How to spot an 'ultimate philosopher'?

Suppose there's such a thing as an ultimate philosopher (UP) - some exemplar, standard-bearer, epitome of the love or pursuit of wisdom - and suppose that the essential subject matter(s) of philosophy is contained somewhere or other in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP).

Now, do we expect at some point such a hypothetical UP to revolutionize a sizable number of fields contained in the UP? And can we expect much in the way of such revolutionizing without some very extensive interaction with current or contemporary professional practitioners (namely, academics) in the philosophical discipline? Beyond blog postings, how much engagement is going on with "the current literature" in this or that field by this here philosopher?

By the way, I have set a personal manuscript/draft deadline for the end of this calendar year (2021) for Better Living Through Philosophy. So presumably some mastery of what's in the SEP is an essential prerequisite for completing any such project adequately? What are the basic parameters of success or failure here? What's going on, where is this leading us?

My initial "area of specialization" is, roughly speaking, ethical philosophy with a secondary emphasis on political philosophy, but really my main area of focus as time goes on is, roughly speaking, philosophical and/or epistemological method and/or metaphilosophy, and some tie-in or other between the fields of ethics, epistemology/method, and aesthetics. Roughly speaking, the most preferable general form of human living in human-specific terms, the 'Good Life,' is rational activity - activity expressive of reason (a, or the, 'better angel of our nature'). What sort of main directives does this give us in ethics? Well, rationality in this framework is the primary virtue, whether conceived in intellectual (or epistemic) or practical (or ethical) terms. And to cut to the chase, the main key to living well for a human being depends on the quality of that agent's reasoning, i.e., questions in ethics are intimately tied to, mirrored in, and perhaps reducible (with some constraints) to questions in epistemology, once we get the basics of the ethics down at least. (This explains, e.g., Ayn Rand's focus in her later work on issues of method and knowledge-building, i.e., epistemology.)

Throw into this mix a perhaps or seemingly exhaustive inquiry into the nature and role of philosophy itself in human life (whether its role in the present world or in some future world defined by a more perfect epistemic union as it were). "Philosophy" is derived from "philo-" and "sophia", or "love" and "wisdom," but "sophia" but me distinguished from "phronesis" or practical wisdom. "Sophia" is theoretical wisdom more specifically, i.e., is concerned with the rules and terms of proper organization of one's conceptual material (respecting the rules of context and hierarchy), and it's one's conceptual material that in term serves to organize one's daily living. And in some way, however removed hierarchically it may seem from the "ordinary" activity of living - the daily sensible concretes and problems solved within their own distinct context - Philosophy proper (I mean, just look at those topics at SEP if you haven't yet) comes to bear on a human life well-lived. Maybe it has something to do with Socrates' dictum about the (human) unexamined life not being worth living. (He was sentenced to death by those to whom he said this, BTW.)

Even if one isn't a full-time philosopher with some Ten Thousand Hours of specialized/expert knowledge, one's being familiar if not conversant with the basic subject matter of philosophy, to the extent that this possibility is actualized, facilitates better living, somehow in terms of a deeper understanding of the organizing principles upon which one conducts one's life. (Should they be organized along perfectionist lines and specifically along Aristotelian-intellectualist lines?) Or so this is what I take the main thesis of Better Living Through Philosophy to be.

My study of philosophy has not been extensive and exhaustive enough yet to make any dents in subfields I don't specialize in, of which there are many to be found at SEP. Nonetheless, I have identified what I believe to be a moral imperative given my understanding of the philosophical enterprise in human life as bare-bones outlined above (which, to clarify or reiterate, is a task for metaphilosophy to discover and formulate), and that imperative is this: philosophical learning should be spread as far and wide as soon as possible. And in some hopefully-impressive, hopefully-epic, and hopefully (and above all) fun fashion, Better Living Through Philosophy is in my conceptualizing of it meant to be some kind of combination of crash course, guided tour, introduction, manifesto (for action), treatise (of underlying theory), magnum opus, motivationally useful example-setting and case study in philosophical reasoning.

