Ranking some philosophers

Ranking is, using Rand's terminology, teleological measurement.  It helps keep one's mind limber.  One ranking I've spent maybe too much time thinking about is the following:

Babe Ruth
Willie Mays
Ted Williams
Ty Cobb
Honus Wagner
Mickey Mantle
Hank Aaron
Barry Bonds (pre-1999)
Mike Schmidt
Lou Gehrig
Rogers Hornsby
Stan Musial
Rickey Henderson
Joe DiMaggio
Yogi Berra
Johnny Bench
Joe Morgan
Albert Pujols
Ken Griffey, Jr.
Pete Rose

(Where Mike Trout fits in here yet is not yet determined, but I assume it is probably in the top five.  And pitchers seem to require a separate ranking.)

Or there's this ranking:

Ludwig van Beethoven
Johann Sebastian Bach
Wolfy Mozart
Gustav Mahler
Dmitri Shostakovich
Franz Schubert
Anton Bruckner
Jean Sibelius
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Joseph Haydn
Johannes Brahms
Bela Bartok
Igor Stravinsky
Pyotr Tchaikovsky
Frederic Chopin
Claude Debussy
G. F. Handel
Robert Schumann
Gyorgy Ligeti

(I don't know where to rank opera composers (e.g., Wagner) or atonal composers (e.g. Schoenberg.))

But a (teleologically) more important ranking would be one like this (more or less aggregated from numerous sources):

Aristotle
Immanuel Kant
Plato
David Hume
Rene Descartes
G. W. F. Hegel
Ludwig Wittgenstein
G. W. Leibniz
Baruch Spinoza
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Locke
Thomas Aquinas
Gottlob Frege
Karl Marx
Thomas Hobbes
J. S. Mill
Bertrand Russell
Martin Heidegger
Michel Foucault
Soren Kierkegaard
Arthur Schopenhauer
Edmund Husserl
C. S. Peirce
John Dewey
W. V. O. Quine
Augustine
Plotinus

(For the above aggregation-based ranking I'm not including Ayn Rand, and although I gather that Chrysippus might very well be top-3 material, there are almost no extant works by him.  (A parallel case might be Negro Leaguer Oscar Charleston, for whom no good stats/records are available.)  Also what about Socrates?)

So, I've studied the ideas of Rand for quite some time, enough to be an expert I'd say.  That includes all of the original materials.  For the other figures I've relied a bunch (or in the case of Hegel, entirely) on secondary materials.  Among the secondary materials on some of the highest-ranked philosophers above, the ones I've found really helpful are the Oxford Handbooks series.  I've gone through a half dozen Handbooks so far, and have another half dozen or so in the reading queue somewhere.  For the top dozen listed above, there are two (Kant and Locke) for whom Handbooks have not been published yet.  I'm just over 3/4 through the Nietzsche one; I put the Leibniz one on pause about 30% of the way through; in the queue are Wittgenstein, 'Descartes and Cartesianism', and Aquinas.  That leaves the following which I've gone through, and for which I provide a ranking based on my overall impression of each philosopher's merits (to be explained in due course):

Aristotle
Plato
Hegel
Nietzsche
Leibniz
Hume
Spinoza

Some inchoate remarks: I liken Aristotle to Babe Ruth; he's like the god-status figure of philosophy. [Note: adjustments need to be made for era (as per baseball historian Bill James) in which a philosopher/player flourished.]  Plato was the first systematizer and recognized the inherent dignity of philosophical activity over and above mere drives, pleasures, inclinations, opinions, or the 'mundane.'  Hegel is something like an abstruse version of a modern-period Aristotle in matters of pure philosophy.  (More context/details.)  Nietzsche's career was cut tragically short at age 44; how might the world have turned out differently otherwise?  (After enough time how would he have avoided a reckoning with Aristotle?)  Leibniz is a serious metaphysician (conversant with Aristotle) whose range of learning/expertise might be compared to Aristotle's.  Hume is a philosopher of 'common sense' and 'mitigated skepticism' with no pretense to metaphysical speculations.  (Blackburn's essay in the Hume Handbook was most useful and one I'd go back to.)  Spinoza requires you to accept his definitions if you're going to accept the system he purports to spin from them; his career was also cut too short.

I'd put Rand at least on the level of (shortened-career-)Nietzsche or Hegel; her mostly-lousy polemics only bolster the proposition that she developed so many common sense positions on the strength of first-hand inductions independent of the 'canon/tradition.'  Her key strengths are in method, aesthetics, political philosophy, and ethics.  She's a plainspoken 'popular philosopher' and as such performs an extremely valuable service to a philosophy-starved public or a newcomer seeking a springboard into the world of 'advanced, technical' philosophy with the aid of her/Peikoff's methodological strictures.  It's hard to imagine a more unjustly smeared or dismissed figure in the history of ideas (on the basis of motivations that IMO are quite nakedly political and therefore highly toxic).  I see no excuse for the professional (sic) neglect of her aesthetic theory much less her theory of method.  She's probably unsurpassed as a political thinker and it's really hard to overstate her contribution to the strongest variants of contemporary libertarian thought (see here for some details).  She also had a fine grasp of the importance of philosophy to the flourishing (or lack thereof) of a culture, and as such she (and Peikoff) should be taken seriously as a metaphilosopher.  (I can only assume that based on the now-available inductive evidence of the viability of philosophy for children, that she'd be all over that at least as much as anyone else - with, I am sure, some qualifications, e.g., that philosophical activity (even of the most 'speculative' variety) should proceed on an inductive/concretizing and context-keeping basis, and consciously and explicitly so.)

Now, if I were to include in the ranking the other top-half-dozen philosophers for whom I've yet to read an Oxford Handbook, as well as Rand and Socrates, my current impression is that the ranking might turn out roughly as follows:

Aristotle
Plato
Hegel
Rand
Nietzsche
Kant
Leibniz
Aquinas
Locke (probably Rand's equal as a political philosopher?)
Wittgenstein
Socrates
Hume
Descartes
Spinoza

You might tell that I'm not exactly a fan of rationalism as methodology; almost surely that dislike was effectively beaten into me by many hours of Peikoff-course listening.  (Also, I'd like to raise the distinct possibility of Hume's being a methodological rationalist while not being a substantive empiricist.  He sure seems to be doing some dubious deducing about 'sense impressions' as definitive of all we have access to.  As for Cartesian mind-body dualism as I understand it, it reflects a destructive methodology, quite explicitly in reaction to Aristotelian dialectic and (therefore) hylemorphism.  Dualisms like mind/body and is/ought seem to suppose that if you can't eliminatively 'reduce' one to the other, they have to be kept separate.  But what about mind as, say, supervening on sufficiently complex natural/physical stuff?  Or in the case of is/ought, the ought as supervening on sufficiently complex natural facts?  (Or suppose that the 'ought' supervening on an 'is' is a species of potentiality supervening on actuality?  We wouldn't, after all, have trouble with the 'is' lining up nice and neat with actuality; this leaves us with whether we should conceptualize 'ought' in terms of potentiality, and whether what is and what ought to be are one and the same - that they reach a sort of 'dialectical unity' as it were, instead of some unbridgeable duality or dichotomy - when some species of potentiality is being actualized....) That's a prospect that Parfit quite disappointingly doesn't investigate in On What Matters (well, I still need to get to Volume Three...), instead pursuing some line about non-natural truths that might not even exist in "an ontological sense," whatever that's supposed to mean.  I think Aristotle might very well go for a supervenience sort of explanation on such things; incidentally, Hurley mentions supervenience early in Natural Reasons, but she loses me pretty quickly after that.  I mean, would you look just at those sentence constructions, much less what's in them?  I'm not worthy, I guess.)  Also, very high up in my reading queue is the Handbook for Marx, although higher still and to be read very soon is the Handbook on Virtue.  Speaking of which, how thoroughly/completely/perfectly will it cover the place of perfectionism in the virtue-ethics tradition?  I really, really want ethical philosophers to get this one right.  After all, how does one possibly improve upon perfectionism, and Aristotelian/intellectualist perfectionism in particular?  I glean an explicitly intellectual-perfectionist strand from Aristotle, Aquinas and Rand, but not so much from all that many of the others ranked above, however much they were pretty much all putting the principle into practice....

(BTW, there's a chapter on order of rank in the Nietzsche Handbook, but the chapter I'd rank the most highly among the book's first 26 chapters is almost surely the one by Jacob Golomb about what Nietzsche meant by 'will to power.'  (Oooh, there's an article by him about Nietzsche contra Trump in search results.)   Also, I just so happen to have my eye on the newly-published Handbook on Expertise.  1300 pages, eh?)

Huemer vs. history of philosophy

three philosophers

Re Prof. Huemer's attack on "the history of philosophy" (as he describes it therein; 'Against History') and in particular his (grounds for) saying, "Please don't be an Aristotelian."

As per the previous post I'm transferring over from what is addendum/digression there to main body here:
===

Obviously he's not aware, for instance, of state of the art interpretations from the likes of David Charles and Allen Gotthelf that a final cause or telos is irreducible to the other causes and associated with this idea is that the final cause achieves a good (so we're in normative/value-theory territory, not the realm of mechanics, physics, chemistry, or unevaluative(?) biology).  And more generally, from the standpoint of a perfectionistic methodology: if we learn nothing else from the history of philosophy, and if we're good learners, we glean from the study of the past greats just what about their thinking styles made them first-rate thinkers with such lasting influence (such as Aristotle has in ethics, specifically with the recently-revived virtue-ethical tradition - duh).

