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 everyone needs philosophy: a proof

A standard hierarchy of needs. Where does philosophy fit in?

It seems like this may involve belaboring what is obvious (to some), but I can't say I've seen the case presented quite like this before.

Pictured above is a rendition of Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs (hereafter "the hierarchy").  I've indicated in a number of places that "Better Living" can be understood in these terms.  I've indicated in my book (see 'About Me') that a (hopefully careful and thorough) inductive grounding of the concept "good" - along with "right" the most important concept in the field of metaethics - points toward good being synonymous with (the fulfillment of) a need.  An overly reductionist and biologistic rendering of "need" or "good" based on some concept of a telos understood in terms of natural functions seems to wind up explaining many of the needs at or toward the bottom or middle of the Maslow-hierarchy but not so much those at and towards the top; while the explanation of our origins is usually rendered in terms of the concept of 'inclusive fitness' - we're genetic preservation and replication machines (crudely, "the four Fs") - it turns out that the distinctively human cognitive makeup comes with ends/goals/purposes like morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem-solving, aesthetic appreciation, etc.  Questions that arise: How does human appreciation of music arise within an evolutionary context?  How do we treat of (genuine) needs toward the top of the hierarchy that don't seem to have played nearly the role for prehistoric humans that they do for us moderns?

Additionally, thinkers like David L. Norton have noted the deep if not exact similarity between the hierarchy and the ancient concept of eudaimonia (rough synonyms are flourishing, well-being, happiness, living well, a complete life).  The terms "eudaimonia" and "self-actualization" appear to be synonymous here.  (Noted ethicist Alan Gewirth takes the idea a step further with his concept of self-fulfillment.)  (One really should do some mental integration and follow these links where they lead; the wikipedia entry for "self-fulfillment" prominently references Gewirth, for instance.)  Now, it may turn out that one partly fulfills needs at different levels of the hierarchy, but the ideal of perfection is a complete (teleios) fulfillment of needs.

I plan to have more to say in a future posting or book or more about the concept of ethical perfectionism as a complete fulfillment of the aspirations of common sense morality (inasmuch as we would say that there are inchoate or implicit aspirations in common sense morality).  Moral theories that involve revisions to common sense morality are dubbed revisionary (aha, Huemer now appears!); "revisionary" seems to be a charge leveled more toward utilitarianism than to competing theories since it involves such a revision or departure from how humans historically have thought about the good and the right-and-wrong.  (See, e.g.: trolley problems.)  That usually has been a charge against utilitarianism because of the apparently or genuinely counter-intuitive (roughly, counter-common-sense-morality) prescriptions, motivations, etc., that people would have to adopt to fit the demands of the theory.  I don't think ethical perfectionism - the most perfect version we can formulate, that is; I nominate an Aristotelian or intellectual perfectionism (as do Hurka, the Dougs, and others) - succumbs to this problem.

(Hopefully an intellectual perfectionism avoids problems of circularity, viz.: when we fill in the concept of intellectual perfection, does it lead to adoption of, say, utilitarianism (and then when we fill in the best version of utilitarianism or consequentialism more broadly speaking, in order to (e.g.) account for Mill's highly plausible distinction between higher and lower pleasures or goods, do we end up with intellectual perfectionism)?  Well, in line with what intellectual perfection involves, in a sense yes, at least in part, via the procedures of dialectic. (Blog tag for dialectic.)  Utilitarianism's appeal comes from having grains of truth, even if it ends up being a one-sided theory that excludes the grains of truth in other theories, e.g., Kantian-style deontology associated with (e.g.) rights-talk that is ethically foundational enough not to be reducible to utilitarian guidelines.  Or so I and numerous ethical theorists claim.)

Somehow all of the preceding is deeply relevant to the promised proof to which I now come, about the need for philosophy.  (I'm trying not to leave loose ends, you see.)

Two of the needs listed at the top of the hierarchy - morality and problem-solving - are centrally specific concerns to philosophy, and uniquely to the discipline of philosophy.  Problem-solving comes under the head of "epistemology" or theory of knowledge, and it's that issue which I seek to address here.