I think if most everyone can get on the same page as to some basics as to the value of philosophical reasoning, and being able to even identify better and finer instances of philosophical thinking (I tend to like the Aristotelian sort, maybe for its example-setting and theoretical perfectionism; I've written a book on this topic), then I think this is a wisdom-juggernaut in the making toward which humanity seems to have been progressing over history. The so-called end of history is that point in time in which humanity as a whole will have reached a new threshold upon which further development is premised. This threshold would include common humanity-wide commitments to basic conditions of human flourishing (or eudaimonia or self-actualizing), premised upon a community-inclusive conception of what is in each agent's best interests. This means a shared commitment to ensuring as much as feasible opportunities, resources and capabilities for a community's members. These include a variety of goods and conditions such as: air, water, food/nutrition, clothing, shelter, safety, pleasure, play and movement, social connections and networks (family, friends, schoolmates), education, income and wealth, irreducibly individualized skills/interests/careers/hobbies, civic, historical, scientific, economic, and philosophical literacy, protections of rights and freedoms, autonomy, creativity/curiosity, irreducibly individualized thought, initiative, motivation, vision, will to power-or-difference-making -- the many factors that go into a successful human life (usually, the more the better). (How do we frame the meaning of life in terms of making a difference in the world? We might say Einstein and Hitler both lived meaningful lives, it's just that they are of opposite evaluative significance.)

And so, among the prerequisites, the common commitments of a human community characteristic of this advanced human (or trans-human, or ...) condition is philosophical learning. And what particular features of humanity-wide philosophical learning will tell us that we are at end-of-history stage? I have two key identifying criteria in mind: (1) Philosophical learning begins as early in life as possible. Some evidence suggests that this can be as young as 5 or 6 years of age. (2) Steelmanning-only allowed. Other names for the principle here: principle of interpretive charity, studying up for the Ideological Turing Test, Mill's knowing all sides in their strongest form, and Rapoport-Dennett Rules.

With all that in mind, is an ultimate philosopher someone who, in the year 2021, is doing perhaps exhaustive research for book-length publication on the topic of 'better living through philosophy,' since that task hasn't been carried out by someone else (not nearly to my satisfaction) yet, and even if the topic-project doesn't propose revolutionary theses (yet) for Philosophy Proper (the SEP items)?

Things I've spent a good amount of time (hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe tens of thousands of hours) thinking about: Philosophy as such, Objectivism/Rand, ethics (namely eudaimonist ethics), political philosophy (namely the moral ground of our rights-claims), how to enjoy and/or rank in value-added terms such things as: films and film directors, music albums, pieces and composers, baseball and basketball legends. Now I just need to combine all the themes going on here into a coherent presentation that anyone else might find of interest.

Or is an ultimate philosopher the long-bearded man alone atop a mountain, answering desperate visitors' questions with questions? (Or is that not a philosopher but rather a sage?)

Ranking philosophers, cont'd

A sequel to the original.

Here I address issues about criteria for ranking philosophers.

Here are some characteristics of some of the most important, interesting, influential, etc. philosophers in history.  The more characteristics a philosopher has, the more likely the philosopher will have a higher ranking:

