-go. But then again, Rand's theory of concepts is of greater philosophical significance than her advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism, based on her own insistence on the primacy of epistemology over politics and on the nature of the rule of fundamentality applied to philosophical hierarchy.
Rand was fundamentally an advocate of a neo-Aristotelian, non-Platonized form of reason. This puts her right there in the philosophical mainstream, as Aristotle-without-Plato is just what the mainstream has been yearning for, for who-knows-how-long now. (Aristotle is the Philosopher of Common Sense, see, and the conscientious philosophers try to emulate Aristotle by taking a humpty-dumpty they were handed from their forerunners and doing their best to merge it with common sense, somehow.) So the task ahead is to translate that message into terms the philosophically inclined can appreciate and understand.
There is a criticism of ITOE by Gary Merrill posted on Usenet in the early 1990s. ("Usenet? What's that? Is that like Twitter or somethin'?") Merrill's review hones in on Rand's polemical style, which does leave something to be desired, but he does not discuss the content of Rand's theory of concepts. If one focuses on Rand's polemical style, it does become a convenient way to dismiss her as a thinker. ("If she doesn't take much care with respect to other thinkers' ideas, how much care could she take in presenting her own?" Actually, that would be a pretty lame basis for dismissing a philosopher's views. They do tend to spend a lot more time on their own views than those of others, after all. Or is that not true in the very conventional-wisdom-like world of academic philosophy?) Anyway, he then hones in on Peikoff's "Analytic-Synthetic" essay as an example of the same bad tendencies he sees in Rand, because it is evidently ignorant of the fact that Quine's essay had attacked the distinction some 15 years before. "Peikoff is dishonest or incompetent, take your pick." Now, come on. Please.
First off, the criticism may well be self-defeating, for if Peikoff did launch a pretty definitive attack on the distinction without knowledge of Quine's essay or its significance, then that indicates a great deal of originality on Peikoff's part. Second, Peikoff was in a very unique position, that of being a Ph.D. from a respectable graduate program in philosophy and of having had Ayn Rand as a long-time mentor. He has described the mental turmoil the back-and-forth between Rand's methodology and theirs put him through. Now, in the time that Peikoff was in the academy, studying the history of philosophy with focus on "the status of the law of contradiction in classical logical ontology," there's no compelling reason to think Quine's essay or its significance had become well-known in philosophy. This is the time, remember, that academic philosophy was so dominated by positivism that Yale's Brand Blanshard wrote a whole book, Reason and Analysis (1962), covering this dominant tendency. This book Peikoff most definitely would have been familiar with (having been reviewed by Branden in The Objectivist), but I don't see a reason that he should have known about Quine's essay. Best as I can tell, Quine didn't begin to attain his status until about a generation (surprise, surprise?) after "Two Dogmas" appeared, and the field had been cleared.
I just find it noteworthy that the CW-pick for "most significant philosopher since Wittgenstein" and Ayn Rand's best student both attacked the analytic-synthetic distinction. Just like I find it noteworthy that - as the academics are now beginning to discover - Ayn Rand's ethics is the best legitimate heir to Aristotle's on the contemporary field. Just like her politics is the best legitimate heir to that of "lightweights" Locke, Jefferson and Spencer.
Anyway, we know what happens if the analytic-synthetic distinction goes. That means all the pretense surrounding Immanuel Kant crumbles. (I already know it crumbles when it comes to ethics - my "area of specialization" - given the clear and immense superiority of a eudaemonistic ethics over Kant's formalism.) But if that pretense deflates, . . . then what happens to the pretense surrounding the analytic-philosophy model, of which Kant was a supreme practitioner? Maybe if Quine had written in terms non-specialists could understand, we wouldn't even be so much as wondering whether Peikoff was or should have been familiar with "Two Dogmas"?
Showing posts with label elitism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label elitism. Show all posts
Monday, January 10, 2011
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Jackass Leiter, Cont'd (Part 26)
You wanna know how the Academy fries the brains/minds of students? When they're taught by the likes of the Prestigious Jackass:
Whenever you get someone talking about how "all hope is lost" with a country such as ours, it is best to simply dump them into the intellectual wastebasket as useless and hopeless themselves. How is it that with all the Great Minds in Academia, they can't get a handle on the American People and brainwash them like they do fellow Academics? Why do they whine and complain so? Why so impotent to influence the minds of The People in the direction of whatever batshit-crazy capitalism-destroying scheme the Leiters of the world concoct? Why all the elitism and condescension? Why all the cynicism and pessimism and defeatism? (Defeatism is a psychological confession of weakness; pretty ironic for a Nietzsche devotee, eh?)
There's also a distinct anti-Americanism going on here. Elitist fucks like Leiter hate America. They really do. And that only makes sense: when Ayn Rand symbolizes all that is great about America, and when dipshits like Leiter blindly and irrationally hate her, it follows quite logically that they have a deep-seated hatred of America, A being A and whatnot.
Meanwhile, Ayn Rand has the truth on her side, and when you've got truth on your side, it's not too difficult to sway people eventually. Try as the Academic Fucks might to import the failed European intellectual models into America, it's simply not gonna happen. Not if I have anything to say about it. America is gonna be just fine, no thanks to cynical dipshits like the Distinguished Professor. Nothing is fucked here, folks, nothing is fucked, they're just a bunch of fucking amateurs! Their inescapable choice in the coming years is to get their act together and jump on the team for the big win, or to be steamrolled under by the Aristotelian-Jeffersonian-Randian juggernaut. Either/Or.