What is the main problem that epistemology is trying to solve?  Well, it's a rather obvious problem: while there isn't really any serious dispute about the general reliability of the deliverance of sense-perception, which humans all share in common (and with the other animals), humans come to many varied systems of belief.  (The Greek term for belief is endoxa.  Consider the relation to terms you already know such as "orthodox" or "paradox.")  Sometimes these systems of belief are wildly at variance with one another.  It's hard to see how (e.g.) socialism and capitalism are in any serious way reconcilable with one another.  And yet different humans, with access to the same sensory evidence, end up thinking very different things about these isms.

Since advocates of capitalism and of socialism can't both be right, we run into the very serious (indeed, life-and-death, if you look at the the 20th century) possibility of doxastic error.  And if one is in serious doxastic error, it's hard to reconcile this condition with being (completely) eudaimonic.  To put the issue into greater relief: what about the irreconcilability of theism and naturalism?  How does that affect how one ought to fashion one's life?  To live a good life do we need to prepare for an afterlife?  Do we need to attend church on Sundays?  Do we need to adhere strictly to what's in Scriptures?  Which set of Scriptures - the Koran, the Bible, the Upanishads?

What's the proper ethical treatment of animals?  Are current industrial farming practices abominable?  (There is something approaching a philosophical consensus, if ever there was any, that indeed it is.  I can think of a lot of arguments in the literature that it is, but I can't think of a single argument in the literature that it isn't.  This has hardly affected social or government policy in the main, however.  This in itself is a philosophical problem.)  Are meat-eating practices of any kind wrong?  (The jury appears to be out on that one.)

Is healthcare a basic and universal human right?  (Note that quality healthcare is pricey, beyond the reach of many of the world's inhabitants.)  If so, how does that square with the right to liberty?  Doesn't the latter preclude being forced into service to provide for others' healthcare?  Isn't taxation of earnings on par with forced labor?  Isn't sending one's earnings to third-world relief funds akin to getting one's work clothing wet to save a baby from drowning in a shallow pond on one's way to work?  (You've never encountered that situation?  Is that relevant to the comparison?  What about trolley problems?)  If you should donate some of your earnings to third-world relief, just how much of your earnings?  What are proper procedures, if any, for quarantining individuals who are infected with a highly contagious virus?  These are life and death questions, and there's no broad agreement on them.

So isn't it really important, if we want to get things right about such questions, and we find that - based on the fact of disagreement alone - that not everyone is getting it right despite their sincerely-held beliefs (endoxa), that we would want to be really rigorous about our belief-formation processes?  Shouldn't we want to learn, rigorously, about the rules of formal logic?  (Should(n't) I present this whole proof of the need for philosophy in numbered-premise-and-conclusion format?  But what is the fun in that?  Have you ever seen me do such a thing in this blog?)  Shouldn't we all want to learn about bending over backwards to avoid committing informal fallacies, which are widespread if not rampant in at least some areas of discourse?  Shouldn't we all heed to the best of our abilities Mill's advice (there's Mill again...) about knowing the opinions of adversaries in their most plausible and persuasive form?  Wouldn't you prefer that your adversaries know your opinions as you actually hold them before they criticize them?