• Addressing matters of philosophical method, preferably including an explicit treatment of the subject of dialectic.  Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel are canonical instances.  Rand, mostly via her student Peikoff in lecture courses, addresses method as centrally important subject matter.  Marx addresses dialectic, although I would need to investigate further on his treatment of methodological issues generally.
• Addressing matters of what Aristotle and Kant call categories, conceptually fundamental means of organizing our thoughts about the world.  Hegel is very big on this as well.
• Addressing matters in aesthetics.  Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Rand are examples.
• (Relates to first bullet-point) Addressing matters of metaphilosophy, i.e., defining philosophy and its place or role in the theoretical sciences and human life generally.  Authors who have "philosophy" in their book titles would be candidates.  Examples of this last qualification include Boethius, Hegel, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Rand, Rorty, Nozick, and Deleuze & Guattari.
• (This would apply to more recent philosophers) Explicitly addressing the "meaning of life" subject at length.  Examples include Nozick and Metz (and figures listed in Metz's bibliography).
• Addressing criteria for how to rank philosophers (heh heh) or teleological measurement generally
• Addressing and rigorously adhering to principles of interpretive charity or steelmanning opposing positions.  Examples include Mill and Dennett.
• Leading an exemplary life (opinions about instances/examples vary)
• Expertise in non-philosophy fields is a plus - e.g., figures identifiable as polymaths (Aristotle, Leibniz), or contributors to the canon of economic theory (Smith and Mill; Marx's contribution to economic literacy is a matter of great controversy)
• [Addendum: Signs of a supposedly controversial because substantive philosophical thesis, position, or even tendency or temperament - the more explicit and self-conscious the better - of perfectionism, and (preferably) more specifically intellectual perfectionism.  The leading figures here are Aristotle, Aquinas, and Rand, followed by Hegel and Nietzsche, then Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Marx, Bradley, T. H. Green, Norton, Den Uyl and Rasmussen, Hurka.  Might a mapping of the intellectual landscape here aid most usefully in what I might term 'end of history'-ology (which would entail among other things a dialectical weighing and selecting partially or wholly from Kant's Kingdom of Ends, Nietzsche's Ubermensch, Hegel's Absolute Spirit (and/or end of history), Plato's Republic, etc.; the more (and more perfected) the intellectual and moral, and aesthetic attributes these notions point to that exist in a human being, the better, amiright?).]

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?).

Why aren't all philosophers Aristotelians?

Philosophers more than any other category of people are headed in the direction, onto the scent, of the idea that all human problems are fundamentally intellectual in nature -- that if we can solve or better address questions that are fundamentally intellectual in nature (namely, how we reason adequately), we'll go a very long way if not all the way to addressing all other human problems and challenges.  (Say that someone offered as a contrast idea that all our problems will be solved by technology?  But isn't the discovery and better application of better technologies at its root an intellectual (e.g., scientific and therefore epistemological) issue?

Plato and Aristotle - but it would seem Aristotle even more, from the overall vibes I get from these writers - identify the human form and essence (are these the same thing?) as the rational or intellectual capacity, the ability to think in terms of universals or concepts (are these the same thing?).  Plato would speak in terms of the proper ordering of the human soul with the rational part in charge, which goes quite a way in its own right to get the program just right, while Aristotle makes the perfection of the rational part, that very essence of man, the ultimate normative standard by which to characterize a flourishing life.  So if philosophers are really into the whole "perfecting the rational part of us" idea, why wouldn't that make them specifically Aristotelians as well?  In ethics, to be an Aristotelian is to endorse the idea, in some fashion or other, that the good life, the most perfect life attainable to us, is defined ultimately by reference to how we use our specifically rational activity.  (Not coincidentally, this is the faculty under direct control and review by human agents themselves; this is the phenomenon referred to as free will.)

Ayn Rand, who was rather quite comfortable with referring to herself as an Aristotelian, while dismissing almost wholesale the rest of the history of philosophy (Aquinas being a rare, standout exception), put this idea in the following terms:

Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.

This looks like a statement that every philosopher could, would, and should endorse.  But how would it not make them Aristotelians (and, if they do their homework, Randians), all of them?  Kantian and utilitarian ethics don't seem to express this idea in a clear-cut way - certainly not the utilitarian one, which focuses our attention upon to good experiences as the primary criterion of the good, while Kant does home in on our rational/intellectual agency as ethically fundamental and meriting respect, and states that the only thing good without qualification is a good will, but how about the Aristotelian idea that our most ethically perfect and most flourishing life (are these the same thing?) must contain in every activity some form or other of intellectual perfection.  Isn't perfecting our intellectual capacity the best way we could express and enact our good/better/best wills, in any case?  Good intentions are nice, but what if we perfect the science of improving people's lives through the perfection of our epistemological (volitional-cognitive) practices, then how much more fruitful would our intentions be?  And how about if we take a giant leap for mankind in that process by spreading philosophical learning far and wide, including for children?  And this education, pursued with optimal rigor, will lead to Aristotelian intellectual perfectionism as the most basic normative principle for living, correct?