One thing that will happen - the immutable laws of economics dictate it - is that Academia as we know it will be crushed asunder. The "great unwashed" are fed up by the likes of the Jackass who simply refuse to engage pro-America, pro-individualist ideas in a fair and honest fashion. It's outright fucking bigotry - and therefore projection - for these elites to ignorantly and arrogantly bash Rand, America, and ordinary Americans who more or less foot the bill for these hateful elites. Good riddance!
[ADDENDUM: It cannot pass in silence that Leither plays a typical smear-game by associating right-wing blogger Pamela Geller with Ayn Rand. Can we name all the brainless idiots and bigots who are devotees of the ideas of Karl Marx? Let's start with Brian Leiter, why don't we. If Leiter had an ounce of intellectual courage, he'd name the best representatives of Randianism inside and outside of academia and then proceed to bash away or cower as he chooses. It so happens that not just Pamela Gellar is "devoted" to Ayn Rand; I, the Ultimate Philosopher and Singularity-starter, am also "devoted" to Ayn Rand. And I'd fucking kick Leiter's ass in a head-on debate about Rand. :-) ]
This is unbelievable. These Tea Party bozos (that's a nice word for them) who may get elected make George W. Bush look like a paragon of intellectual sobriety and moral acuity. That the response of large segments of the brain-dead electorate to the current crises of capitalism and American empire is to turn to crazies to the right of Bush is the clearest sign that all hope is lost in this increasingly dysfunctional country.
Whenever you get someone talking about how "all hope is lost" with a country such as ours, it is best to simply dump them into the intellectual wastebasket as useless and hopeless themselves. How is it that with all the Great Minds in Academia, they can't get a handle on the American People and brainwash them like they do fellow Academics? Why do they whine and complain so? Why so impotent to influence the minds of The People in the direction of whatever batshit-crazy capitalism-destroying scheme the Leiters of the world concoct? Why all the elitism and condescension? Why all the cynicism and pessimism and defeatism? (Defeatism is a psychological confession of weakness; pretty ironic for a Nietzsche devotee, eh?)
There's also a distinct anti-Americanism going on here. Elitist fucks like Leiter hate America. They really do. And that only makes sense: when Ayn Rand symbolizes all that is great about America, and when dipshits like Leiter blindly and irrationally hate her, it follows quite logically that they have a deep-seated hatred of America, A being A and whatnot.
Meanwhile, Ayn Rand has the truth on her side, and when you've got truth on your side, it's not too difficult to sway people eventually. Try as the Academic Fucks might to import the failed European intellectual models into America, it's simply not gonna happen. Not if I have anything to say about it. America is gonna be just fine, no thanks to cynical dipshits like the Distinguished Professor. Nothing is fucked here, folks, nothing is fucked, they're just a bunch of fucking amateurs! Their inescapable choice in the coming years is to get their act together and jump on the team for the big win, or to be steamrolled under by the Aristotelian-Jeffersonian-Randian juggernaut. Either/Or.
One thing that will happen - the immutable laws of economics dictate it - is that Academia as we know it will be crushed asunder. The "great unwashed" are fed up by the likes of the Jackass who simply refuse to engage pro-America, pro-individualist ideas in a fair and honest fashion. It's outright fucking bigotry - and therefore projection - for these elites to ignorantly and arrogantly bash Rand, America, and ordinary Americans who more or less foot the bill for these hateful elites. Good riddance!
[ADDENDUM: It cannot pass in silence that Leither plays a typical smear-game by associating right-wing blogger Pamela Geller with Ayn Rand. Can we name all the brainless idiots and bigots who are devotees of the ideas of Karl Marx? Let's start with Brian Leiter, why don't we. If Leiter had an ounce of intellectual courage, he'd name the best representatives of Randianism inside and outside of academia and then proceed to bash away or cower as he chooses. It so happens that not just Pamela Gellar is "devoted" to Ayn Rand; I, the Ultimate Philosopher and Singularity-starter, am also "devoted" to Ayn Rand. And I'd fucking kick Leiter's ass in a head-on debate about Rand. :-) ]
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
More academic idiocy
The Distinguished Professor and his ilk seemingly can't avoid getting their digs in against Ayn Rand whenever possible. The DP - vile, creepy coward that he is - quotes a "senior philosopher" regarding the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
I should mention right off the bat that my book will be out in some format or other within a matter of weeks. It will fucking blow away whatever "product" these academic jackasses have been churning out for decades. There will be a veritable bukkake of egg to be wiped off these people's smug faces, it will be so embarrassing to them and their tired old pretentious ways. (I will only mention at this point that the book will vastly exceed the scope and effectiveness of that of the tentative outline I made back in February.)
As to the "outlets of questionable merit," we can cut the bullshit and translate that snooty weasel-wording into: "Not from the most elite academic presses." Best as I can determine, that means: Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press, and Princeton University Press. According to the Distinguished Professor, Cambridge University Press doesn't reliably produce "first-rate" material - and he would cite Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics as one example of why it doesn't.
(I am curious, why hasn't the Distinguished Professor published a stand-alone book on Nietzsche from one of these most "elite" presses? Routledge surely qualifies as "second-tier" at best, correct? Leiter has an established "elite" publishing record and reputation in the field of law or philosophy of law, but is he really that "elite" a philosopher, pathologically elitist creep that he is?)
Now, as to those most elite of presses, I can cite books from those presses offering essentially the same substantive conclusions that Rand delivered: David Norton's Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton), Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness (Oxford), A. John Simmons's On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent, and the Limits of Society (Princeton).