(Apparently tons of haters of Ayn Rand "know" from afar that Rand admirers such as myself are empathy-lacking assholes, and that all we have to talk about is politics and not things like aesthetics or philosophic method.  I was not aware that all that time pondering the implications of the issue of (e.g.) Rand as a dialectical thinker, or (which comes roughly to the same thing) the thinking that went into my Journal of Ayn Rand Studies article, was the equivalent of staring into blank space, my life is so empty and lacking in experiential-background context!  The things the haters know about me that I don't, it's just effing great, I tell ya.  So, is Ayn Rand a philosopher, much less a good or serious one?  As long as we're going to issue forth with endoxa or opinions about that, we should want to be pretty careful and thorough about getting it right, because who or what counts as a (good or serious) philosopher is really quite important to all this.  And isn't issuing forth opinions lazily and recklessly about others' opinions almost the very definition of being an empathy-lacking asshole as opposed to a noble soul?  Not to name names, but is the opinion of a Rand-bashing Nietzsche scholar who runs the most popular philosophy blog worth anything in this context?  What does popularity or even "credentials" count for when it comes to truth and honesty, BTW?  Who runs a philosophy blog as good, overall, as this one?  Are any of the others talking explicitly, specifically, and with aspirations to systematicity about the topic of better living through philosophy?  About philosophy for children?  Like, sometimes?  Ever?  Is that 'Aristotle' on twitter running a sprawling enough research program like the original Aristotle to have the lay of the philosophy-blog land?  I know about that 'Aristotle' figure, does he know about me?  Why is 'Aristotle' on a known intellectual cesspool like twitter rather than running a philosophy blog, publishing books, etc.?  How did I find out about that 'Aristotle' if I spend little time on twitter, anyway?  What does a perfectionistic research program involve?  Why isn't twitter-'Aristotle' talking incessantly about better living through philosophy for children?  What does twitter-'Aristotle' have to say about a culturally-influential-and-polarizing figure like Ayn Rand and/or her associate and leading Aristotle scholar Allan Gotthelf?  If somehow hypothetically revived to the present day, would Aristotle specialize in Aristotle studies?  Could someone in the present day only specialize given the growth of specialized knowledge required for expertise in any field nowadays?  Would specialization explain why next to zero politicians today, who specialize in the art of persuasion, are anything close to experts in philosophy?  Etc.  As far as I know, only one philosopher is asking questions at this overall level of perceptiveness nowadays.  And only I can anticipate what my next blog post will be, and it should be pretty darn good.  [Edit: and here you go.]  BTW, I need to perfect my research program more, by homing in on state-of-the-art journals/articles in my own 'areas of specialization' [ethics, political philosophy].  I have good reasons for doing so, given the nature of the integration and transmission of knowledge/research....)

Have I made my point yet?

But just to state the conclusion succinctly: You need philosophy because at least some of your opinions are probably wrong, and better living for a human involves advanced cognition about morality and problem-solving.

To tie up any loose ends: Aristotle is known as the fountainhead of dialectic.  Dialectic has been described in the Oxford Handbook of Aristotle as his philosophical method.  The fruits of that method are well known for their explanatory power.  (He had wrong things to say about women and slavery.  His theories in physics have been superseded - after only about 1800 years or so of other thinkers doing natural philosophy, that is.  He has to be assessed on his overall merits.  His ethics are as canonical as ever, even in the demanding confines of analytic philosophy.)  T.H. Irwin has a whole book - the largest single-author book on Aristotle's philosophy that I know of - titled Aristotle's First Principles (1988) in which he investigates Aristotle's application of the method of dialectic (what Irwin terms 'strong dialectic').  Aristotle recognized the major issue raised above, the problem of opposing opinion or endoxa despite uniformity in human sensory experience.  Surely everyone has hit upon some grain(s) of truth or other in their opinion-formation processes, but clearly (given the fact of disagreement) they need to perfect those processes to the best of their abilities.  One way of doing so is engaging in dialectic, the art of context-keeping in the most fundamental explanatory sense, but the art, more popularly understood, of seeking reconciliation among opposing ideas.  (That is the art of context-keeping applied, in the sense that we seek to establish the cognitive contexts within opposing belief-formation processes occur, so as to better understand how opposing opinions were arrived at, and therefore how to apply needed fixes.)  So dialectic and intellectual perfection(ism), which may well come to the same thing, are fundamental to philosophical activity.  Now, Aristotle didn't say that (strong) dialectic was merely about treating the contexts opposing opinions, since he was also a realist in the sense that an independent reality (the one we commonly access through sense-experience) is the ultimate arbiter of truth and falsity.  This explains the grain(s) of truth in opposing opinions even though, for all we know, opposing opinions taken on the whole are false.  Point being, it's not opinions all the way down.