If Aristotelians are better and more homed in on the intellectual-perfectionist essential here than philosophers of other traditions have been, this would be evidence for a thesis that Aristotelianism is a better way of doing philosophy itself than the other traditions are.  To get thorough/complete/perfectionist on this we would need to do a rank-ordering in terms of better-thinking/living fruits yielded.  Anyway, all activities that characterize human flourishing, Aristotelian-style, involve inter alia the perfection of the intellectual capacity, as like the form of human flourishing to whatever is the content of the activity.  (Not only does this conception of ethics and eudaimonic activity have something of an aesthetic appeal to it, but it sounds distinctively Aristotelian in both the form of framing it and and in content. ^_^ )  Stated another way: human flourishing or eudaimonia, Aristotelian-style, is thoughtful or intelligent living.

My view of Aristotle in relation to the rest of the history of philosophy is something as follows: You can only hope to match him but not exceed him.  He's the first to discover and fully implement a program of intellectual perfectionism (a maximally sprawling research program in his case, as full-time philosopher by profession) and quite self-consciously so.  (So why wasn't, say, Bertrand Russell an avowed Aristotelian?  How could his shoddy treatment of Aristotle in his History of Western Philosophy be at such variance with that of a Kenny, Cooper, Irwin, Barnes, Shields, et al?  Assuredly more intellectual perfection needs to happen for everyone to get on the same page about the A-man.)

Better living through philosophy, in broad outline

In which Ultimate Philosopher addresses the question, "Is there definitive evidence, man, that better living and philosophy go together?" and then such related questions as "What if we encounter one miserable philosopher, doesn't that falsify a better-living-through-philosophy hypothesis" and then "Isn't part of wisdom learning not to be miserable (as distinct from, say, 'in physical pain'), like, ever, and isn't philosophy after all the pursuit or search for wisdom which is distinct from the having of wisdom or sagacity itself" and then such related questions about the meaning of life, etc.

So, let's begin.  What is better living?  In short, whatever it is that the ancients (Aristotle first and foremost, of course . . .) were getting at with the concept of eudaimonia.  Happiness, flourishing, comprehensive well-being, . . . a modern rendition of the concept is found in self-actualization psychology associated with Maslow and others.

Next question: are there real-world examples of self-actualized or eudaimonic philosophers, not merely philosophers who seek these things but also attain these things?  It is helpful to have real-world examples to go by.  How do we go about identifying who a philosopher is, anyway?  And surely we need to be able to distinguish between a mere philosopher and a sage, so getting the definition of 'philosopher' correct is important (for purposes of this discussion, etc.).  To best answer that question is to get into the topic of 'metaphilosophy' or philosophy (asking questions about, thinking through thoroughly, more to follow below) about philosophy.  Just what are the necessary and sufficient conditions, etc., for someone to be engaging in what we correctly identify as philosophic activity?

Philosophy is something something love or pursuit or seeking after wisdom, with the goal or telos of such activity being an actual sage.  A sage is one who has attained wisdom, and so what is wisdom you might ask?  Ah, what is wisdom.  How do we know when we have found it if we do not yet possess it?  We could say numerous things about wisdom and hopefully identify fundamental features in common to those things to form a working definition of wisdom.  Okay, so I'll cheat and see what google says.  "the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the quality of being wise.
synonyms: sagacity, intelligence, sense, common sense, shrewdness, astuteness, smartness, judiciousness, judgment, prudence, circumspection

So, like I hear about these wiseguys, you know, goodfellas?  Michael Corleone, did he possess these features?  He had to be pretty good at what he was doing to run an empire like that.  Keep your friends close and enemies closer, etc.  Or, how about when the "Meth Milf" Lydia Rodarte-Quayle from Breaking Bad discusses whether it would be, you know, wise to have Mike's good men bumped off.  That's not the wisdom the likes of Socrates, Plato and of course (duh) Aristotle spoke about, but it's something called wisdom by some, and we need to have strict guidelines for distinguishing fool's gold from the real.  And what if Corleone or the Meth Milf do possess some of the characteristics provided by the google algorithm?  Are those good characteristics to have no matter the context?  What about smartness, anyway?  Is that ever bad?  Can one be more clever than smart, more smart than wise?