Now, let's comment on the cowardice, second-handerism and social metaphysics of "the caliber of outlet," shall we? Leiter as well as anyone knows that Nietzsche stood against a whole tradition of philosophy that was quite thoroughly academic in nature. The irony here, of course, is that the likes of Leiter, comfortably ensconced in academia, represent the very phenomenon Nietzsche was against. The politicking, the snootiness, the conformity to the established ways, the "Professor X says" over the "it is" . . . Nietzsche blasted right through all that. ("But it's the Parthenon!" And so it is.) Leiter as well as anyone should remember how tenured Princeton philosophy professor Walter Kaufmann (Critique of Religion and Philosophy) blasted through the whole charade that passed for philosophy as it was done in the mid-20th century. What exactly has changed, other than some sluggish progress in an Aristotelian direction?
Let's also further comment on the nature of the academic intelligentsia: for over 100 years, the academy was (still is? still?) fervently pro-socialistic, despite there being no sound basis on which to argue for socialism. We already know how Marxian pseudo-scientific anti-capitalist dialectics fell flat on its face. We know how socialism has proven to be a massive and utter failure, just as Mises predicted back in 1922. As the whole intellectual world was engulfed in socialistic ideology, Mises was a virtual lone voice of sanity - as was Ayn Rand later on when it came to philosophy as such (before being joined in that regard independently by Kaufmann in the '50s). The academy's reaction to Mises' absolutely sound argumentation: to ignore it.
Now, something about the sociological-institutional-psychological tendencies within the academy would explain this hostility to capitalism and to open and honest debate about it.
But it's not just about capitalism. Let's take another instance of the academy's failure: the stale, worn-out, dead-end debate up until only recently between "deontological" and "consequentialist" schools of ethics. I mean, before Anscombe's essay came along (concurrently with epochal works by Rand and Kaufmann), modern moral philosophy was truly a shithole, but it was academics doing the shitting, so I guess the only rational thing to do was to genuflect towards the academics, right? Their shitty works were, after all, being published by the elite academic presses, right?
One might conclude from the myriad failures of the academy when it comes to philosophy that academia stinks. Actually, no, academia per se does not stink. It is the academic humanities that (for the most part) stink. And I'm not talking only about the lit-crit wankers, the ultimate manifestation of the wafting stench. I'm talking about the default on philosophy by the academy, philosophy being the ultimate uniting discipline of the humanities (and, ultimately, of all fields). The main problem here is the lack of objective standards within the humanities despite (or because of?) the fact of peer-review methods - methods ostensibly similar to those found also within the hard sciences (which continue to make all kinds of strides while the Leiters and affiliated Senior Philosophers wallow in the muck and whine helplessly about Ayn Rand's continuing and expanding cultural influence). Only with a lack of objective standards do you get interminable debates about deontology-vs.-consequentialism and whether "social justice" should have a Rawlsian or more egalitarian flavor.
This is dysfunction, sickness and madness that urgently needs being called out as such, rather than being placated. It is exactly the same sort of madness that led to Marxism and socialism being the fad for decades in the intelligentsia - and which led directly and inevitably to decades of mass murder perpetrated by the governments of Russia, Germany, and China. When Ludwig von Mises is the lone voice of sanity ca. 1922, the ghastly and deadly period stretching from 1914 to 1945 (and stretching on into roughly the '70s in a somewhat less ghastly form) was inevitable. And the fucks like Leiter still, still, still refuse to learn the lesson or re-examine their unobjective premises.
What I would like to know is how a magnificent book such as Norton's Personal Destinies, published by Princeton University Press, still managed to become obscure within the profession. Here's a possible clue: back in the '70s, all the rage was about Rawls, and this wonderful book simply got drowned out by all the wanking to Rawls. The fundamental elements of a correct theory of justice are there in Norton, and don't require the silly rationalistic constructions of Rawls ("original position"; "veil of ignorance"; "reflective equilibrium"; "the natural lottery") where justice is divorced from productive achievement (which Ayn Rand regarded as man's noblest activity, but which really doesn't seem to play much of a role, if any, in Rawls's theory). Hell, how did Kaufmann's excellent Critique of Religion and Philosophy manage to fall into relative obscurity?
So isn't it really about fucking time that Aristotle, Mises, Rand, Kaufmann, Norton, and Rasmussen and Den Uyl got their full due amongst those people - the academic philosophers - charged with the sacred responsibility of doing philosophy as opposed to sneering, politicking and evading?
ADDENDUM: Note to self: study Henry Veatch to see if he should be added to this last list of greats.
There is no question that SEP is fantastic, but if the recent entries I’ve noted are the new standard, there is an emphasis on something other than the importance of the possible entry that made SEP fantastic in the first place. The entry that set me off was the Ayn Rand one—the bibliography alone is one of the most embarrassing I’ve ever seen: outlets of questionable merit at best, etc.
I should mention right off the bat that my book will be out in some format or other within a matter of weeks. It will fucking blow away whatever "product" these academic jackasses have been churning out for decades. There will be a veritable bukkake of egg to be wiped off these people's smug faces, it will be so embarrassing to them and their tired old pretentious ways. (I will only mention at this point that the book will vastly exceed the scope and effectiveness of that of the tentative outline I made back in February.)
As to the "outlets of questionable merit," we can cut the bullshit and translate that snooty weasel-wording into: "Not from the most elite academic presses." Best as I can determine, that means: Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press, and Princeton University Press. According to the Distinguished Professor, Cambridge University Press doesn't reliably produce "first-rate" material - and he would cite Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics as one example of why it doesn't.
(I am curious, why hasn't the Distinguished Professor published a stand-alone book on Nietzsche from one of these most "elite" presses? Routledge surely qualifies as "second-tier" at best, correct? Leiter has an established "elite" publishing record and reputation in the field of law or philosophy of law, but is he really that "elite" a philosopher, pathologically elitist creep that he is?)
Now, as to those most elite of presses, I can cite books from those presses offering essentially the same substantive conclusions that Rand delivered: David Norton's Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton), Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness (Oxford), A. John Simmons's On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent, and the Limits of Society (Princeton).