(A note about Irwin: he's a good man, and thurrah.  I may have mentioned before that his massive, 3-volume The Development of Ethics (2007) contains the largest bibliography that I know of -  approximately 1600 references, even more than the 1300 or so of Sciabarra's Total Freedom (2000).  (While I haven't read it, I am aware that Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) also has a massive bibliography, around 1100 references IIRC.  Any deep tie-in between the themes covered in these three books?  How much and against what odds should one bet that there is?)  Irwin is the main source of my awareness of discussions about an ethical theory being revisionary.  For point of reference, the 5 thinkers to whom Irwin devotes more than 100 pages of coverage each are Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Kant and Sidgwick (the revisionary utilitarian guy).  Now, while if you took only these 5 thinkers and 'dialecticized' them, you'd probably come up with an intellectual and ethical framework that, practiced by all humans, would lead to a really decent and enlightened society, despite differences about "the foundations."  Aristotle and Aquinas in particular are perfectionists - intellectual perfectionists to be exact - and the clear sense from Irwin's exhaustively comprehensive treatment of the history of ethics is that their 'Aristotelian naturalism' offers the strongest resources overall for ethical theory.  In fact, Irwin's coverage of Aquinas is the most extensive of any other figure in his Development, at over 200 pages.  I'm close to finishing the final, third volume of the series.  The last 300 densely-packed pages cover the 20th century from Moore onward.  Up until that point, Irwin's coverage was quite lucid, easy (enough) to follow.  But then 20th century ethics comes around, and it becomes almost excruciatingly technical and focused on the difficult subject matter of metaethics.  The likes of Ayn Rand had no time for this stuff, as she was focused on the life-and-death importance of ethics whereas the relevance for ethical practice of any number of the proliferating 20th-century isms (expressivism, cognitivism, emotivism, error theory, internalism, subjectivism, realism, quasi-realism, etc. etc.) is not exactly clear.  The frustration of non-academics/specialists about this situation is expressed in such articles as this one.  Still, you have a (the?) leading Aristotle scholar in W. D. Ross heavily involved in these discussions, so they're still in some way very important.  The question is, can their importance be conveyed to a lay-audience?  Or is the subject matter inherently too difficult?  I remember a claim to the effect that Heidegger's subject matter is inherently too difficult for lay-translation, although Irwin's chapter on Existentialist ethics, which is pretty much all about Heidegger, is easily the clearest of his 20th-century chapters so far, so I doubt such a claim in Heidegger's case.  Also, while Irwin's prose when it comes to 20th-century meteathics is difficult, the treatment of the metaethical subject matter in fellow Oxford scholar Derek Parfit's On What Matters (2011), volume 2, is actually quite accessible, breezy almost.  What's missing in On What Matters is coverage of the Aristotelian naturalist tradition so favorably treated by Irwin.  Is a (dialectical) synthesis of Irwin and Parfit possible, or does specialization preclude that, dammit?  [Edit: On the topic of good and thurrah men, Mortimer Adler's compilation, Great Treasury of Western Thought, is some 1770 pages, 1430 of which are the main textual extracts, in double columns, in tiny print.  I'm about halfway through it, and based on the pace of reading so far (roughly 12-14 pages an hour) I expect it will take over 100 hours, probably around 120 hours, to get all the way through.  Likewise, Irwin's Development is some 2800 large-size pages, with small print, and at my pace of reading of about 22-25 pages an hour, the time to completion would be over 100 hours as well.  Both good and thurrah men are Aristotelian researchers - and so is Sciabarra - so is there something more than a coinkydink there?  What other works from a single author/editor take over 100 hours to get through?  I want to know, dammit.  I don't remember Copleston's History, with its relatively short pages, taking nearly as long.])

[Addendum: the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary definition of "self-actualize" is "to reach one's full potential."  So now we have another conceptual tie-in, between goods, needs, and potentialities, yes?  (Actuality or energeia being synonymous with entelechy.... ain't making connections fun?)]

The academy: structurally dishonest?

The latest from the shitshow that the leftist-infested academy has been turning into more and more. (h/t Maverick Philosopher, additional related link there)  Aside from the obviously suspicious circumstances of this tenure-track person's firing, and the obviously credible depiction of all-too-familiar "woke" smear tactics involved, there is an entirely valid point the author raises:

I did not enjoy the protection of tenure (I was, however, tenure-track), but we should not rely upon tenure to uphold free inquiry. Academic health is not served by a message that tenure can only be secured by those prepared to embrace political orthodoxies. After all, if tenure is intended to protect people who challenge dogmas and orthodoxies, why would we support a system that punishes non-conformists and that sieves them out before they are capable of safely challenging prevailing views?

Gee, ya think?