Wisdom has a synonym in the ancient Greek, scientia or some form of systematized or organized knowing.  In this context it is unavoidable for me to recall a portion of historian-of-philosophy Will Durant's summary statement of Kant: "Science is organized knowledge; wisdom is organized life."  Wisdom is organized life, philosophy is the love of wisdom, therefore by ironclad deduction philosophy is love of organized life, QED, shows over, philosophy 1, non-philosophy zero.  (Plato proved this over 2,000 years ago and yet humanity has not taken to Plato in all this time.  Is it a communication problem?  Shit.)

Humans are distinguished from the animals by the faculty of intellect or reason, which enables thought and the ability to express them via language.  Intellect or reason itself is present enough in the activities of nearly all human beings (not in the category of the developmentally disabled, say) that it serves to organize experiences into a systematic-enough whole to get by to varying degrees of success in daily and often routine affairs.  But the light of independent thought and initiative and creativity is still in there, enough for legal (including criminal) responsibilities.  Some element of free will that accounts for about 30% of our life circumstances (the other 70% roughly evenly divided between genetics and environment/upbringing).

Moving on.  It is systematic approaches to reasoning in specialized areas of knowledge we tend to put under the heading of 'the sciences.'  But philosophy is something about organizing our thought processes at a higher level of sorts, of bringing together all our reasoning processes under a higher-order level of systematicity, enough so that it takes on the task of "organized living".  The pursuit of wisdom seems to be, in addition to anything else, the pursuit of better or organized living.  And this seems to happen via a process known as philosophy.

Time out for a moment.  The first google result for 'philosophy' is:

skin care, fragrance, perfume, bath and body, gifts, philosophy

https://www.philosophy.com/

philosophy | skin care | fragrance | bath & body | gifts philosophy.

Skin care explore advanced skin care products from philosophy. as ...

Bestsellers philosophy.

So philosophy as something to do with, like, beauty?  Are there objective teleological standards for beauty?  Is there an organized field of knowledge that deals with this subject?

Now, I have in mind something more like what appears on the right sidebar:

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Philosophy

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Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. The term was probably coined by Pythagoras. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument, and systematic presentation. Wikipedia

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So

So somehow there's a connection - I'm not entirely clear on it myself at this point - between "the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language" and self-improvement! which is what Better Living Through Philosophy might very well best be marketed as?  Have you seen philosophy journal articles where "fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language" are discussed?  A bunch of it almost goes right over my head especially if I'm not reading carefully.  Some of these things just don't interest me that much: I'm more interested in that field known as 'ethics' (link above) than I am in getting it exactly just right whether our conception of substance (this would be in the branch of metaphysics, mysteriously not linked above) is best understood in Aristotelian or Thomistic terms much less Leibnizian or Spinozist terms.  (Is there a difference between Aristotelian and Thomistic conceptions, and even if there is one, are these the best two candidates to choose from, vis a vis the likes of Leibniz and Spinoza?  Yeah, I think they may be pretty good candidates.  But like I said, given only so much available time my own personal focus has been more squarely on the topic of ethics.  This is not at all to say that getting a fully systematized understanding of our ethical concepts won't rely on metaphysical ones.  But then they might also have to rely on aesthetic ones as well, and that seems like a rather under-served area in philosophy; only a few of the most canonized philosophers - little overlap with specialists who've made their name in aesthetics (Danto, say?) - delved into that subject matter.  What is there to say about whatever it is that aesthetics studies, anyway, and what relation does it have to better living / self-help?