And if we're really perfectionistic we should be able to devise methods by which to reliably and accurately rank-order the great thinkers on a scale of greatness (be it in cardinal or ordinal terms).  By any good measurement system Aristotle comes out pretty much well ahead of the competition in virtue of a monumental body of writings (and lost dialogues likened by some of the ancient wisdom-lovers to rivers of gold to Plato's silver).

(By virtue of her identification of the principle of ordinal rankings in terms of teleological measurement, as well as the identifications made throughout the rest of the Ayn Rand Lexicon, does(n't) Rand rank pretty high on the scale of overall philosophical greatness?  By parity of reasoning, if indeed Rand along with the other giants of the history of philosophy - all by repute and nearly all in fact first-rate minds - each had their own well-edited and cross-referenced Lexicon demonstrating with great effectiveness what first-rate minds they pretty much all are, wouldn't that increase people's interest in doing philosophy?  Huemer seems to short-change this possibility or something, in which case I suggest he get more dialectical/thorough in reasoning through what value things like history of philosophy provide.)

Also, I've explained in my book (namely in the most-important second chapter, 'Aristotelianism') that I'm an Aristotelian in terms of a tradition of thought defined by certain fundamentals but not beholden to all of Aristotle's arguments (as he himself would have wanted it, duh).  And fundamental to his very-impressive-results-getting intellectual enterprise was his philosophic method, which the scholar writing about Aristotle in the Oxford Handbook identifies with dialectic.

But the dialectical method should be treated most fundamentally, not merely as a matter of consulting, giving a fair hearing to, etc., the varied learned and reasoned-sounding opinions, weighing them and deciding on a best explanation; it is most fundamentally the art of context-keeping, for which Huemer can consult Sciabarra's Total Freedom, where Aristotle is treated as the fountainhead of this methodological tradition while its being formulated in terms of Sciabarra's art-of-context-keeping fundamentals (and in terms of the proper application of "both-and" reasoning to competing and partial claims to the truth, in addition to the proper "either-or" reasoning involved).  So far as I know, no one's presented any good reason to doubt Sciabarra's thesis, not even the ultra-wisdom-loving Prof. Huemer.  Also not widely known: for Rand, her concept of mental integration is, well, integral to her concept of context(-keeping).  And that is integral to her concept of hierarchy of thought.  (A proper approach to hierarchy would help inform us on if-then style hypotheticals that philosophers to pose; what are not just the implications of the if-clause but the presuppositions?  Like, "if the Aristotelian end of history as defined in UP's book were to eventuate, then...".  Like, for instance, would UP's book have to have been written first?  Is it a realistic hypothetical in the first place?  That kinda shit you should get stoned and think through very carefully and thoroughly.

Darn it, I lost a certain train of thought here, for which I blame the weed.  Oh wait, now I remember: I supersede 'Aristotelian' and 'dialectic' in the sense that I identify my methods in terms of a principle of intellectual perfectionism, which means (among other things) doing the activity of philosophy as close to perfectly as one feasibly can, but also learning a bunch of shit (for which don't ever trust AOCs under 30) and also possibly fanatical attention to (hopefully the most crucially relevant, philosophically essential) detail.  Like Aristotle, Aquinas and/or Rand, for instance?  (Also, I think with a probability approaching 100% that a Hegel Dictionary of the sort built by, who was it, Solomon in the 1980s perhaps or Houlgate ca. 2000?), might be part of a whole revived "understanding Hegel" effort that may actually pay off for once, but idk.  Just call it the Hegel Lexicon and voila, we've got a volume 2 in a much-anticipated-by-me series.  I just get a bit of a kick out of inductively identifying tantalizing principles like that one there.)

[Background music/soundtrack to the foregoing: Pink Floyd favorites, a listing of which is available]

The core libertarian principle explained

I'm using the term 'libertarian' in its specifically political sense, not the (indeterminist) free-will sense, as per the following image:

The basic libertarian principle is often phrased in terms of 'self-ownership' - the principle that one is the rightful owner and therefore has exclusive rights of disposal or control over one's own physical person (body-mind; faculties; abilities; energies; time; life-activities) - and, by further reasoning, exclusive rights of disposal or control over the productive fruits of applying one's personal resources in action (property rights, including the right to start and own/control a business of one's own, or pool capital with others, whatever one freely chooses).

Now, in the header I put the word "explained", and in so doing I'm both giving an essential description of the core libertarian principle as well as a why-account, as in why do people possess an exclusive right of 'self-ownership' and classic, essentially Lockean property rights.

The core libertarian 'self-ownership' principle reformulated is provided in the image above: one person's life is not another's (or others', as in a majority/mob) to dispose of.

I take the libertarian principle to be some kind of undeniable moral truism although its precise specification is a matter of controversy.  Is it consistent with any form of welfare or subsistence rights that Rand explicitly denies?  (And for reasons I will get into shortly I regard Rand as preeminent exponent of the libertarian idea.)  If it is undeniable, then it means that whatever other ethical/moral principles we can all reasonably agree upon after due deliberation, they all must occur within the constraints of libertarian 'self-ownership'.

Now, as to the reformulated wording.  The most directly comparable formulation of "one person's life is not another's to dispose of" or "my life is not yours to dispose of" in the literature is Prof. Hospers' "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of," in his early-1970s article, "What Libertarianism Is."  But it's a safe bet that his primary influence in this regard was his series of conversations and correspondence with Ayn Rand in the early '60s.  And the evidence that it originated with Rand is a passage in Atlas Shrugged (1957) where the hero, John Galt, asks the Head of State (heh heh) Mr. Thompson (heh heh), what he has to offer him, and the panicked (heh heh) and account-overdawn (heh heh) Mr. Thompson says, "I'm offering you your life" or words to that effect, and Galt replies, "It's not yours to offer, Mr. Thompson."  (Of course, anyone who has followed these things knows, Hospers, a widely respected figure in his profession, is recognized in particular for his expertise in aesthetic theory, and he's a big fan of Atlas Shrugged.)

Now, the core libertarian self-plus-property ownership principle is often taken by many scholars and interpreters to imply a rejection of any extensive measures of taxation and governance (a really big, powerful armed forces might be required for a period of time to defeat a mortal foreign enemy?), and especially measures that take property/income/wealth from one citizen and give it to another, or, what's usually called redistributive taxation/spending.  (Self-styled anarchist libertarians or 'anarcho-capitalists' say that you don't need any form of government/taxation to have a stable rule of (libertarian) law, national defense, or other 'public goods' functions usually attributed to a 'minimal state' framework.)

Now, the basic libertarian 'self-ownership' is, I believe, best formulated by Rand and (subsequently) Hospers, but Rand gives an explanatory why-account that Hospers doesn't in his article, although the intuitive appeal of the principle is there aplenty even in his telling.  But it's Rand who really gets to the meat of the why-account, which is the whole theoretical & thematic core of Atlas Shrugged and her entire philosophy: the role of the mind in man's (human) existence and all this entails.

Rand boils down the basic principle in dramatic fashion in the Galt-Thompson scene as much as she does throughout pretty much the whole novel.  The basic opposition comes down to this: Is John Galt's mind properly at Mr. Thompson's disposal rather than (exclusively) his own?  By "mind" Rand means a specifically human, conceptual or intellectual faculty which depends on the volitional  (thereby requiring free or uninhibited thought/action) act of focus, and the ultimate measure of the service to one's life, i.e., ethical or moral perfection, is the degree of one's focusing one's mind as opposed to evading or being otherwise frustrated or negated from within or without (by other actors).  
Put another way: A human is, by nature, a volitional/free conceptual-intellectual being who must make judgments about how to act, and this requires a focused process of thinking and this requires an effort (the basic phenomenon that involves active, free, volitional movement as opposed to a relatively or fully passive or restive state), and it means that one must be able to duly consider the reasons for taking a course of action.  So is it Galt's life to determine by how own free judgment how it is disposed of, or does it belong in part or full to Mr. Thompson/the State?  It's an irreconcilable opposition of basic principles.  Miss Rand is often bashed for putting things like this in such starkly "unrealistically black-and-white" terms, but I don't see any way around it.  It's the basic crux of Nozick's rejection of Rawls' theory (and arguably on grounds Rawls concedes as true when he defends the seperateness of persons against utilitarian appropriation-of-persons-for-collective-benefits).

But the fundamentality or primacy or basic-principle-ness of Rand's role-of-the-mind theme is the why of the libertarian principle.  To state again: the human mind (intellect) must operate freely to act/be what it is, and to be appropriated from outside against the action-directives issued by the exercise of its own free judgments weighing the for/against reasons (etc etc?) is to be treated as a mere instrument or means which falls afoul not just of the libertarian principle as presented here but also a 'Kantian' principle widely considered eminently plausible (the Randian version being stated as: "man is an end in himself and not a means to the ends of others" - which I take to be another alterative formulation of the libertarian principle).

So if Mr. Thompson is to get Galt to willingly cooperate, bother to put forth the effort to act (causally enact an effect, which in human terms is means-ends reasoning), he needs to be shown a reason to do so, and not the muzzle of a gun.  (Oh no, that unbearably black-and-white illustration of the principle, stated for the umpteenth time already in the novel (heh heh - if only the Rand-bashers would just fucking listen for a change, man, they might learn something; Rand's got information, man; not-exactly new shit has come to light (these past 63 years and counting ffs etc. for the umpteenth time)).)