The blatant hypocrisy of the tenure system, from an academic-freedom standpoint at any rate, is now laid bare.  Not just a system of tenure under the currently prevailing leftist-scum-infested shitshow, but any system of tenure whatsoever: from a intellectual-freedom-loving standpoint, what legitimate function does it serve?  Why in the everloving fuck should anyone, anywhere be made to feel afraid to speak their minds?

Not just in the academy, but corporations, or . . . anywhere.  It's an unphilosophical world where there are punishments for intellectual honesty.  I don't give a fuuuuuuuuuuuck if intellectual honesty makes someone annoying, unpopular, or "uncomfortable" for others to be around.  (Why can't these others fucking deal with it?  What the fuck is their problem?  [Note: this is not to say that other factors besides intellectual honesty can make someone annoying, unpopular, etc.  But that's not the issue here.  All too many people don't value intellectual honesty or intellectualism very highly, and they are annoyed or made uncomfortable in its presence, and that's a problem with them.])  Intellectual honesty is the one paramount value I embrace, and intellectual dishonesty (among the kinds of which is intellectual laziness) the one thing that really grinds my gears; it is the #1 cause of the world's avoidable problems.

What the fuck, is the idea of a free and fair marketplace of ideas utopian, or something?

Do I even need to ask what sages like Socrates (who was sentenced to death for being honest/"annoying", for godsakes...), Plato, Aristotle, et al, were they revived to speak authoritatively today, would say in response to such questions?

What a fucking joke.

[Addendum: Is social media structurally dishonest?  Consider: "likes" are what drive social media, but "likes" entail a popularity contest, not the encouragement of honesty and truth.  Of course social media is structurally dishonest, and that's the #1 cause of why social media is such a widely reviled toxic shitshow.  The old discussion formats - listservs, Usenet - didn't have this problem.  Fuckerberg, Dorsey, Huffman and the other war-profiteers of "likes" can stuff it.]

[Addendum #2 (3/11/2020): Leiter quotes Kathleen Stock on twitter: "The problem with academic feminist philosophy is that it’s run like a fiefdom, not like a normal open philosophical discussion. There are things you are just not allowed to say, and people you are not allowed to offend. Quality suffers, and to [the] rest of [the] world, it shows."  (Fucking twitter and its cognition-diminishing character limits, huh?)  Now, just replace "academic feminist philosophy" with "academia today," and definitely keep the "to the rest of the world" part, and you might see just what a fucking joke this all is.  This is sickness, folks.]

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]

Philosophy profession discredits itself?

(a teensy bit of context)  (a not-so-teensy bit)

This situation is unacceptable: 8 in 10 Philosophy Majors Favor Socialism

In addition to being unacceptable (on the merits of socialism vs. capitalism), it makes a bad impression about philosophy on the wider American public which contains a great many folks skeptical of philosophy's value for society, and some of whom have influence on state university budgets.  This should be cause for alarm for the philosophers whose profession will inevitably be targeted because of this.

If ever there is an idea discredited theoretically, morally and historically, it is socialism.  Mises' 1922 book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (linked above) is an epic, monumental takedown of socialist "thought," and is widely acknowledged among defenders of the free market -- i.e., capitalism -- for being such.  (Keep in mind that a great many of capitalism's defenders are not often in agreement about what thinkers and arguments are its strongest.  Misesians may overlap plenty with Rothbardians, say, but there isn't so much overlap between Rothbardians and Randians.  Just for instance.)  Mises' book and case against socialism was most widely discussed in reference to his "calculation argument," in which he established with great thoroughness and care that a truly socialist production framework couldn't properly calculate prices (particularly for production factors, i.e., capital goods).  What role for entrepreneurs in a socialist framework, particularly if such putative entrepreneurs had to answer to some collective production bureau?  (There also is a sizable body of literature on entrepreneurship by 'Austrian school' economists influenced principally by Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Mises and Hayek.)

Socialism's defenders took Mises on regarding the "calculation problem" (which appears in the end to have vindicated Mises, if Heilbroner's testimony is any indication).  But they neglected the rest of Mises' book, which exposes patterns and habits of thought among socialists that are inimical to Western civilization.  The final chapters of Socialism concern the tendency of socialism toward cultural destructionism, for example.