So there's something about the activity of philosophy - which encompasses not just (science-like) knowing or wisdom accumulation but also the activity of putting whatever wisdom obtained so far to use in organizing or systematizing the art of living better, but also an activity distinctive to philosophy per se: thought.  It is, ultimately, the activity of thought that itself aspires toward a systematic unity or completeness or wholeness, and so atop the hierarchy of the human sciences is philosophy, basically a science of what it is to live functionally or well as a human being.

This is basically the essential idea of what I think "better living through philosophy" is aiming toward, the rest being application, examples, a treatise-length fleshing-out.

Now, let's say that there are better modes of doing philosophy itself than others.  There are plenty of great philosophers in history but what crucial features account for some philosophers being more influential than others?  (Why isn't a pessimist like Schopenhauer a lot more influential than someone who's more optimistic like Aristotle who believes humans - well, Athenian citizens at least - are in principle equipped for eudaimonia?  If pessimism is true, shouldn't it sell?  And why hasn't the full range of wisdom of Plato and Aristotle, at minimum, rubbed off on all school children all of 2,000 years later?  Communication barriers?  Really?  Surely I could get polemical about the "progressive"-run schools but I'll keep it clean here.  I'll just say that a truly progressive mindset gets you to Aristotelian wisdom-pursuit and I wish I were seeing a lot more of that explicitly and systematically instilled in schools.)

So there are better and worse ways of doing philosophy, let's assume.  We should then have some way of ordering the different approaches and styles and methods (METHODS!!!) according to their value (teleological ranking).  Through to their (methods') fruits ye shall know them.  Aristotle knew a ton of shit - founded biology as a science that was authoritative for 2,000 years until Darwin in the 1800s; systematized the science of logic to such an extent that (quoting historian of philosophy Anthony Kenny in Essays on the Aristotelian Tradition) "his work was subsumed, rather than superseded, by the developments of mathematical logic at the end of the nineteenth century by Frege and his contemporaries; developed a physical science that stood authoritative until the Renaissance, systematized philosophy itself with treatises on metaphysics, ethics, politics, psychology, aesthetics, philosophical procedures and methods.  Aristotle's work (not like this stuff shouldn't be known to everyone by now) exists now only in not-always-accessible, quasi-lecture-note format; he is reputed to have written dialogues that outshone (as gold to silver) those of his master Plato.  He was hailed almost unanimously among the medieval scholars who preserved and studied his work as the ultimate in human intelligence, the philosopher "par excellance," or simply The Philosopher according to the greatest of the medieval minds, Aquinas.  (This despite having numerous erroneous views and often in areas of less specifically philosophical consequence - he didn't think his principles of the good life or eudaimonia applied to slaves or women; numerous of his scientific theories have been superseded or overturned.)

It is my view that an 'Aristotelian' approach to doing philosophy is the best one, or at the very least a suitably strong candidate for one.  I place the likes of Aquinas, Ayn Rand, and Mortimer Adler within that tradition broadly speaking.  When it comes to the "fruits" of whatever his method was, it includes a crucial piece of insight: that the human good, to be most fully or perfectly actualized, requires philosophical contemplation, and a perfecting of one's intellectual activity itself (whether as an aesthetic principle - living to kalon or for the sake of the noble, fine or beautiful - or for the sake of better living overall qua the kind of life-form one is).  I characterize this as an intellectual perfectionism; Aristotle has been variously dubbed an "intellectualist" in his conception of (the fullest realization) of eudaimonia.  The philosophic or contemplative life, and generally the progressive development or perfection of one's intellectual faculty, are in this sense a central and fundamental feature of the good life, the feature that more than any others would best explain all the other facets of a good human life (physical, emotional, social, spiritual, aesthetic,...).  For the Aristotelian, eudaimonia is best or maximally achieved through the perfection of that 'best aspect within' our nature, our nous or intelligence, that a good human life is one led thoughtfully and intelligently, that this perfection of our rational natures is in some sense the same thing as living eudaimonically, as an activity of the rational soul.  (Are living wisely and eudaimonically the same thing?  Must one be a sage to be truly or fully eudaimonic?)