What exactly is a reason for engaging in the effort of an action?  Well, there's a vast literature on that but a lot of it has to do with reconciling the "rational" and the "reasonable," or put another way, between appeals to one's personal preference- or value-set, a so-called egoistic reason-giving or justification for action on the one hand, and what, in arriving at the best principles for governing interpersonal behaviors meet the highest standards of fairness?  (Much of the influence of John Rawls in recent moral-political theory has to do with his understanding of political justice in terms of fairness or what I'm here calling reasonabless.  The idea I'm advancing/advocating here is that the libertarian principle must be able to - and does - satisfy standards of fairness, principles all communicating-in-moral-terms actors can freely and cooperatively agree upon.  Rawls brings in the concept of overlapping consensus to help describe/explain this ideal deliberative-communicative framework.)  The reasonableness-standpoint also suggests something or other about taking a stance of impartiality so that the perspective of all moral deliberators-actors are respected (taken into account).  (Political jab: this is why I loathe today's leftists who constantly caricature their opponents.)  Some sort of principle of human-equality is operative throughout all this ideal, something about equal consideration of all perspectives which means techniques of free, rational, logical persuasion and dialectic.  (Rawls' famous Original Position is a thought-experimenty device for taking the impartial standpoint so that particular circumstances don't affect one's judgments of fairness.)

So, Galt and Rand are saying - or might or ought to say - perhaps not to a slimeball like Mr. Thompson but rather to even an honest interlocutor whom I take Rawls and Nagel (whose 'altruism' or other-person-directed motivation comes from taking an impartial stance) to be, something like the following: "Look, give it your best shot at convincing me to take your so-called impartial stance but it's going to me my own free judgment and not yours that decides, okay?  This constrains you from applying your difference principle and all that stuff in anything other than a voluntary sense, i.e., even then it's not the role of the political to employ physical force in any capacity other than protection from the initiation of force (the introduction of force into human relationships)."

Rand has a lot of very negative things to say about the initiation of physical force.  "Force and mind are opposites" as she would say aplenty.  Then there's the translation of "armed might (of, e.g., the electoral majority)" into "guns and physical force."  Rand ain't fucking around here when she brings up the gun thing, because that's what it comes down to, a tool to threaten you to do things contrary to your own judgment and substitute for that the judgment of others (over how to lead your own life, etc.).  If Rand gets nothing else about her political principles across, it's that all human relationships should be premised on rational persuasion.

Now, there's the introduction of force, and there's the use of force in self-defense in the event that its use is initiated.  So that gives us some idea of when the use of force is ever appropriate.  If one is ever to use force, one should be able to give a damn good reason for doing so.  In the case of self-defense, a life is at stake (we're taking the case of defense against attempted murder here).  Or, we can speak of a portion of one's life (which is one's own to exclusively dispose of, etc.) being defended against less deadly forms of violent assault.  Now, there's also the matter of what are usually termed 'emergency exceptions,' e.g., the shipwreck scenario and breaking into an absent owner's house to obtain food rather than starve - provided compensation is paid to the owner, say.

Some philosophers - James P. Sterba comes to mind - have argued that a combination of reasonableness and libertarianism (or the moral principles that give libertarianism its appeal) leads to subsistence or welfare rights on roughly the 'emergency exception' grounds, although that can probably (surely?) be reformulated in the terms of reasonableness and fairness outlined above.  But there is reasonable disagreement over really (I mean, really, c'mon) how much leeway this gives the government/state to use forcible mechanisms to move resources around on a greater-needs basis.  (Keep in mind that the primary/basic/fundamental/essential productive resource is the human mind/intellect.)  For one thing there is a really large body of economic and political-philosophical literature that speaks of the wisdom of free markets in minimizing human want or suffering across a vast range of goods and services, in raising living standards wherever they're instituted, in making for the development of capital which leads to fewer out-of-resources scenarios, etc.  (Rand famously yet widely-misunderstoodly explains all this in terms of the darn-near-explosive power of the human mind unleashed especially as that has happened in the modern period from the scientific and political Enlightenment and onward, with (in her polemical mode) statist parasites trying to divert all the fruits of that progress to their big-government programs for little or no reason (sic) other than that "the resources are there for the taking [and Rawls tells us that we should go by maximin principles as a justice-as-fairness criterion, so the proper, non-libertarian role for government/force here is to maximally improve the lives of the least advantaged, and that requires about 50% of GDP be government/force-based.]")

(Note, BTW, the implausibility of the Warren/Obama argument that billionaires are created through massive state-created infrastructure - the famously caricatured but still relevant-point-making "You didn't build that" stuff.  So, how do they explain the existence of a billionaire like John D. Rockefeller or an industrialist on the level of a Henry Ford, prior to the rise of post-New Deal big government infrastructure?  Is it the idea that more government-provided infrastructure adds to the per-capta GDP growth rate?  I rather doubt that the data available at ourworldindata.org support such a thesis.  It actually shows a fairly consistent cross-era (pre- and post-New Deal) average growth rate - so doesn't that suggest that all that extra government is just a deadweight-loss superfluity in GDP growth rate terms, thereby recommending a return to a libertarian-ish default government size?

I guess one basic question here, though, is whether the libertarian is conceding as a matter of principle that in the event that misfortune should ever exhaust a person's resources, they have a government/taxpayer-provided safety net, which is in effect conceding that there are welfare or subsistence rights.  Do we get at least this concession on behalf of a "right to well-being" when Gewirth formulates his semi-famous principle of generic consistency (PCG) in terms of rights to freedom and well-being (inasmuch as he's formulating his 'dialectical' moral framework in rights-terms...).  Put differently: is this a principle that even a John Galt could rationally-and-reasonably concede in terms of the value-hierarchy he could rationally endorse, which necesarily includes taking an appropriate stance of impartiality?  What if he's in the shoes of the unfortunate who has exhausted all resource-avenues (somehow)?

I think I'll leave that as an open question for now.  While it is an interesting question whether the kind of subsistence-rights-claim I'm talking about can still be called libertarian in some sense, the more interesting question is whether it's the right position to take.  I happen to think it is, as long as it's properly qualified and constrained.  There is an emergency-exception kind of rationale on the one hand, and then there's the reality of government taxing and spending upwards of 40% of GDP in many advanced economies today on the other hand.  Is there some kind of slippery slope from an emergency-style safety net (what else is "safety net" supposed to connote? it's not supposed to mean a hammock, as many conservatives like to point out) to government taking up half a country's (it's citizens' lives) in GDP?

Okay, to wrap this up: There's a lot of reason to believe that the libertarian principle, widely adopted in all its implications and grounding principles, would be a route to optimal human problem-solving across a vast range of cases (particularly in regard to what I take to be its Randian grounding principles about the free exercise of the human intellect - which adopted/applied universally would meet by definition for an end of history, i.e., a universally or perhaps only near-universally adopted principles of a perfectionistic or 'Aristotelian' approach to human rationality or problem-solving.  I've found the tendency for the most accomplished libertarian theorists (the Aristotelians and Randians) to be barking up that tree quite a bit more than I've been seeing the other libertarians or the non-libertarians doing so.  Communicative rationality, justice-as-fairness, or even the basic libertarian principle itself describe roughly the "form" that human reasoning ought to take on ethical (more specifically, moral or universalistic) grounds - ideas that fall more or less into the Kantian tradition of theorizing.  But the Randian-Aristotelian ground of the libertarian principle is a principle of intellectual perfectionism that applies not only to thinking in terms of mutual deliberative rationality and that cluster of Kantian-ish theories (with reasonabless front and center), but at least as importantly to the issues about how to live one's life and fulfill one's wisely-formed goals, expressed in terms of rationality (preference-satisfaction) and well-being (objective flourishing/actualizing of potentials).  (This is often associated with 'Aristotelian,' teleological, eudaemonist or happiness-oriented, self-actualization (like in David L. Norton's magisterial if not monumental Personal Destinies), perfectionism (the Dougs Den Uyl & Rasmussen; Thomas Hurka), virtue-ethics (a huge field of authors such as Anscombe, Foot, Rand, Veatch, MacIntyre, John M. Cooper, Nussbaum, Annas, and basically a lot of the moral philosophy faculty at places like Arizona and UNC-Chapel Hill.) That is to say, the intellectual perfectionism applies to the content of one's ends over and above applying the proper form of reasoning.  The very interesting question from this point on, explored in places like Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment, is how mutually reinforcing these reasoning-stances are or might be.  We can have Kantian-ish constraints informing us about the reasonableness of ends to adopt as examined from the flourishing-angle - to both reasonably and rationally incorporate such contraints into one's (wisely-formed) preference-set, as it were.  And it seems to me that whatever else intellectual perfectionists ought to be, they ought to be libertarians who also recognize the problem-solving power of human intellect with all this entails.  (And it's hard to see how Rand doesn't earn high philosophical marks on this count, although I would like also to single out Gewirth - a good man, and thorough.)

How to criticize Ayn Rand effectively

[This post might serve as a proto-version or background material for a planned future posting or writing on "Rand and philosophy," which would be Part 2 of such a project (a full version of which would involve a comparison/contrast, i.e., integration/differentiation, of Rand with numerous canonical figures in the history of philosophy, and that requires lots of research); Part 1, "Background timeline/players," is already available here.  As if Part 1 weren't enough on its own to give a strong indication of what a bunch of intellectual malefactors Rand-bashers are....]