Now, let's comment on the cowardice, second-handerism and social metaphysics of "the caliber of outlet," shall we? Leiter as well as anyone knows that Nietzsche stood against a whole tradition of philosophy that was quite thoroughly academic in nature. The irony here, of course, is that the likes of Leiter, comfortably ensconced in academia, represent the very phenomenon Nietzsche was against. The politicking, the snootiness, the conformity to the established ways, the "Professor X says" over the "it is" . . . Nietzsche blasted right through all that. ("But it's the Parthenon!" And so it is.) Leiter as well as anyone should remember how tenured Princeton philosophy professor Walter Kaufmann (Critique of Religion and Philosophy) blasted through the whole charade that passed for philosophy as it was done in the mid-20th century. What exactly has changed, other than some sluggish progress in an Aristotelian direction?
Let's also further comment on the nature of the academic intelligentsia: for over 100 years, the academy was (still is? still?) fervently pro-socialistic, despite there being no sound basis on which to argue for socialism. We already know how Marxian pseudo-scientific anti-capitalist dialectics fell flat on its face. We know how socialism has proven to be a massive and utter failure, just as Mises predicted back in 1922. As the whole intellectual world was engulfed in socialistic ideology, Mises was a virtual lone voice of sanity - as was Ayn Rand later on when it came to philosophy as such (before being joined in that regard independently by Kaufmann in the '50s). The academy's reaction to Mises' absolutely sound argumentation: to ignore it.
Now, something about the sociological-institutional-psychological tendencies within the academy would explain this hostility to capitalism and to open and honest debate about it.
But it's not just about capitalism. Let's take another instance of the academy's failure: the stale, worn-out, dead-end debate up until only recently between "deontological" and "consequentialist" schools of ethics. I mean, before Anscombe's essay came along (concurrently with epochal works by Rand and Kaufmann), modern moral philosophy was truly a shithole, but it was academics doing the shitting, so I guess the only rational thing to do was to genuflect towards the academics, right? Their shitty works were, after all, being published by the elite academic presses, right?
One might conclude from the myriad failures of the academy when it comes to philosophy that academia stinks. Actually, no, academia per se does not stink. It is the academic humanities that (for the most part) stink. And I'm not talking only about the lit-crit wankers, the ultimate manifestation of the wafting stench. I'm talking about the default on philosophy by the academy, philosophy being the ultimate uniting discipline of the humanities (and, ultimately, of all fields). The main problem here is the lack of objective standards within the humanities despite (or because of?) the fact of peer-review methods - methods ostensibly similar to those found also within the hard sciences (which continue to make all kinds of strides while the Leiters and affiliated Senior Philosophers wallow in the muck and whine helplessly about Ayn Rand's continuing and expanding cultural influence). Only with a lack of objective standards do you get interminable debates about deontology-vs.-consequentialism and whether "social justice" should have a Rawlsian or more egalitarian flavor.
This is dysfunction, sickness and madness that urgently needs being called out as such, rather than being placated. It is exactly the same sort of madness that led to Marxism and socialism being the fad for decades in the intelligentsia - and which led directly and inevitably to decades of mass murder perpetrated by the governments of Russia, Germany, and China. When Ludwig von Mises is the lone voice of sanity ca. 1922, the ghastly and deadly period stretching from 1914 to 1945 (and stretching on into roughly the '70s in a somewhat less ghastly form) was inevitable. And the fucks like Leiter still, still, still refuse to learn the lesson or re-examine their unobjective premises.
What I would like to know is how a magnificent book such as Norton's Personal Destinies, published by Princeton University Press, still managed to become obscure within the profession. Here's a possible clue: back in the '70s, all the rage was about Rawls, and this wonderful book simply got drowned out by all the wanking to Rawls. The fundamental elements of a correct theory of justice are there in Norton, and don't require the silly rationalistic constructions of Rawls ("original position"; "veil of ignorance"; "reflective equilibrium"; "the natural lottery") where justice is divorced from productive achievement (which Ayn Rand regarded as man's noblest activity, but which really doesn't seem to play much of a role, if any, in Rawls's theory). Hell, how did Kaufmann's excellent Critique of Religion and Philosophy manage to fall into relative obscurity?
So isn't it really about fucking time that Aristotle, Mises, Rand, Kaufmann, Norton, and Rasmussen and Den Uyl got their full due amongst those people - the academic philosophers - charged with the sacred responsibility of doing philosophy as opposed to sneering, politicking and evading?
ADDENDUM: Note to self: study Henry Veatch to see if he should be added to this last list of greats.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Vileness in academia
The Distinguished Professor is just a vile human being. His latest cowardice involves this cheap shot that doesn't address any of the substance of any of the arguments.
I have experienced, first hand, the DP's closed-mindedness and/or dull-wittedness on the subject of Ayn Rand. One thing to keep in mind regarding his vile and vicious (and ignorant! let's not forget ignorant) attacks on Rand and Randians is that a former colleague of his at the University of Texas, Tara Smith, is one of those "lightweights" he implicitly insults, attacks, and slimes with his broad brush. I wonder, just what are the hiring standards at the University of Texas, anyway, and why does the DP impugn them so? This is especially odd considering that the University of Texas philosophy department is ranked No. 20 in the Leiter Report (the DP's long-running project of obsessively ranking things to satisfy his pathological narcissism and elitism).
The fact of the matter is, if it were Brian Leiter against any of the people on the Ayn Rand Society's steering committee, he'd have his ass handed to him, and something tells me that he has an inkling of an awareness of this fact and decides to evade it mentally. How vile! What a creep!