The history of socialism was not only one of failure, but monumental and monumentally deadly failure.  Some 20 to 40 million or more people perished in the Great Chinese Famine alone.  Time and time again mediocrities and sociopaths with access to power were (unsurprisingly?) drawn to this ideology, or more specifically the Marxian strain of it.

If anything might have discredited socialism, it is this deadly (and often outright bloody) history.  There is no honest denial of it, no way to spin the evidence.

If anything discredits socialism it is the ethical premises it relies upon, and while ethical theory isn't subject to the same testing the way that socialism was tested historically, one uncontroversial ethical principle (if any exist at all) is that stated by John Hospers, philosophy professor and first Libertarian Party presidential candidate, more or less directly channeling his former sparring partner, Ayn Rand: "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of."  Socialism, by definition, contravenes this principle.

Here's the definition of socialism appearing at the top of the above-linked google search:

a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

As Rand states in "This is John Galt Speaking" (Atlas Shrugged), "When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind."  The theme (of course?) of Rand's novel is: the role of the mind in man's existence.  (This applies in both the material and the spiritual realms, in politics and religion.)  It is only by application of the distinctively human conceptual faculty that the human race has moved from a primitive, caveman existence to modern, technologically-sophisticated society - and in any era of this progression, it's exceptional individual minds/intellects rising above the herd level, the conventional, the given, who drive further progress.  Non-human-intellect natural resources (means of production) have to be transformed by the human intellect to generate value-added or technological advance, and these minds/intellects come attached to specific individuals who are in a unique position to develop and direct this resource.  But even more importantly, ethically speaking (and not just a matter of historical explanation) the minds/intellects are their owners' to dispose of.  The whole point of her novel's heroes going "on strike" is to devote their energies/talents/minds to ends and projects of their own choosing, rather than to be forcibly subjected to the dictates of their public-sector inferiors.

Now, I'm aware that Rand-bashers typically refuse to understand Rand's point, hence their resort to any number of intellectually lazy or reckless caricatures or outright smears.  In any case, she remains socialism's most potent critic of socialism (and defender of capitalism) on ethical grounds.

Now, socialism proper - the state or collective owning "the means of production" is discredited roundly enough that defenders of it are hard to find these days.  But there's a little loophole in the above definition of socialism: "or regulated".  The same moral principle applies: under this definition the state or collective can still control and direct (under force of law) how individuals are to dispose of their intellects, talents, time and energy and the subsequent property holdings.  And significant wide-ranging regulation of people's economic lives is not only typical of most nations' economies of today, but those of the more socialist bent seek more such control.

Anyone who finds socialism attractive and yet fails to engage with Rand and Hospers (and Nozick and Mack) with due dialectical diligence is either ignorant or dishonest.  So which of these two is this 80 percent of philosophy (sic) majors, and - more importantly - how did this 80 percent manage to end up supporting the unsupportable?  How poor a job did their philosophy (sic) instructors have to do in order to generate such an unacceptable result?  I understand that the philosophy majors who go on to grad school would have to do a minimally decent job of dialectic with the libertarian position espoused above (which holds that either (a) market arrangements are in fact the best-known way of improving people's economic situation as well as preserving other freedoms and republican political institutions, or (b) that non-market arrangements are the best way of improving lives where markets didn't meet the task, or both).  But what excuse is there for so many undergrads/majors for embracing such a monumentally stupid, immoral and un-American idea as socialism (whether defined in terms of ownership or of control of "the means of production")?  (The best non-market arrangement I can propose for improving people's lives is (of course?) widespread philosophical education.)

If philosophers concerned with the public image of their professors have a clue, they'll be driven to some amount of action to counteract what's going on here.  (How does socialism compare to / contrast with biblical fundamentalism, say?  With the Rapture-ready variants?  With more extreme variants than that?)  Let's put this in terms that might stimulate their competitive juices more:

Economics majors aren't nearly so favorable to socialism; "only" 1 in 4 find socialism appealing.  Now, in the undergraduate academy there are three main sectors: the physical sciences, the "soft" or social sciences, and the humanities.  Various measures of (academic) intelligence show consistently that the smartest (on average) physical sciences majors are in Physics, the smartest social scientists are in Econ, and the smartest humanists are in Philosophy.