Perhaps the only way a decent critical commentator on Rand might get some serious traction is to argue that this or that position or argument or claim of hers violates the methodological strictures that she and especially Peikoff (her hand-picked heir) promoted, especially in Peikoff's Rand-authorized 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course (later adapted into his 1991 book, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand or OPAR [seminar course]; either the course or the book are pretty definitive statements of the Objectivist philosophy).  (Peikoff's later courses, after Rand's death - especially his Understanding Objectivism, OPAR Seminars, The Art of Thinking, Unity in Epistemology and Ethics, and Objectivism Through Induction get more into the meat of Objectivist method, and are invaluable whether or not Rand was around to authorize them.)

Now, key terms of method in Objectivism are context, integration and hierarchy.  Now, it would be nice to helpfully summarize in the space of a blog post what these concepts are all about, but I don't know how to do such a summary at this point.  But these concepts have (more or less) to do with how to discipline one's mind to arrive at a thoroughly validated picture of the world.  In fact, I can't think of any serious criticism of these disciplinary strictures to be found, anywhere, ever, and the reason for this is a little secret that (unfortunately) few are in on:

The Objectivist methodological strictures are philosophic method proper.

Establishing the proper context for one's concepts, to establish the relationship of that concept within a system of concepts, and to establish the place of a concept within a hierarchy of concepts, and doing this in a fully systematic and disciplined way . . . how does this differ from philosophic method as such?

All I know is, by adhering to the methodological strictures involved here, I've developed the ideas as they've appeared on this blog, covering a rather vast range of subject matter under a relatively few number of philosophical principles.  Indeed, I've come to the rock-bottom, can't-go-any-further stuff, as it were, as it pertains to philosophical education of a citizenry as a major remedy for the ills it faces.  I've arrived at a theme of fundamental importance: Better Living Through Philosophy.  I've developed a sensibility about the study of the history of philosophy that respects the principle of charity and/or Dennett/Rapoport Rules.  (I consider such things a matter of proper application of context-keeping: what, e.g., was the intellectual context within which, say, Spinoza or Kant was operating, and how does that relate to, or integrate with, the intellectual context of other thinkers such as Aristotle or Rand?  And how does one properly differentiate and integrate such concrete particulars as these four thinkers along various axes of measurement?)  I've also arrived at the idea that both philosophic method proper and the Rand-Peikoff themes about method are ways of expressing an intellectual perfectionism, and that such a perfectionist theme is at the core of the philosophical vision of the good life (whatever else is included in or subsumed under this vision).

Now, if the things that Rand and Peikoff say about method are another way of formulating what it is to engage in the method of philosophy as such - in a way that hasn't been explicated by other philosophers in history (else we'd be hearing all about context, integration and hierarchy when studying the history of philosophy) - then acknowledging such a point puts Rand-bashers in a bit of a bind: How can such philosophically negligible figures arrive at such sound methodological principles that are virtually synonymous with philosophic method?

But let's say that Rand-bashers can exercise enough good faith to figure out that these thinkers aren't the philosophically negligible lightweights the bashers pretend them to be, and they're still interested in criticizing Rand.  Well, what better way to put Rand and her defenders on their heels than to show that something Rand said or argued fails to properly adhere to her own methodological advice?  Then they would be effective in doing so.  But note here that if "A is A" - that if Objectivist method and philosophic method are one and the same thing - then all they're really saying is that Rand, in failing to adhere to her own stated methods, is also failing to do philosophy properly (or as well as she could do it).

My advice would be for the Rand-bashers to give up their bad-faith anti-Rand position and go right for the jugular - that, e.g., Rand's argument for a standard of value or a system of virtues doesn't comport with her stated method.  They would be doing the more productive thing which is to acknowledge (a la the Dennett/Rapoport Rules) where Rand is strong (indeed, very strong) before getting to their criticism.  They would also have before them the task of figuring out how it is that, if philosophic thought is indeed properly all about keeping context and respecting hierarchy, philosophers other than Rand/Peikoff hadn't formulated philosophic method in those terms.  (All I know is, framing one's thinking methods in those terms has been very helpful to me in thinking philosophically.  This is a genuine experience that no amount of Rand-bashing from someone else can erase.  So to hell with the bashers, they haven't a clue, although they have it within themselves to get one.)

So basically to criticize Rand effectively you also have to concede that there's something about her/Peikoff's thought and writing that's unassailable, and that this something is very fundamental to her thought.  This is an example of going where the argument leads, even if one initially thinks that where the argument leads (that Rand/Peikoff are right on philosophically fundamental matters) would be a real bummer, a blow to one's low estimate of Rand.  So, whether or not the Rand-bashers are prepared now to follow the argument here where it leads, one can raise the legitimate question: would they ever be prepared to follow the argument here where it leads, as intellectual honesty would require?  Are they seriously prepared to entertain the suggestion that they simply got it very wrong about Rand?  Are they seriously prepared to acknowledge that intellectual perfectionism leads them to recognize that Rand endorsed intellectual perfectionism as a way of life?

And, heck, once they grasp in basic form the idea that Rand's entire ethical system - her concept of egoism - basically has this intellectual perfectionism as its formal characteristic, where does this leave them qua Rand-bashers and qua intellectually credible commentators?  (An alternative route in which they attack the principle of intellectual perfectionism itself doesn't sound viable; how would such an attack not be self-defeating?  Put another way, philosophy always buries its undertakers.  As anyone who's thought this through carefully knows, philosophy is foundational to the hierarchy of knowledge which is why the conceptual hierarchy of wikipedia leads one ultimately to philosophy.  We also have Rand herself emphasizing this point in her own discussions of philosophy itself, and in releasing a lecture/article as well as a book under the title/theme "Philosophy: Who Needs It."  Why the f isn't a critical mass of philosophers writing books and articles along these lines, as is arguably their moral imperative to do given the implications for human flourishing and/or respect for humanity?)

On the merits, the prospects for Rand-bashing at any time in the future are exceedingly slim to none.  (This says something not so good about the intellectual character of Rand-bashers.)  This leaves room only for the usual ordinary give-and-take forms of criticism, but even there, given what I'm saying above, it vindicates Rand/Peikoff on fundamentals and necessarily narrows the scope of what can be criticized (since we already saw above that you can't coherently attack intellectual perfectionism, context-keeping, etc., which cannot be separated from Rand's egoism as understood the way a Dennett/Rapoport-caliber critic would understood it, i.e., as she understood it).

I take issue with Rand's largely polemical approach to the history of philosophy, and I'd say this is a very ripe area where one can take issue with Rand using all the proper tools of philosophy and/or her own method.  What I'm not clear on is how one could prove that her case against Kant is lousy and also have this be a critique of her own, intellectual-perfectionist egoism.  It really strikes me as an area where the things she says are not tied inherently to the fundamentals of her system, the way (e.g.) her new concept of egoism is tied to its intellectual-perfectionist fundamentals.