I have experienced, first hand, the DP's closed-mindedness and/or dull-wittedness on the subject of Ayn Rand. One thing to keep in mind regarding his vile and vicious (and ignorant! let's not forget ignorant) attacks on Rand and Randians is that a former colleague of his at the University of Texas, Tara Smith, is one of those "lightweights" he implicitly insults, attacks, and slimes with his broad brush. I wonder, just what are the hiring standards at the University of Texas, anyway, and why does the DP impugn them so? This is especially odd considering that the University of Texas philosophy department is ranked No. 20 in the Leiter Report (the DP's long-running project of obsessively ranking things to satisfy his pathological narcissism and elitism).
The fact of the matter is, if it were Brian Leiter against any of the people on the Ayn Rand Society's steering committee, he'd have his ass handed to him, and something tells me that he has an inkling of an awareness of this fact and decides to evade it mentally. How vile! What a creep!
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Brian Leiter: Jackass, Cont'd
Yesterday, the Distinguished Professor posted a link to this piece in the Boston Globe. It's a good piece. The gist of it is, to quote Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science,” and that the typical American voters' response to belief-refuting facts is to retrench further with the belief:
Now, one might think that this behavior is exclusive to the uneducated, non-academically-elite rabble, right? But let's also consider this:
Professor Leiter and his band of emulators pride themselves on being more sophisticated than the average boob. But they are not immune from this cognitive deficiency. Indeed, when the likes of Professor Leiter bash capitalism (which is awesome) and praise socialism (a total failure), they are engaging in sophisticated forms of rationalization of rather base emotions ("capitalism is bad because of the pursuit of profit" or some such BS). Attendant to this process of rationalization is a reflexive antipathy towards thinkers like Ayn Rand not actually borne out by a remotely careful investigation of her ideas. But since the Leiter-types have the prestige, they evidently feel some kind of special entitlement to dismiss contrary viewpoints in a very sneering, snide, and smug fashion, and to evade accountability for doing so when reasonably challenged.
In linking the Boston Globe piece, Leiter clearly demonstrates a monumental lack of self-awareness for someone so "sophisticated."
What’s going on? How can we have things so wrong, and be so sure that we’re right? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Generally, people tend to seek consistency. There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.” Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.
Now, one might think that this behavior is exclusive to the uneducated, non-academically-elite rabble, right? But let's also consider this:
And if you harbor the notion — popular on both sides of the aisle — that the solution is more education and a higher level of political sophistication in voters overall, well, that’s a start, but not the solution. A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.”
Professor Leiter and his band of emulators pride themselves on being more sophisticated than the average boob. But they are not immune from this cognitive deficiency. Indeed, when the likes of Professor Leiter bash capitalism (which is awesome) and praise socialism (a total failure), they are engaging in sophisticated forms of rationalization of rather base emotions ("capitalism is bad because of the pursuit of profit" or some such BS). Attendant to this process of rationalization is a reflexive antipathy towards thinkers like Ayn Rand not actually borne out by a remotely careful investigation of her ideas. But since the Leiter-types have the prestige, they evidently feel some kind of special entitlement to dismiss contrary viewpoints in a very sneering, snide, and smug fashion, and to evade accountability for doing so when reasonably challenged.
In linking the Boston Globe piece, Leiter clearly demonstrates a monumental lack of self-awareness for someone so "sophisticated."
Brian Leiter: Jackass and Bully
Seeing as I have no aspirations to enter academia anytime in the near future - that is, unless perhaps the likes of Brian Leiter get their comeuppance or simply grow old and fall out of the ranks - I feel totally uninhibited about shining the light of truth on this individual and those blog-cronies who genuflect in his direction.
Some background: Prof. Leiter holds a distinguished professorship in law and philosophy at the prestigious University of Chicago. He is a big-time Nietzsche scholar, having published books on Nietzsche from the most prestigious academic presses, Oxford University Press in particular. He runs a blog disseminating various bits of philosophical news. Among the bits of "news" he disseminates from time to time are items relating to Ayn Rand. His attitude towards Ayn Rand is hostile, sneering, and dismissive. She "isn't taken seriously by serious philosophers," i.e., by distinguished elites such as himself.
Leiter takes great interest and pride in academic attainment and status; for him it is a "filter of reliability" for what to take seriously or pay attention to. That might be all well and good, were it not also an excuse to deride, ignore, and dismiss such thinkers as Ayn Rand, who stand well outside of the academy in terms of style, substance, readability, and prestige-worship. One thinker Leiter and his blog commentators take most seriously is former Harvard philosopher John Rawls, whose landmark A Theory of Justice presents a highly influential synthesis of libertarian and egalitarian concerns. This left-liberal politics is the mainstream for academia, and presumed in that arena to be the political-philosophical orientation for which there are the best arguments. A look at the philosophy faculty at the top universities would seem to confirm this assessment.
A couple months ago, Leiter posted this blog entry, containing a link to this hit piece on Ayn Rand which Leiter describes as "amusing and worth reading." Anyone with a clue about Ayn Rand's ideas would instantly recognize how utterly, abysmally shoddy and ignorant the hit-piece is. Leiter, however, poses as some kind of qualified commentator on Ayn Rand's philosophical credentials. He apparently thinks that his highly negative opinions about Ayn Rand carry some considerable amount of weight or credibility given his prestigious position within the academy, presumably attained through a process of quality intellectual work and assessment of philosophical ideas. I cannot comment on his published work, not having read it, but I say this without reservation:
Brian Leiter is a jackass. An arrogant, elitist, narcissistic jackass. He thinks he is entitled to bash Ayn Rand and not have to actually present any quality evidence for his claims. The shameful excuse behind which he seems to hide is that to study Ayn Rand seriously is not worth the time and energy. As someone with much more of a clue about Rand's actual ideas and substantive merits, I beg to differ. So what would explain his unscholarly hostility towards Ayn Rand?