So . . . which majors are really the smartest and least ignorant when it comes to socialism?

You can't really blame "the campus environment" for the deplorable level of Philosophy majors' support for socialism, since that toxic environment hasn't destroyed (yet) the Econ departments enough to result in their majors supporting socialism in similar numbers.  Anyway, the overwhelming majority of the Econ and the Philosophy majors can't both be right about the socialism thing; one of these groups is probably screwing up big-time.  So which group is it?  Are the Philosophy professors curious enough to find out, and perhaps clean up their acts?  This is assuming that institutional incentives related to possible departmental budget cuts by representatives of pissed-off taxpayers aren't motivation enough.

As it is, 80 percent of philosophy (sic) majors supporting socialism only supports the widely-held thesis that "philosophers don't know how the real world works."  Two last points to bring up here:

(1) There is indeed a widespread problem about the relation of philosophy to the real world, and that is a tendency among highly intellectual people - academic types perhaps most especially - toward cognitive rationalism, or a fundamental breach between ideas and the world that's supposed to moor down the ideas.  (If you're a philosopher who wasn't confronted the problem of rationalism head-on, explicitly, fully and systematically, then how do you know you're not beset by it?  Note that Peikoff delves in pretty deep on this stuff in Understanding Objectivism - head on by name in Lectures/chapters 8 and 9 and implicitly throughout the first 7 lectures/chapters as preparatory work.  

(2) How would the likes of Plato, Aristotle and Kant address the socialism subject?  One thing they (well, Aristotle for sure) wouldn't do is to fail to have a rigorous dialogue with the Econ profession.  (I say Aristotle for sure, not just because of his sprawling research program, but if you open a history of economic thought you might just well find Aristotle discussed as a leading founder of the discipline - basically not surpassed for some 2,000 years until the Physiocrats et al.)  Aristotle's sensibility is such that he'd be engaged heavily with Mises' book as well as Rand/Hospers' "your life is your own to dispose of" thesis.  Nozick's 1974 Anarchy, State, and Utopia was praised on a back-cover blurb for its "unsurpassed dialectical sensibility" or words to that effect.  It's unmistakable that this former leftist Nozick did his homework and concluded about socialism pretty much the same thing that Rand, Mises, Hayek, and Hospers did: it's indefensible as moral theory and as social science.  Would Aristotle with his unsurpassed dialectical sensibility conclude any differently?  Does Rawls' advocacy of a quasi-socialistic regime of economic and/or property rights fall afoul of the "individuals' lives are their own to dispose of" moral principle, and if it does, does this rule out as unacceptable (this aspect of) Rawls' theory?  Among leading Harvard political philosophers of the early 1970s, the ratio of Rawlsians to Nozickians was 1:1.  Wouldn't that be a more healthy representation of the philosophy profession than the (more or less) 4:1 ratio among philosophy majors?  If so, whence the disconnect between points A and B?

Also, perhaps philosophers might explain how Hospers - a non-Harvard man tainted by his enthusiasm for and association with Rand - has gotten little recognition for his "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of" formulation while Nozick's essentially similar point but stated less strikingly is what gets the academic attention?  What's wrong with Hospers' formulation?  How is it not a powerful moral principle?

(I once stated this principle to a Rand-basher who replied that "that's actually a Kantian principle," and whereas Kant was a philosopher this Rand-basher respected most highly, this basher wouldn't extend any credit to Rand for espousing that very idea.  Par for the Rand-bashing course, as my exhaustive experience in this area tells me.)

How on earth do philosophy (sic) majors appear utterly ignorant of such a hard-hitting formulation of libertarian principles?  Surely Aristotle wouldn't fail to engage fully and fairly with Rand, Hospers, Nozick and Mises?  Aristotle is one of the people I can confidently say didn't contribute to negative aspects of philosophy's reputation (notwithstanding hubristic STEM-lords who blame Aristotle for subsequent thinkers turning his physical theories into dogma).  He systematically eschewed cognitive rationalism.  If the only excuse today's philosophy profession has to offer for not operating at Aristotle's level is that they can't keep up with someone who had as a teacher someone who had Socrates as a teacher, then perhaps that's a legitimate excuse, but they might not like the can of worms this explanation might open up, either.  If the notion of (my hypothetical, resurrected, preferably drill-sergeant-role) Aristotle embracing socialism strikes one as ridiculous as it strike me, then one should operate accordingly.  Me, I wrote this blog post and have it duly contextualized with hard-hitting links.  (Here's even another one, right from the SEP.)  Perhaps others in the profession can take measures of their own to help salvage its reputation?