(This parenthetical turned into a lengthy digression: Follow the argument where it leads?  That's an egoistic attitude in Rand's framework.  It's in one's rightly-understood interests - one's right desires - to have right opinion about the world.  Does such a concept of egoism turn out to be vacuous or uninteresting?  Is that the best critique we might arrive at?  Why not call the intellectual-perfectionist philosopher who experiences no conflict between feeling or inclination/desire and virtue (this harmonious condition would be virtue proper, and not incontinence or continence or akrasia) a shmegoist?  How does egoism/schmegoism not then line up with morality proper, thereby making the "egoism" concept superfluous, not explanatory of anything, or something like that?  What work does the concept of egoism do here?  IOW: why not just call it "schmegoism" instead, and define a schmegoist as anyone who fulfills his rightly understood interests?  I think it has to do with Rand's tight formal connection between actor and beneficiary in the sense that the actor is the rightful beneficiary of activity directed toward the good life.  So if universalizability (Kantian or otherwise) is a formal constraint on good-life-directed activity, then acting in accordance with such constraints would fulfill the actor's rightly-understood interests and the actor would be the beneficiary (in some non-vacuous sense) of this universalizability-respecting action.  Now, I've made a published case that Rand's argument for rights involves a form of universalizability-reasoning; she employed it in her own writings as a matter of what a logically consistent actor does.  At the same time, the case I made also holds that Rand's egoism itself involves such universalizability reasoning, as a matter of context-keeping - what are the requirements for life qua man, any individual man and not just John G., say - and that the common grounding requirement for life qua man - something about the ability to direct one's own intellect in the characteristically human act of thinking, free of external compulsion - points to both egoism (Randian form) and to rights.  This all becomes very tightly bound up: egoism grounds rights and respect for rights informs what it is to be a (Randian) egoist, and to escape any circularity here we need to acknowledge something about formal characteristics of a good human life (namely, freedom) that is fundamental to the case for both (Randian) egoism and rights.  The very point of a code of values is to achieve happiness and to achieve happiness you need to life according to the requirements of life qua man, and both happiness and life-qua-man are roughly synonymous with rational self-interest, but when we fill this in with substantive content we get (among other things) rights, which philosophers had traditionally said is not an outcome of egoism (traditionally construed).  If we use Aristotelian notions of eudaimonia or self-actualizing, the social component of one's individual flourishing becomes integral to the good-life picture.  In any event, it seems of crucial importance to understanding why Rand uses the term "egoism" that it specifies the individual actor as the proper beneficiary of that actor's efforts - that the social components of the flourishing life redound to the benefit of the actor.  It's just that this flourishing life not only doesn't look like egoism traditionally construed (and it definitely doesn't, otherwise Aristotelian ethics would traditionally be identified as an egoism and not just a eudaimonism) but it also incorporates others' interests in such a way that it becomes something of an issue why one would bother to use the term "egoism" where such putatively egoistic behavior involves taking a great interest in the self-actualizing of others.  Rand would probably put in terms of there being a community grounded in virtue (and virtue in essence is, or is expressive of, intellectual perfection).  Galt's Gulch might be such a society.  But then we're rather far removed from any of the usual lines of strawman-like criticisms of Rand as an advocate of some sort of asocial or atomized "individualism."  We basically have an Aristotelian ethics updated to specify the proper beneficiary of eudaimonic activity as ultimately the actor herself and in which the actor makes free judgments based on her own unique and individualized hierarchy of values as to how to "fit" the (eudaimonic) interests of others into her value-scheme.  The objectivity of human values requires that values be freely chosen based on the actor's hierarchy of values, which excludes the "altruistic" alternative in which some alien set of values is demanded or imposed (by force) on the individual irrespective of how those values are supposed to integrate with the actor's own.  The "altruistic" alternative is a form of intrinsicism where the "values" to be acted upon are imposed from without, i.e., without respect for the context of the individual's own knowledge and decision-making.  Here we are back to that basic methodological concept, context.  This stuff really is all tightly interconnected in Rand and its appeal should be plenty clear to those who do their homework and think this through.  Just from this post there are leads to any number of closely interconnected concepts: context, life qua man, judgment, intellectual perfection, interests, objectivity, virtue.  It just rings to me at this point that without some well-developed understanding of the interrelationship of all these concepts, one is unlikely to understand what Rand was really up to in her philosophical writings.  You might as well glide your eyes over the pages of her writings without integrating any of it.  I'm coming to think - with the aid of some secondary scholarship - that Hegel's system has a similar feature whereby the web of (perhaps mutually-supporting) conceptual interrelations in his system can't be approached in a casual manner with any expectation of serious grasp or understanding.  The further complication in Hegel's case is his abstruse presentation - its needless abstruseness is in evidence by the fact that secondary scholars seem to be able to translate his verbiage into more accessible terms.  So . . . can someone like Hegel much less Aristotle be construed as an egoist in Rand's terms?  I guess it all comes down to whether or not one understands egoism in terms of the beneficiary-criterion spelled out above with reference to the individual's own rationally- and hence freely-integrated hierarchy of values.  So applying the "schmegoism?" challenge and pursuing that where the argument leads, do we still get anything like a serious critique of Rand that should lead to some kind of dismissive attitude toward her work?  We certainly don't seem to be going down any line of careful argument or critique that we'd expect from a Rand-basher, and we certainly seem to end up tying a lot of Rand's ethical concepts back to formal characteristics like intellectual perfectionism and context-keeping, which no one can coherently reject.)

So, to sum up, I think to criticize Rand effectively one must by necessity make a number of concessions about Rand's greatness as a thinker, in such a way that she enters squarely into the conversation with the likes of Aristotle and Hegel (would that she weren't such a shallow Hegel-basher?) and with the rest of the philosophical canon on some issues of fundamental philosophical importance.  As opposed to the usual criticisms of Rand of downright terrible quality that are all over the internet, what we should end up with instead is a treatment of Rand by philosophers much as they treat the other philosophers in the canon: with careful, context-respecting, principle-of-charity commentary.  In other words, the kind of effective criticism of Rand that might be made is almost nonexistent to date.  Nozick and Huemer deserve credit for proceeding as philosophers should proceed.  (Note a key feature in common here: they're libertarians, assessing the strengths of various different arguments for libertarian ideas.  So they have a motivation that is probably not to be found all that widely among non-libertarian philosophers.)  Rand-bashers typically will cite Nozick and Huemer without acknowledging the responses to their arguments.  (Huemer's "Objectivist in a hurry" doesn't address the way actual Objectivists reason about things, so there's a rather glaring problem there as far as criticism goes.  As things I've said above indicate, Rand's egoism entails, among other things, universalizability constraints and even empathy, if you can believe it.  The Rand-basher will take Huemer's "Objectivist in a hurry" argument as the final word, as though Objectivists haven't come up with any kind of rebuttal in over 20 years.  The Rand-basher will also "somehow" fail to recognize the existence of the Den Uyl and Rasmussen rebuttal to Nozick, which is quite effective as pushback goes.)  But at the very least the Nozick argument and the published rebuttal to it are an example of how people of a philosophical sensibility can argue about the merits of Rand's ideas, and that's even without touching upon the methodological core of Objectivism (distilled more or less in chapter 4 of OPAR, if a single published resource is what you're looking for).

Rand's writings stand outside of the philosophical "tradition" or "canon" in certain ways; they stand especially outside of the academic mode of philosophical writing with its abundant footnotes and whatnot.  (I readily imagine referees calling Rand to task for her controversial yet undocumented characterization of, e.g., Aristotle's view about value-justification in "The Objectivist Ethics."  But as a paper delivered at an academic symposium - which it was - it does overall the job it's supposed to do, and it presents a serious alternative to the dominant ethical positions of the time (1961), enough so as to place "The Objectivist Ethics" within the neo-Aristotelian, virtue-ethical canon that was nearly nonexistent in 1961.  I can understand the professionals at the time not taking up Rand on her virtue-ethical alternative, given the relative unfamiliarity to them of the conceptual structure of virtue ethics.  And while Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958) gets plenty of acknowledgment and credit for being a seminal virtue-ethical essay, I don't get the impression that Anscombe's essay was widely credited or embraced at the time.  (Did Veatch's Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics (1962) get much traction either?)  But now it is canonized after the philosophical community has had time to come to grips with it.  Well, the philosophical community has had plenty of time (given the three-year proximity of the two essays, although the essentials of Rand's argument were originally published before Anscombe's, in a 1957 fiction book) to come to grips with Rand's argument as well.  Those in the community don't seem to have come up with a compelling refutation of it, or a reason to dismiss it as unserious.  But there are a relatively few of those in the community (again, listed here) who have come to analyze Rand's argument and find merits in it, and even to debate its merits in published forums such as the first volume of the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies series.  So the attention and discussion is happening, just not all that much.  But this notion that there's some vast divide between the respective merits of Anscombe's and Rand's articles is little other than a myth peddled by people with anti-Rand biases.  The differing amounts of serious attention paid to these two articles among academic philosophers might have to be explained by something other than their respective merits.)  Rand was by an large hostile to how the academy was doing philosophy, the main exception being her relationship to Hospers.  (Whatever exactly the academy was doing wrong in Rand's view, I don't really have a good idea - my best guess is that it supposedly indulges in methodologically-inferior "rationalism" or play with concepts not rooted in concrete, readily accessible and practical reality -  but evidently she didn't think Hospers was part of that problem.)  So for a philosophical community not already committed to Rand or even the Aristotelian tradition to take up a figure such as Rand would require overcoming certain barriers, to communication or otherwise.  Time and priorities might even dictate more or less the course of action many philosophers are on already, such that they're more inclined to focus their energies and interests on Aristotle's own writings.  The Aristotelian virtue-ethical tradition has seen a revival in academia, after all, which is all for the (ahem) good.  It just seems to me (and to many Rand-fans who are academic philosophers) that this revival can be further sped up and enhanced by incorporating Randian insights into the virtue-ethical framework - e.g., her emphatic intellectual perfectionism which ties into her core methodological commitments; or, the specific virtues (e.g., independence, integrity, productiveness) Rand sets forth as essential.  But the wheels of research turn slowly; how exactly does a philosopher go about setting the virtue-ethics tradition in relation to, say, the themes of Parfit's On What Matters?

And here I was supposed to be getting back to the Oxford Handbook of Spinoza already.  I've done written enough in this one post as it is.  Long story short, you basically have to invoke Rand's greatness in order to deny it, so you might as well affirm it (and then, if you want to critique her, make a case showing in effect that she might have been greater, although that opens up another can of worms; let's just say for now that if Rand had had a Plato-caliber teacher, for purposes of perfecting the art of dialectic, of course, she may well have been as great as Aristotle; given what she did have to work with as teachers/associates and circumstances go, what good reason is there to think she didn't do her very best?).

Going where the argument leads

I was thinking recently about the debates (rather limited ones, given the nature of all the entities concerned) I've had with Objectivists online who adopted the Rand/Peikoff line against Kant; the debates concerned the idea that Rand was wrong in some major ways about Kant (most obviously the claim that he was "the most evil man in mankind's history" - remember, this is Immanuel Kant whom Rand is talking about here).  The main point I usually try to make in these debates is that if you apply the principle of charity to his writings (see also: Dennett/Rapoport Rules) in the very same way that Objectivists rightly demand that Rand's commentators or critics apply to her writings (which with rare exceptions they never do), then you probably won't get the same sweeping conclusions about Kant that Rand/Peikoff did.

For example, a Kant-bashing session that makes light of his sharp dichotomy between acting from inclination and acting from duty, but doesn't bring into consideration his ideal of a Kingdom of Ends, much less other foundational and difficult things that informed Kant's argument, doesn't conform to the principle of charity or the Dennett/Rapoport Rules.