Now this distinctively Aristotelian (or more broadly, Greek) conception of the good life gives us a picture of the human good in terms of both the end and the means by which it is exercised (which are in some sense united and instantiated in rational activity, or: the human good is rational activity), which places it in interesting contrast to other ethical traditions which aren't so homed in on the rational element of our soul as the central defining potentiality to be actualized in a good human life.  (This subsumes even the 'Kantian' rational-willing characteristic of distinctively moral cognition.)  The Aristotelian ethical tradition is big on the concept of virtue (or excellence, arete in Greek): what makes for an excellent human being/life?  Something something the utmost excellence of the rational or intellectual faculty.  Now, the task of figuring out general principles for the best exercise of our rational faculty?  That's for epistemology, the science of knowing as such.  And if we exercise the proper epistemic discipline, the science of knowing becomes a unity with the science of living, with practical concerns.  To live best is (inter alia) to know best, i.e., the latter is a precondition for the former.  So what do the wiseguys, the made men, know exactly, anyway?

So something like philosophic activity itself is central to the Aristotelian conception of the good life.  How much is that notion seared in the consciousness front and center when we consider alternative philosophical schools, whatever extant candidates we might look into for philosophic guidance?

As to such profoundly significant identifications being the fruit of a method, in Aristotle's case it has to do with something called dialectic, or the art of playing opinions against one another to hopefully yield a truth agreeable to all despite their remaining well-scrutinized differences.  And even though Plato is noted for having made The Grand Original Contribution to the philosophical dialogue style via The Republic and other published works, it is dialectic as picked up and applied by Aristotle that may well yield the greatest fruit.  Among other fruits of dialectical method would be what, in the final comparison, differentiated Plato from Aristotle: Aristotle adopted both Plato's 'rationalist' framework for thinking about philosophic questions (homing in on eternal, unchanging Forms or Ideas supposedly grasped by the intellect with the sense experience only providing at best a hint in Their direction), and a thoroughly empirical or experience-based one.  Ideally the Aristotelian approach should be able to provide the very definitional or formal criteria for both living well and specifically philosophical activity, along with empirical examples of such in the real world.  (Shouldn't philosophy be practical and not a lot of idle word-play?)

Dialectic has something to do with taking into account all the essential factors that come to bear on forming an opinion on anything, and ideally applies not just to analyzing and resolving differences of opinion but also in mapping our opinions onto the world itself.  (It is a common sense or classical realist assumption that there is a real world out there independent of our knowing it and that our opinions can at least sometimes match up with or more systematically map onto what our senses provide us.)  And in his inquiries into the nature of existence and our place in it, Aristotle covered a bunch of ground, really thoroughly/completely/wholly/perfectionist-like.  I take him as an example to be emulated, each in our own way (we providing for the individuating features or manifestations of this formal principle of intellectual perfectionism), and perhaps not to be superseded or surpassed.  If we propose to have a superior or more perfect alternative model of thinking/knowing/living on offer, then aren't we just re-affirming a principle of intellectual perfectionism, to the effect that we should adopt the most superior model on offer?  So this becomes like an endpoint of the conversation about the norms of an ideal human society (also known as 'end of history' or perhaps 'utopia').

So as we progress through the stages of development we see that there is the potential for, if not actuality of, better living through philosophy, but then we see that there may be better ways of doing philosophy than others, in which case we should think in terms (eventually) of the best living through the best philosophy.  And getting 'em as young as possible probably wouldn't hurt to speed up the 'end of history' collaborative project, as long as they learn all about things like the Aristotelian-Thomistic synthesis and are not pumped full of philosophically-less-perfect material instead.

So this should give a taste of the gist of the 'better living through philosophy' Project that I've been consciously mulling these past 15 or so months, atop the previous context of thought already accumulated, and aided by some possibly-performance-enhancing substances.  (Substance. ^_^ )