We get a clue here. What Leiter displays is an extreme antipathy towards capitalism, and he is also known to be an admirer of Karl Marx, whose characterizations of "capitalist exploitation" have been long discredited amongst those with a clue about economics. (It is unlikely that Leiter is unfamiliar with Robert Nozick's decimation of exploitation theory in Anarchy, State, and Utopia - a theory Nozick describes as an exploitation of economic ignorance.) Marx also made predictions regarding the eventual collapse of the capitalistic mode of production, also not borne out by empirical and historical realities. As these are central ideas in Marx's purported analysis of the capitalistic system, one is left wondering what there is to admire so much about Marx, his methodology, and his mode of inquiry. Whatever Marx might have gotten right, there's really next to nothing in his purported analysis of capitalism that actually corresponds to reality. But it still retains its appeal to Leiter.
(Nozick also provided one intriguing socio-psychological-institutional explanation for the hostility towards capitalism amongst the intelligentsia. It is this explanation, and not explanations grounded in the substantive merits of capitalism, that more likely explains the hostility. There is another, more comprehensive explanation, I think: the disconnect between the mode of inquiry all-too-widely practiced in the academy and actual, everyday reality. Hayek diagnosed this intellectual illness as rationalism. Rawls's theory of justice is one such elaborate exercise in rationalism, but I'll get to that in future postings.)
So anyway, Leiter is big on Marx, who screwed up big-time as an analyst of anything capitalism-related. But I guess he excuses him for that, because the main point seems to be that capitalism is still, nonetheless, exploitative and that it sucks. I can only speculate on what alleged facts of reality - not some rationalistic exercise performed on concepts (well, words purporting to represent meaningful concepts) removed from reality - leads to his overwhelming condemnation of capitalism. My strong hunch is that the explanations (well, the causes) are socio-psychological-institutional in nature. What this is not, is the impartial search for truth that is philosophy. Let's not confuse academia with philosophy. Leiter's got the academia part down, anyway.
Anyway, back to Leiter's contrasting of Rand and Nietzsche: it's plainly ignorant of Rand's ideas. Leiter, incompetently, misconstrues Rand's conception of selfishness and productive achievement. Whether or not one agrees that Rand gave a proper definition of "selfishness," she clearly spelled out what she meant by that term and it is shoddy interpretation to treat her like she meant something else. It is also manifestly clear from Rand's novel The Fountainhead, exemplified in the character of Howard Roark, what selfishness meant in the context of the pursuit of material values. When Roark turned down a major commission - meaning money - because it would mean compromising his own vision, he told the board of directors that it was the most selfish thing they ever saw a man do. In the Randian-Roarkian conception, selfishness means integrity - truth to one's own rationally-based values. It has nothing to do with the vulgar pursuit of material profit. Indeed, Roark is being as true to his vision as Beethoven (mentioned approvingly by Leiter) was to his.
Now how on earth could Leiter be ignorant of this, and yet be so certain that Rand sucks? How on earth can a philosophy of genuine individualism be so crudely mischaracterized by someone so academically prestigious? This is laughable, and Jackass Leiter should really be embarrassed for himself.
Leiter speaks about Rand's "superficiality," but what other way is there to characterize his own reading of Rand?
Leiter then quotes a crony-contributor, Prof. Robert Hockett at the intimidatingly prestigious Cornell Law School:
The irony here speaks for itself.
It is also intellectually incompetent to refer to Rand as an elitist, considering it is precisely sneering elitists like Professors Leiter and Hockett she was so opposed to. One need also only - once again - look to the character of Roark and see whether there was an ounce of elitism in him.
So much for Leiter's ridiculous, superficial, stupid, sophomoric, clueless, snooty, incompetent, ignorant and mean-spirited reading of Ayn Rand.
(At some later point I will address Ayn Rand's own similar weak point - her polemics against other thinkers such as Immanuel Kant. Suffice it to say that "Rand did it too" is classic self-serving fallacy and won't work as a defense for Leiter.)
There's another Leiter episode I would like to comment on here. This concerns his attitude towards the CATO Institute's Will Wilkinson. This attitude is reflected in this blog entry of a couple years back. Leiter likes to make wind of the fact that Wilkinson dropped out of philosophy graduate school, the insinuation being that a "libertarian zealot" like Wilkinson wouldn't be able to hack it in that setting.
Let's clear up a bit of Leiterite-leftist mythology about libertarianism and academia. First off, in economics, at least three notable libertarians - Friedman, Hayek, and James Buchanan - are Nobel Prize winners, as high a mark of intellectual prestige as I can imagine. Second, the case of former Harvard professor Robert Nozick presents a bit of a stumbling block for the mythology that libertarianism isn't an academically-serious political philosophy. The mythology has it that he "abandoned his libertarianism" later in life, when this is an egregious oversimplification at best. What he did specifically abandon was the extreme version of libertarianism he advocated earlier, citing concerns about community - concerns that no serious libertarian would ignore in any event. Also, it is unclear how any of his later shifts would provide justification for the sorts of violations of libertarian constraints he defends in AS&U. Seeing as he did not write in detail on political philosophy after that book, the public is left with the little nuggets he provided later on, and much guesswork. Anyway, the point here is that it's patently false that serious, "prestigious" intellectuals - even by Leiter's narrow standards - can't advance compelling justifications for libertarian ideas.