A series of polemical attacks that make minimal specific reference to or quotation from original materials, is unlikely to conform to the principle of charity or the Rules.  Unless I'm mistaken, Rand made one direct quote from Kant in the entirety of her anti-Kant writings, and it is a quote that any Kant scholar would tell you requires a context of understanding that Rand's polemical attack doesn't demonstrate a grasp of.  (Amazingly enough, when I make reference to serious Kant scholars, the Kant-bashing Objectivists don 't think this carries any serious epistemic weight.  It's as though the Kant scholars' expertise on the subject should have no bearing on whether one's interpretations of Kant are sound, even though the very concept of expertise has to do with whether someone has come to a sound grasp of the subject matter.  But an appeal to expertise is perfectly legitimate in its proper context, just as it is perfectly legitimate for me to point out that serious Rand scholars don't take 99% of criticisms of Rand seriously, since the quality of those criticisms - usually based on a sloppy "understanding" of Rand's words - is so low.  The appeal to expertise is nothing other than an appeal to: "This is what people who've studied the subject indepth have come to conclude, but of course this is defeasible if you come up with a better interpretation than theirs, with - of course - specific reference to a canonical data-set about that topic."

Or, to take the most extreme claim about Kant that Rand makes - that he is supremely evil - it would help her case if she could specifically respond to the arguments Kant presents in the Antinomy of Pure Reason, a kind of lynchpin to his argument that we don't have epistemic access to any supersensible realm.  But I've never gotten a Kant-bashing Objectivist to address what's going on in the Antinomy portion of the first Critique.  This should be as much of a red flag as when a Rand-basher can't or won't deal specifically and head-on with matters especially of method that longtime students of Objectivism (and of courses like Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism, much less the Rand-endorsed 1976 course The Philosophy of Objectivism) are versed in well enough to know how the method-issues drive everything else in Rand/Peikoff's writings.

(And there's no good, non-self-defeating argument against Rand on these methodological issues.  Sciabarra's method-focused and exhaustively researched 1995 book, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, shows how seriously Rand should be taken in the context of the history of thought, and no rebuttal of its central thesis has happened or could happen.  You just don't mess with dialectical method or systematic context-keeping without being self-defeating, is all.  [The criticisms of his book from the 'orthodox' Objectivist faction surrounding Peikoff didn't address the substance of that the methodological theme but rather Sciabarra's placement of Rand in intellectual history.  I'm not going to say that these criticisms were in the spirit of the principle of charity or the Rules, either.])

Part of the issue here is - to borrow a formulation from Maverick Philosopher - that polemics, while often appropriate to the adversarial realm of the political, are not appropriate to the properly collaborative realm of the philosophical.  Unless there is uncontrovertible evidence that a supposed philosopher is presenting dishonest arguments, then the proper approach isn't polemical.  (And there is no way around applying thoroughly the principle of charity or the Rules to arrive at the conclucion that an argument is being presented dishonestly.  Once one does arrive at a conclusion that an argument is being presented dishonestly, then one should also drop the identification of the dishonest arguer as a philosopher; such a person is more accurately called a sophist.)

But here's the problem I'm leading to here: Many, many "rank and file" folks in an intellectual movement are not philosophers either by profession or by temperament.  Their loyalty is often to the ideas of the movement, sometimes even to the leading personages of the movement.  It's no accident that the leading academic philosophers of Objectivism have also not gotten in on the Kant-bashing act.  Not only is it a matter of professional suicide if one took the Rand/Peikoff line on Kant, but just as a matter of standard academic protocol where the charity principle and the Rules are (by the nature of the discipline) encouraged to a maximal feasible extent.  (Note: in actual practice, the adherence to these standards are not consistent, uniformly and fairly applied, etc.  Much as academic philosophers are lovers of wisdom, and pursue intellectual perfection, that is no guarantee that they will have achieved such perfection.  Some academic philosophers are Rand-bashers, i.e., taking the route of hubris and mean-spiritedness over withholding judgment where they are ignorant [and demonstrably so].  Indeed, those who adopt such a hubristic and mean attitude are, to that extent, not even being philosophical.)

On the subject of Kant I'll put it this way: there isn't an academically-respectable path from Kant's texts to Rand's sweeping vilification of him.  There's also the issue of specialization and priorities: Rand scholars in academia are usually too focused on obtaining an adequate grasp of Rand's ideas and related issues to attain expertise on Kant; unless they have a publishable criticism of Kant the prudent thing for them is to refer to the Kant literature, SEP entries, etc.  And I don't expect any time soon to see Rand scholars publishing on Kant in a way that supports Rand's claims and conclusions about him.

But with a non-philosophical person - you'll find tons of these in politics within a stone's throw - such prudence, withholding of non-expert judgment, principle of charity or the Rules, etc., are not standard practice.  And applying this to certain Objectivists/Randists who also display cult-like behaviors: they are more interested in adhering to Rand's claims/conclusions about Kant than they are about where the arguments on this matter would lead.  If they lead to showing Rand being seriously wrong in her claims/conclusions about Kant, that may threaten the adherent's perception of Rand as a flawless reasoner.  (If I say "Rand was a tremendous reasoner on a whole host of subjects, but..." the adherent is likely to have a knee-jerk reaction along the following sort of lines: "this is what Rand-bashers do; they offer a fig leaf before they go about trying to discredit Rand."  I've met this reaction myself, notwithstanding all the Rand-promoting I do.  It's kinda ridiculous....)  I mean, given the integrated nature of human cognition, how can someone be really good about some things but not about others?  How would someone so meticulous in formulating her own ideas on the basis of exhaustive induction and integration manage to slip up when it comes to representing what other philosophers have said?  Note the key distinction here: formulating one's own ideas, vs. representing others'.  I don't think it's hard to figure out how a disconnect might happen here.

Aristotle said of his teacher Plato that he loved him - but that he loved the truth even more.  That's my basic attitude toward Rand.  I have found Rand's system to be a tremendous engine of mental and philosophic integration.  That doesn't mean that her anti-Kant polemics are worth much of anything, are conducive to learning and insight, etc.  If there are good anti-Kant arguments out there, they're likely from others who've put in the research and made publishable arguments.

So if you're thoroughly willing to go where the argument leads - no matter where it leads - then that's a sign you may be a philosopher.  If you're not willing to do so, you may be any number of other things: dogmatist, partisan, polemicist, follower, ideologue, loyalist.  And as much as this thought began with Randian Kant-bashers, it's the Rand-bashers who may actually be among the worst of these un-philosophical types.  At least Rand herself, as per what her philosophical and ethical principles dictate, put forward the maximal effort to get things right, which matters more in this context than actually getting things right.  Error is one thing, evasion (which includes intellectual laziness) is another.

So there are at least two distinguishing features of the philosophical mindset that I've highlighted today (the first feature having been brought up here):
1. Being guided in life by a vision of the good (over and above what is pleasurable, fun, career-advancing, family-building or loyalty-encouraging [think of the Corleone family as a contrast case], powerful, popular, etc.)
2. Being willing to go wherever the argument leads

In this post I took at least one argument where it led: if one is (rightly) dismayed by the usual Rand-bashing tactics, one should see the same red flags in the way Rand and Rand-devotees bash Kant.  And there seems to be a whole lot of people out there who are willing - indeed eager - to take exception to one but not the other, i.e., they're not willing to follow the argument where it leads.  The underlying problem here is exemplified in all the hypocrisy in politics we all know about (and "it's the other party that's hypocritical, not mine" is itself part of that very hypocrisy, thereby rendering all the much less clear and distinct one's understanding of the phenomenon of hypocrisy one is otherwise inchoately aware of).

Anyway. doesn't a whole lot of argument ultimately lead to, say, advocacy of philosophy for children, and doesn't that lead to advocacy of philosophy for everyone and ASAFP?  It's where I keep ending up time and time again, after all.  (But I'd be willing to go wherever the argument leads, even if it leads (somehow) to a rejection of these things; right now the idea of that happening sounds like a real bummer but how would it be a bummer if that's where the argument leads?  (And what about some argument that (somehow) shows that one shouldn't take an argument (or just any argument) where it leads?  Hopefully such an argument contains coherent advice on whether to follow that argument or not, since incoherence is a real bummer.)

I'd like to get back to the Oxford Handbook of Spinoza now.  (I still have Hurley's Natural Reasons to get to, as well.  The wheels of research grind only so fast....)

[Edit: To take another example of Kant-bashing from Rand/Randians: she attributed to Kant the view that "because man's consciousness has a specific identity, it is an agent of distortion, i.e., that identity is the disqualifying element of consciousness: it's equivalent to saying that man is blind because he has eyes, deaf because he has ears, etc."  Now, it would have been helpful had Rand tied this characterization to something, anything specific in Kant's texts, for some frame of reference, because I for one am at a loss as to where it is that Kant made such a line of argument.  I've actually had defenders of Rand's Kant-bashing suggest that there isn't a problem about leaving the reader guessing here, that it's just a matter of common knowledge about Kant that this is an aspect of his system.  [Turn the tables and apply the same kind of crap to "common knowledge" about Rand's ideas that aren't really knowledge, and you might see how I lose patience with this stuff.]  I mean, I'm quite familiar with Kant's (in)famous distinction between the 'thing in itself' and its appearance or manifestation which may have a character different from the 'thing in itself' - and indeed we even seem to get such a logical absurdity in his system as a cause that is 'phenomenally' determined while 'noumenally' free (in which case the causal character of appearance and of the thing in itself are in direct conflict with one another, not merely that the character of the thing-in-itself cannot be said to have the range of qualities or determinations that the subject-conditioned appearance has; alternatively, to say that consciousness adds or guarantees qualities or determinations that we cannot attribute to the thing-in-itself is not the same as saying that consciousness generates or might well generate determinations that run counter to the character of the thing-in-itself; to say that noumenal freedom in the face of phenomenal determinism is a matter of "faith" does not resolve this problem, since not even "faith" can square a circle: either we are free or we are not).  But because consciousness has identity, Kant somehow/somewhere claims that this is what gives rise to the appearance/thing-in-itself dichotomy, and that consciousness isn't merely an agent of conditioning of its object but of distortion?  Something tells me that a critique of Kant's infamous distinction/dichotomy from someone like Hegel would be much more useful and informative.  Something tells me that Kant scholars pay attention to critiques other than this apparently idiosyncratic one from Rand about "identity disqualifying consciousness."