Socialism is a litmus test for sound moral and/or scientific reasoning.  In my experience, arguing with socialists is like arguing with flat-earthers; they will stop at nothing to spin the evidence in their preconceived direction, and when confronted with the Rand/Hospers/Nozick principle (especially when illustrated by an example such as a decision to start one's own business to compete with the collectively-run/regulated enterprise, or with the reality of the skills bell-curve that results in differences in income and wealth), they don't even bother spinning: they fall silent.  The socialists did a piss-poor job of responding to Mises' treatise in its full context (including his thesis about cultural destructionism), they've done a piss-poor job of even understanding Rand's main political-economic themes, they have a track record of apologetics for the most murderous and authoritarian political regimes; they have long since squandered the benefit of the doubt.  You don't even need a hypothetical example of a resurrected Aristotle to figure this out; the aforementioned figures already presented compelling arguments and the historical record of socialism's failure can't be honestly avoided.

Is the only sorry excuse for this sorry state of affairs that the meaning of "socialism" has changed between the time of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, et al and today, such that the Scandinavian welfare-state model (where the lives of the men of mind and ability, as Rand/Galt terms them, are merely extensively regulated but not owned outright) and not the USSR is the most representative case?  (As for the use of the term "socialism" to apply to Scandinavia but not to the USSR: how is the linguistic confusion run rampant here in any way acceptable in its own right?  How on earth can it look good, no matter how you spin it, that 4/5 of Philosophy majors favor socialism?)

I already linked above Alan Charles Kors' discussion of the malpractice of intellectuals (sic) during the USSR era and afterward.  Can there be an "after socialism," Kors asks, if the intellectuals don't come to grips with this malpractice?  (Unlike medical doctors they can't be sued for malpractice; it's not evident that they face any serious negative repercussions for the failures of their ideas, a point that Thomas Sowell has repeated endlessly.)  The fact that 80 fucking percent of philosophy majors find this evil idea attractive would indicate that the intellectuals (sic) are still engaged in the same malpractice, in essence.  Bad-faith rationalizations about how pro-capitalism, libertarian and/or conservative intellectuals aren't competitive in an academic environment won't cut it, and certainly won't help to rehabilitate the low to mixed public reputation of the philosophy profession.

How much could it hurt these academics for them to actually behave like the letters "PhD" behind their names would suggest?  How much does it really hurt them to seriously and fully consider that Bezos, Buffett, et al are entitled to their wealth for implementing visions that evidently no one else had the skills to do (at their level, anyway), that they're using their own skills/talents/energies/time/minds attached to their physical and moral personhood, that their activities tend to raise living standards generally, and other such truths about the capitalist system?  Short of my hypothetical resurrected Aristotle, there is the example of Nozick who went through all the alternatives on offer and found socialism - basically anything to the left of Rawls - to be woefully inadequate as serious political philosophy.  So, what did Nozick miss?  (And it wouldn't be very philosophical to peddle the easily-refuted myth that Nozick "abandoned libertarianism," now, would it.  What's the 2011 Slate article author's excuse for not acknowledging Nozick's 2001 interview?  This is just the sort of intellectually lazy, bad-faith shit I'm talking about, which seems to pass without comment way too damn much.  Heck, why don't leftist intellectuals respond to Kors and either atone as he recommends, or explain how they don't have to?  Had I somehow missed their addressing Kors' argument?  Do I need to make some exhaustive google search to confirm what I already suspect with ample justification?  Shouldn't the Kors search link provided above suffice?  If anything, the only arguments, facts and justifications here keep coming from the other direction, providing only more evidence of the academic left's shameful, credibility-squandering intellectual history.  And the mainstream of taxpaying America certainly doesn't have the patience for this far-left shit.)

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.]