Apparently Wilkinson doesn't meet Leiter's narrow and exacting standards of seriousness and prestige, given how he dropped out of academia to work for a libertarian think tank. Apparently Leiter thinks this entitles him to make note of that fact in order to denigrate him as a thinker ("zealot"). This is the mark of an intellectual bully trying to throw his academic weight around, and it's not an isolated instance of Leiter's behavior. (Some attribute his pattern of behavior to Leiter's possibly being a head-case. I'm not in the business of diagnosing head cases, but this may provide potential pointers for those so interested.) He has a reputation for engaging in vendettas against those who get in his way. How this lines up with being a philosopher is beyond me and anyone else with a bit of common sense. (My own experience with Leiter was a brief email exchange some time back in which I tried to talk some sense into him about Rand, and met a brick wall. Again, this is philosophy?) It's quite possible that a major reason Will Wilkinson left the academy was because of how many assholes like Brian Leiter he had to deal with there.
What I think needs to happen is for Brian Leiter not to be enabled further in his pattern of destructive and irrational behaviors. This means for his blog-cronies and/or other colleagues not to continue their pattern of me-tooing, kowtowing and circle-jerking. As it is, he is the epitome of the Academic Elitist, the very embodiment of what makes the commonsensical, intelligent man-on-the-street (for whom Ayn Rand was an eloquent spokesman, I might add) so contemptuous of the academic world.
(Lest Leiter and his cronies whine and complain about how devastating to his pretentions I am being here, just keep this in mind: He brought this on himself. Reality, as Ayn Rand put it, is its own avenger. I'm only the messenger. The solution, of course, is not for him to bash or denigrate me, but to clean up his own despicable act. But should he deem it suitable to attack me, I say: Bring it on, Jackass, if you're so a glutton for punishment. I can out-think you, I can out-learn you, and I can out-philosophize you.)
Some background: Prof. Leiter holds a distinguished professorship in law and philosophy at the prestigious University of Chicago. He is a big-time Nietzsche scholar, having published books on Nietzsche from the most prestigious academic presses, Oxford University Press in particular. He runs a blog disseminating various bits of philosophical news. Among the bits of "news" he disseminates from time to time are items relating to Ayn Rand. His attitude towards Ayn Rand is hostile, sneering, and dismissive. She "isn't taken seriously by serious philosophers," i.e., by distinguished elites such as himself.
Leiter takes great interest and pride in academic attainment and status; for him it is a "filter of reliability" for what to take seriously or pay attention to. That might be all well and good, were it not also an excuse to deride, ignore, and dismiss such thinkers as Ayn Rand, who stand well outside of the academy in terms of style, substance, readability, and prestige-worship. One thinker Leiter and his blog commentators take most seriously is former Harvard philosopher John Rawls, whose landmark A Theory of Justice presents a highly influential synthesis of libertarian and egalitarian concerns. This left-liberal politics is the mainstream for academia, and presumed in that arena to be the political-philosophical orientation for which there are the best arguments. A look at the philosophy faculty at the top universities would seem to confirm this assessment.
A couple months ago, Leiter posted this blog entry, containing a link to this hit piece on Ayn Rand which Leiter describes as "amusing and worth reading." Anyone with a clue about Ayn Rand's ideas would instantly recognize how utterly, abysmally shoddy and ignorant the hit-piece is. Leiter, however, poses as some kind of qualified commentator on Ayn Rand's philosophical credentials. He apparently thinks that his highly negative opinions about Ayn Rand carry some considerable amount of weight or credibility given his prestigious position within the academy, presumably attained through a process of quality intellectual work and assessment of philosophical ideas. I cannot comment on his published work, not having read it, but I say this without reservation:
Brian Leiter is a jackass. An arrogant, elitist, narcissistic jackass. He thinks he is entitled to bash Ayn Rand and not have to actually present any quality evidence for his claims. The shameful excuse behind which he seems to hide is that to study Ayn Rand seriously is not worth the time and energy. As someone with much more of a clue about Rand's actual ideas and substantive merits, I beg to differ. So what would explain his unscholarly hostility towards Ayn Rand?
We get a clue here. What Leiter displays is an extreme antipathy towards capitalism, and he is also known to be an admirer of Karl Marx, whose characterizations of "capitalist exploitation" have been long discredited amongst those with a clue about economics. (It is unlikely that Leiter is unfamiliar with Robert Nozick's decimation of exploitation theory in Anarchy, State, and Utopia - a theory Nozick describes as an exploitation of economic ignorance.) Marx also made predictions regarding the eventual collapse of the capitalistic mode of production, also not borne out by empirical and historical realities. As these are central ideas in Marx's purported analysis of the capitalistic system, one is left wondering what there is to admire so much about Marx, his methodology, and his mode of inquiry. Whatever Marx might have gotten right, there's really next to nothing in his purported analysis of capitalism that actually corresponds to reality. But it still retains its appeal to Leiter.
(Nozick also provided one intriguing socio-psychological-institutional explanation for the hostility towards capitalism amongst the intelligentsia. It is this explanation, and not explanations grounded in the substantive merits of capitalism, that more likely explains the hostility. There is another, more comprehensive explanation, I think: the disconnect between the mode of inquiry all-too-widely practiced in the academy and actual, everyday reality. Hayek diagnosed this intellectual illness as rationalism. Rawls's theory of justice is one such elaborate exercise in rationalism, but I'll get to that in future postings.)
So anyway, Leiter is big on Marx, who screwed up big-time as an analyst of anything capitalism-related. But I guess he excuses him for that, because the main point seems to be that capitalism is still, nonetheless, exploitative and that it sucks. I can only speculate on what alleged facts of reality - not some rationalistic exercise performed on concepts (well, words purporting to represent meaningful concepts) removed from reality - leads to his overwhelming condemnation of capitalism. My strong hunch is that the explanations (well, the causes) are socio-psychological-institutional in nature. What this is not, is the impartial search for truth that is philosophy. Let's not confuse academia with philosophy. Leiter's got the academia part down, anyway.