Here's another one: Rand and Peikoff can't get their stories straight on the relation between desire and duty in Kant.  Rand claims: "An action is moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material nor spiritual; a benefit destroys the moral value of an action."  (This screams of strawman.  The issue of benefit might be said to be incidental to Kant's criterion of moral value - expressed in the various formulations of the Categorical Imperative - but I don't think a single Kant scholar in the history of the planet would endorse or take at all seriously the interpretation about a benefit destroying the moral value of an action.  Heck, in application of the CI, benefit comes back into the picture.  It's just not foundational as the moral criterion for the CI, however.  But you can certainly do something that benefits yourself, as a matter of respect for your own humanity, and Kant might even argue that this makes your action morally obligatory, a matter of duty.  And Kant is plenty clear that a desire as such doesn't give rise to a moral imperative - that the desire has to be conditioned or constrained by the CI.  At the very minimum there is a distinction shared by Rand and Kant and pretty much any moral philosopher in history, ever: the distinction between desire and right desire.  There's no way Rand endorses a desire "out of context"; in fact she might describe this as "whim-worship.")  But then, later, Peikoff says this: "In theory, Kant states, a man deserves moral credit for an action done from duty, even if his inclinations also favor it—but only insofar as the latter are incidental and play no role in his motivation. But in practice, Kant maintains, whenever the two coincide no one can know that he has escaped the influence of inclination. For all practical purposes, therefore, a moral man must have no private stake in the outcome of his actions, no personal motive, no expectation of profit or gain of any kind."  So Peikoff concedes that "in theory" for Kant an inclination or desire doesn't destroy the moral value of an action.  And so as if to seemingly save Rand's extreme claim to that effect, he introduces the "in practice" part, although that depends on the latter portion of the "in theory" part, where he makes the claim that for Kant an inclination can only be incidental and not part of the moral person's motivation.  I suppose this reconciles the two characterizations that on their face don't seem to say the same thing (either desire or inclination destroys the action's moral value or it doesn't...), but it's fishy, and it still suffers from the strawman problem.  There's also that whole matter of Kant's not using the term "happiness" the way that either Rand or the Greeks tended to use it; "flourishing" and "satisfaction of inclination" have different meanings, but Kant was going with the latter and it's not clear that Kant was well-versed in the Greeks on this point; details on this are in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics (Whiting and Engstrom, eds., CUP, 1996).  I guess the best that might be said for Rand/Peikoff's polemics here is that they make a clear and bold stand against any moral theory, whether such a theory was in fact endorsed by Kant or not, that would tell us that inclination or desire is antithetical to moral motivation or that happiness is irrelevant to morality.  So if Kant endorsed such a theory, then he is a bastard of sorts.  Well, that's illuminating.  I mean, who actually does endorse such a theory (under a non-strawman interpretation, of course)?  Something tells me that moral philosophers tend to go out of their way to avoid ending up at such a psychologically implausible notion of moral motivation, or to avoid being mistaken for advancing such a notion.  And of course none of the Rand/Peikoff characterizations of Kant account for the actual source of Kant's appeal and/or influence in ethical theory, which has a shit-ton more to do with the CI (both its grounds and application) than with some inclination/duty distinction which is really just another way of making a distinction - between desire and right desire (the latter usually grounded in reason) - endorsed by all moral philosophers.  I just don't see anything in Rand's anti-Kant writings that moral philosophers can make use of that furthers their understanding in any way - unlike with her main writings on ethics, virtue, method, etc.  See more on this in my subsequent post.]

A semi-meticulous narrowing down

Philosophers as a rule are excellent researchers; they've figured out how to prioritize their research focus to home in on the foundational meaning-of-life issues confronting all humans.  This is confirmed at least in part by the foundational place of philosophy in the wikipedia hierarchy.  (Would this have ever become clear before the days of hyperlinking?  I remember those days; "woke" millennials don't; they have no frame of reference here.)

So let's consider the population of philosophers.  A great many are in academia as full-time professionals, some are independent of that milieu.

Among that population there are those who are big on Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition.  Aristotle more or less was the first to perfect a research program (not that Plato was chopped liver).  Time and time again Aristotle has reappeared on the history-of-philosophy scene to the great benefit of the participants (as inspiration if nothing else).  The recent revival of virtue ethics when before only Kantian and utilitarian ethics dominated the scene is one case in point.

As documented extensively in this blog, there is a by-and-large formidable neo-Aristotelian stream of thought inspired by Ayn Rand.  (Now things are starting to get pretty narrowed down.)  If there's one central and crucial theme uniting the systems of Aristotle and Rand it is a focus on what I term intellectual perfection(ism).  (Narrowing things down further....)  The gist of this is that we have an ethical imperative to maximize the actualization of our intellectual potentialities; it is the best organizing principle available for better living.  And while philosophers almost to a person (I leave out pseudo-philosophers who are more like sophists) value the principle of intellectual perfection or integrity or wholeness, Aristotle and Rand are among the few to make this into an explicit defining principle of living well.  It's not just the actualization of just any set of potentials that makes for self-actualization or eudaimonia; at the foundation, center and peak expression, there is intellectual activity tending toward perfection.

Then there are those Aristotelians and Randians who are obsessively into methodological perfection(ism); the term "dialectic" comes up in connection with Aristotle and his comprehensive and sprawling research program; it's about tying together all the strands in an organized unity.  In connection with Rand the terms/concepts "context-keeping" and "integration" cover more or less the same methodological territory.  So we've more or less narrowed things down to Sciabarra (editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies) and his circle of associates as far as "dialectic" goes, and to Peikoff (Rand's hand-picked heir) and his circle as far as integration/context-keeping go.  But there's almost no overlap between these two groups; it is as though they exist in a condition of dialectical alienation or tension.  (As to why that is, well.  Long-ish story.)

As far as self-actualization or eudaimonist ethics goes, there is a subset of Aristotelian-Randians who specialize in ethics and who picked up on the themes of Norton's Personal Destinies.  This includes "Dougs" Den Uyl and Rasmussen and Tibor Machan, but not all that many others.  Norton integrates themes from classical eudaimonism (namely Plato and Aristotle) with modern humanistic psychology (Jung and Maslow).  I've only read some of Jung and Maslow; somehow the intellectual-perfectionism theme in Aristotle and Rand covers the widest explanatory range of the content and appeal of eudaimonism in its strongest form.  Anyway, Sciabarra - in the circle of associates with the "Dougs" and Machan - cites a massive number of sources informing his Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (2000), but Norton isn't among them.  I guess he isn't the specializer in ethical theory that the "Dougs" and Machan are?  So we encounter yet another division of sorts, resulting from a diversification of specialized knowledge.  So an avid researcher would have to home in on the most significant sources/figures cited in Total Freedom (hint: Mises, Hayek, Rand) as well as, say, Machan's Individuals and Their Rights (1989) and the "Dougs" Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (1984) and Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order (1991), to both have promising leads to Norton as well as to conjure up whatever connections Norton might have to Sciabarra's dialectical-libertarian thesis.  Along the way, such a researcher will most likely have encountered the libertarian rights theory of Eric Mack and drew meticulous comparisons/contrasts to these others' rights theories.  Further along the way, one may have encountered the 1974 volume edited by Machan, The Libertarian Alternative, which contains John Hospers' "What Libertarianism Is," which contains a memorable knock-down formulation of the synoptic libertarian norm: "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of."

The number of people who would have engaged in the research covering these works (which have already integrated a lot of source material themselves, so hopefully nothing big got overlooked in the lines of transmission), is probably quite small.  But it is, in terms of foundational importance and tradition worked in, probably the most high-efficiency philosophical research to be done.  Does anyone really do better work than the Dougs, explicit and avowed perfectionists?  Norton also uses the term "perfectionism" as more or less interchangeably with "edaimonism," "self-actualization ethics," and "normative individualism."  But he doesn't get into the more distinctively Aristotelian-Randian-style emphasis on intellectual perfection(ism).

I mention in connection with Aristotle the notion of an organized unity.  Nozick, who has a sprawling research program of his own (he probably had a lot more raw smarts than I do), spoke of value in terms of organic unity, and more specifically an organic unity made up of two criteria: (1) the range, scope, or quantity of material being organized, and (2) the "tightness" of the unity or organization.  (Philosophical Explanations (1981) and The Examined Life (1989).)  Somehow Nozick manages (I'm not clear as to how, exactly) to keep this conception of value separate from his idea of "flourishing" which he takes to be inadequate as a unifying theme in ethics.  Given what I've been saying so far, I think there is a most-viable way to unify these, uh, strands.  Are "organized life," "integrated life," and "flourishing/eudaimonic life" mapping different territories?  I don't see how.

So at this point we have the following figures mentioned: Aristotle, Rand, Peikoff, Sciabarra, the Dougs, Machan, Mack, Norton, Nozick.

Researchers on Aristotle researchers leads one to Oxford's T.H. Irwin, author of Aristotle's First Principles (1988) and the utterly massive The Development of Ethics (2007).  Irwin is a good man, and thorough.  If one has only so much time on one's hand to study Aristotle and the history of ethics, respectively, Irwin is a good bet.  (Irwin is big on the theme of dialectical method in Aristotle, and is cited in Total Freedom.)

Ferrarin ties together the ridiculously abstruse presentation in Hegel's writings with themes central to Aristotle's philosophy of nature and spirit(/soul?), in Hegel and Aristotle (2001).  Comparative studies between Aristotle and other towering figures in the history of philosophy include Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics (Engstrom and Whiting, eds., 1996) and The Highest Good in Aristotle and Kant (Aufderheide and Bader, 2015).  Leading Kant scholar Christine Korsgaard draws comparisons between Kant's conception of acting for the sake of duty and Aristotle's acting for the sake of the noble (to kalon), in a comparative essay in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996) (or is that a reprint from the Engstrom and Whiting collection?).  [Edit: Also, Kant and Aristotle: Epistemology, Logic, Method (Sgarbi, 2016), which I was all over like flies on shit almost the moment it was published...]  [Edit: Also, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Sherman, 1997).]

The concept of to kalon may not be limited just to the noble, but also the fine or beautiful, suggesting an aesthetic component to goodness.  On the subject of the noble, specifically, Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (section 287) speaks of the noble soul having reverence for itself.  Not only is this mentioned by Rand in the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, but the Kaufmann translation of Nietzsche refers to Aristotle on the great-souled man as a proper lover of self.  It's like the strands just keep tying together.  I'm aware of (but have not yet read) Alexander Nehamas's well-regarded Nietzsche: Life as Literature from the '80s, but the title suggests an aesthetic conception of a desirable or choiceworthy life (although I'm not really clear at this point on how the concepts of "desirable" and "choiceworthy" fit in with Nietzsche's metaethical scheme).  In any case, these points need to be properly integrated and/or differentiated with the aformentioned theme in Nozick about organic unity and how aesthetic value specifically fits into that.

So we have a research program that includes so far: Aristotle, Rand, Peikoff, Sciabarra, the Dougs, Machan, Mack, Norton, Nozick, Irwin, Ferrarin, Korsgaard, Nietzsche, Nehamas.

The folks who've gone through the Peikoff courses thoroughly to the point of automatization/habituation of the prescriptions therein, by and large have it together pretty well.  But I part ways with that crowd mainly on matters of the proper approach to "philosophical" polemics, such as their Kant-bashing.  An effort to keep full context as prescribed in the Peikoff courses leads me to making a full effort to understand those philosophers as well as, . . . well, as well as Rand wanted her own ideas to be understood before critiqued or commented on.

Then there's Alan Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment (1998), a culmination of a long lifetime of ethical thought.  I was kind of disappointed that Norton receives such cursory treatment there, but Gewirth is also integrating a ton of other material as well.  As is an increasingly common occurrence in ethical theory these days, Gewirth synthesizes 'Aristotelian' teleology and 'Kantian' deontology.  Mack was doing this back in the '70s with his 'Egoism and Rights' dissertation/article.

And then there's researcher extraordinaire, Mortimer J. Adler, the main organizer of the Great Books series (millennials know all about that, right?), and author/compiler of two massive books: Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought and Great Treasury of Western Thought (co-edited with Charles van Doren of Quiz Show notoriety, of all people?).  I've only gotten through some parts of the Treasury but made it all the way through the Lexicon, which was quite edifying.

A great many of these items/authors seem to me to be essential parts of a top-notch philosophical research program.  Other books that strike me as essential (but which I have not yet gotten to) include: Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985); Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (1986); S.L. Hurley, Natural Reasons (1989); and Parfit's major works, Reasons and Persons (1984) and On What Matters (2010 and later).  Also on any avid lifelong learner's bookshelf should be volumes of writings by Franklin, Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln.  We're talking bare essentials here, now; if you have room for Thomas Paine he should be included.

I have among my "essentials" in hard copy format (in addition to gobs of books in e-format...) a 2001 or so volume titled Moral Knowledge (ed. Miller, Paul and Paul 2001), a collection on metaethics.  Metaethics is a difficult genre; I have not yet gotten more than a few pages in that volume.

Back when I was an obsessive/completist/perfectionistic student of Econ before transferring that obsession to philosophy research (mainly due to Rand), I homed in on a particular volume titled A History of Economic Theory and Method (Ekelund and Hebert).  I've since supplemented that with Intellectual Capital: Forty Years of the Nobel Prize in Economics (Karier, 2010).  And I still have a nice volume, Austrian Economics: A Reader (Ebeling, ed., 1991-ish) which I must have discovered in a Laissez Faire Books catalog.

The Oxford Handbooks series is also a very useful, state of the art, highest-tier-university-press learning resource.  (There's even an Oxford Handbook of Lifelong Learning.  How soon do I get to it?  Before or after the Cambridge History of Capitalism?  Before or after Sciabarra-mentor Ollman on alienation and dialectical method?  Before or after the Oxford Handbook of Virtue?  And does the section on epistemic virtue therein draw close connections/integrations to intellectual perfectionism?  Does LeBar's essay on (virtue-)eudaimonism in this volume serve as an adequate condensation of sorts of his The Value of Living Well [2013]?)  One could keep busy with just this Handbooks series for a very long time.

One George F. Kennan condensed/essentialized a long lifetime of learning into his book, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (1993), which I happened upon in a used book store.  When do I get around to it?  Somehow I've already been pulled into reading another book found at the same store, Talents & Geniuses by Gilbert Highet; a nice read, certainly easier to get through than a metaethics text, say.

Dennett is a thorough researcher - somehow only he revived Rapoport's Rules, in Intuition Pumps? - but most of his books I've tried I made about halfway through before moving on to other things; his research priorities have him focused on other things, and that's cool.

Given constraints on time and cognitive powers, one needs to essentialize/condense as much as possible.  The above resources seem to be what best survive the process of sifting and a modest book budget.  This principle also applies to research in music and film.  There are some films I can quote nearly back to front.  Essential filmmakers include Kubrick, Tarkovsky, and Welles as tippy-top tier.  Do enough back-to-front sifting and re-sifting in major American team sports statistics, and you might develop some serious knowledge there as well.  I'm not saying I'm anywhere near Bill James' league as baseball researcher, but at least I've read James fairly indepth.  Millennials wouldn't remember that On-Base Plus Slugging (OPS), a simple but really good measure of batting prowess, was once called Production and included in the Total Baseball encyclopedia.

As indicated in the post title, this was a narrowing down of some kind.  Who on this planet has engaged in the research necessary to be able to list and discuss all these things above?  Not very many people.  In fact, it might be only one person.  We might, if so inclined, bring in Leibniz's famous principle of the identity of indiscernables to identify that person.  (How soon do I get to the Oxford Handbook of Leibniz?)  The one and the same person who listed and discussed all the things above also turns out to be the person who authored Prologue to an Aristotelian End of History (2015), which far (?) surpasses anything else I'm aware of in terms of the world-historic-important, fundamental essentials integrated into one work.  (From a marketing standpoint it's something of a hurdle just to get past the title.  Me, I'm all over a book with that sort of title like a fly on shit, of course.  And probably the optimal course in this regard is not to invest a lot of time/resources in marketing but in more research front-loading to the point that it's front-loaded af for the next book or series of them.)  On top of that, this author has a really thorough approach to blogging (with posts characteristically chock full of supporting/contextualizing links when needed).  On top of that, the author has homed in on a 'Better Living Through Philosophy' theme, as though that were perhaps the most perfect theme one could present to a wide reading audience, and where no one else seems to be (explicitly, systematically) taking up the idea quite so obsessively.  The progress here looks promising.  Can the research be even better prioritized for honing in on the truly most essential?

If the traces a human leaves to posterity are key to what gives meaning to one's life, it's looking okay so far in this instance; it'll look even better if/when Better Living Through Philosophy becomes a final published reality.  (Or, to adopt Norton's conceptual scheme, how does this implicit reality become actuality, where an "ought" and an "is" come into unity?  And how Hegelian is that conceptual scheme, exactly?)  But what comes before and after that final product, research-wise?  And how "self-referential" must that text unavoidably be, particularly if it must be placed within the history (and future? and end of history?) of thought?

[something of a precursor post to this one, here]

(What would a fully meticulous narrowing down look like?... Well, darn, I left out Aquinas.  Not an expert there.  Doug R most likely would most fully know the integrations/differentiations with Rand there.  My experience after about 140 pages of Stump's Aquinas (2003) was that it was coming off as distinctively rationalistic - lots of abstract conceptual architecture but hard to tie down to perceptual/concrete experience.  Then very shortly thereafter I am re-listening to one of Peikoff's most essential courses where the subject of rationalist polemics comes up, and Aquinas is mentioned right off.  Peikoff had made it his mission from Understanding Objectivism (1983) onward to root out rationalism (e.g., 'floating abstraction') in method.  Sciabarra identifies both rationalism and empiricism as one-sided/incomplete rather than dialectical, and doesn't include Aquinas among his paradigmatic dialectical thinkers (e.g., Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Rand).  For whatever any of that is worth.  Oh, and I did read through most or all of this book, which somehow caught my attention.  That, along with the fairly extensive treatment of Aquinas in Irwin's Development of Ethics, is about the extent of my Aquinas study so far.  And of course the Oxford Handbook of Aquinas awaits...)