Anyway, back to Leiter's contrasting of Rand and Nietzsche: it's plainly ignorant of Rand's ideas. Leiter, incompetently, misconstrues Rand's conception of selfishness and productive achievement. Whether or not one agrees that Rand gave a proper definition of "selfishness," she clearly spelled out what she meant by that term and it is shoddy interpretation to treat her like she meant something else. It is also manifestly clear from Rand's novel The Fountainhead, exemplified in the character of Howard Roark, what selfishness meant in the context of the pursuit of material values. When Roark turned down a major commission - meaning money - because it would mean compromising his own vision, he told the board of directors that it was the most selfish thing they ever saw a man do. In the Randian-Roarkian conception, selfishness means integrity - truth to one's own rationally-based values. It has nothing to do with the vulgar pursuit of material profit. Indeed, Roark is being as true to his vision as Beethoven (mentioned approvingly by Leiter) was to his.
Now how on earth could Leiter be ignorant of this, and yet be so certain that Rand sucks? How on earth can a philosophy of genuine individualism be so crudely mischaracterized by someone so academically prestigious? This is laughable, and Jackass Leiter should really be embarrassed for himself.
Leiter speaks about Rand's "superficiality," but what other way is there to characterize his own reading of Rand?
Leiter then quotes a crony-contributor, Prof. Robert Hockett at the intimidatingly prestigious Cornell Law School:
I thought that this passage in the Rand book review was the most accurate of all:
"Rand's particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism -- to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished." (Fourth full para. at page 8.)
In short, she is the Lumpen-"philosopher" par excellence. My better half was asking me, just as I began to read this review aloud, what could possibly account for the popularity of this ridiculous woman. I hypothesized that it was the way in which she afforded a sort of vicarious self-flattery to narcissistic imbeciles. Then I began reading, and upon finding the just-quoted sentence, smiled with Randian self-satisfaction!
The irony here speaks for itself.
It is also intellectually incompetent to refer to Rand as an elitist, considering it is precisely sneering elitists like Professors Leiter and Hockett she was so opposed to. One need also only - once again - look to the character of Roark and see whether there was an ounce of elitism in him.
So much for Leiter's ridiculous, superficial, stupid, sophomoric, clueless, snooty, incompetent, ignorant and mean-spirited reading of Ayn Rand.
(At some later point I will address Ayn Rand's own similar weak point - her polemics against other thinkers such as Immanuel Kant. Suffice it to say that "Rand did it too" is classic self-serving fallacy and won't work as a defense for Leiter.)
There's another Leiter episode I would like to comment on here. This concerns his attitude towards the CATO Institute's Will Wilkinson. This attitude is reflected in this blog entry of a couple years back. Leiter likes to make wind of the fact that Wilkinson dropped out of philosophy graduate school, the insinuation being that a "libertarian zealot" like Wilkinson wouldn't be able to hack it in that setting.
Let's clear up a bit of Leiterite-leftist mythology about libertarianism and academia. First off, in economics, at least three notable libertarians - Friedman, Hayek, and James Buchanan - are Nobel Prize winners, as high a mark of intellectual prestige as I can imagine. Second, the case of former Harvard professor Robert Nozick presents a bit of a stumbling block for the mythology that libertarianism isn't an academically-serious political philosophy. The mythology has it that he "abandoned his libertarianism" later in life, when this is an egregious oversimplification at best. What he did specifically abandon was the extreme version of libertarianism he advocated earlier, citing concerns about community - concerns that no serious libertarian would ignore in any event. Also, it is unclear how any of his later shifts would provide justification for the sorts of violations of libertarian constraints he defends in AS&U. Seeing as he did not write in detail on political philosophy after that book, the public is left with the little nuggets he provided later on, and much guesswork. Anyway, the point here is that it's patently false that serious, "prestigious" intellectuals - even by Leiter's narrow standards - can't advance compelling justifications for libertarian ideas.
Apparently Wilkinson doesn't meet Leiter's narrow and exacting standards of seriousness and prestige, given how he dropped out of academia to work for a libertarian think tank. Apparently Leiter thinks this entitles him to make note of that fact in order to denigrate him as a thinker ("zealot"). This is the mark of an intellectual bully trying to throw his academic weight around, and it's not an isolated instance of Leiter's behavior. (Some attribute his pattern of behavior to Leiter's possibly being a head-case. I'm not in the business of diagnosing head cases, but this may provide potential pointers for those so interested.) He has a reputation for engaging in vendettas against those who get in his way. How this lines up with being a philosopher is beyond me and anyone else with a bit of common sense. (My own experience with Leiter was a brief email exchange some time back in which I tried to talk some sense into him about Rand, and met a brick wall. Again, this is philosophy?) It's quite possible that a major reason Will Wilkinson left the academy was because of how many assholes like Brian Leiter he had to deal with there.
What I think needs to happen is for Brian Leiter not to be enabled further in his pattern of destructive and irrational behaviors. This means for his blog-cronies and/or other colleagues not to continue their pattern of me-tooing, kowtowing and circle-jerking. As it is, he is the epitome of the Academic Elitist, the very embodiment of what makes the commonsensical, intelligent man-on-the-street (for whom Ayn Rand was an eloquent spokesman, I might add) so contemptuous of the academic world.
(Lest Leiter and his cronies whine and complain about how devastating to his pretentions I am being here, just keep this in mind: He brought this on himself. Reality, as Ayn Rand put it, is its own avenger. I'm only the messenger. The solution, of course, is not for him to bash or denigrate me, but to clean up his own despicable act. But should he deem it suitable to attack me, I say: Bring it on, Jackass, if you're so a glutton for punishment. I can out-think you, I can out-learn you, and I can out-philosophize you.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)