Peikoff, Binswanger, Gotthelf

I isolate these three concrete instances in virtue of one crucial similarity: they are professionally-trained philosophers, still living, who attended Ayn Rand's epistemology workshops from 1969 to 1971 (now reproduced as the appendix to the 2nd edition of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology). If you want incontrovertible evidence - whatever you think of her conclusions - that Ayn Rand was an absolutely first-rate mind, have a careful and studied look at that appendix. These are things Rand was saying on the fly, without prepared notes, without anything but the vast and integrated contents of her subconscious.

(The subconscious is a chief component of what this small group of philosophical elites called "psycho-epistemology," something Rand was deeply concerned with at this time, as evidenced in her late magnum opus, "The Comprachicos". Keep in mind that "The Comprachicos" was written only a few decades after the works of Aristotle were made available in English and she was pretty much the only philosopher at the time to grasp completely first-hand the awesome magnitude of his importance to human civilization. "The Comprachicos" is a document of a world ruled not by Aristotelianism but by the anti-conceptual effects of Pragmatism. Viewed in that light, "The Comprachicos" ranks up there with Galt's speech and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology among Rand's greatest masterworks. Suffice it to say that around 1970, Rand was at the height of her powers.)

Now, two of the three ITOE-worskhop philosophers are on record for comparing Ayn Rand to Aristotle. That Leonard Peikoff is on record, is quite well known to those who've read or know about Leonard Peikoff. While Binswanger is not on record as far as I know, his doctoral work at Columbia that became his book, The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, gives you a good idea of his estimate of Ayn Rand as a thinker. The other is Allan Gotthelf, who also received a Ph.D. at Columbia around this time and later started up the Ayn Rand Society, a professional society affiliated with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association.

Gotthelf is now Visiting Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he holds the University's Fellowship for the Study of Objectivism. According to the Leiter Report, the leading source for rankings of graduate programs in philosophy, the University of Pittsburgh stands alone as having the highest-ranked program for general philosophy of science. Here's what wikipedia says about Gotthelf:

In the 1980s he co-organized numerous international conferences on Aristotle's biological and philosophical thought, including the 1988 NEH Summer Institute on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Biology, and Ethics (with Michael Frede and John Cooper). He edited the Festschrift in honor of David M. Balme, Aristotle on Nature and Living Things and co-edited (with James G. Lennox) Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Gotthelf has prepared for publication D.M. Balme's posthumous editions of Aristotle's History of Animals (HA): (a) the Loeb edition of Books VII-X (Harvard University Press, 1991) and (b) the Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries edition of the whole of HA (Cambridge University Press, vol. 1: 2002, vol. 2: forthcoming).

Gotthelf has received many honors for his work on Aristotle, including in 2004 an international conference on "Aristotle on Being, Nature, and Life", held "in celebration of his contributions to the study of classical philosophy and science"; a volume of the proceedings, Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle: Essays in Honor of Allan Gotthelf, edited by James G. Lennox and Robert Bolton, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. A volume of Gotthelf's collected Aristotle papers is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

He is currently doing work on Aristotle and Ayn Rand's epistemology.[1]

Most recently, at the University of Pittsburgh, he has organized various workshops and conferences on the nature of concepts and objectivity and the bearing of these issues on important topics in epistemology, philosophy of science, and metaethics.

You see where I'm going with this, right?

According to one of the most respected Aristotle scholars around, being at Rand's epistemology workshops "was the equivalent of having Aristotle in the room." (from 100 Voices, p. 342)

I think those limited number of people around who grasp the momentous importance of Aristotle should perk up their ears at this point. Keep in mind two fundamental similarities between Aristotle and Ayn Rand: they were both systematizing empiricists and they were both in essence eudaemonists who emphasized the central role of rationality and intelligence in a flourishing human life. I think one rightly says they are in essence both perfectionists understood in their respective ways: Aristotle understands it as a living entity achieving its form, actualizing its potentialities (the ancient term teleios signifying this perfection); Rand (and Norton) understanding the significance of individuated potentialities (with Rand - but not Norton - grasping the centrality of rationality as the human form metaphysically and the human essence epistemologically). Aristotle and Rand are agreed that the human good consists in the actualization of human (rational) potentiality.

With Norton factored in, we know that this actualization of human potentiality has gone under the heading of "self-actualization" in humanistic psychology. Eudaemonia just is self-actualization, and is the self-perfection of the human being. Norton fills in the "social entailments" angle not accounted for in Rand, though I'm sure she would have gotten there eventually, if she had the time. Norton also adds insight into the so-called is-ought problem: once we conceive of the distinction between potentiality and actuality, we can understand "ought-ness" in terms of potentiality and "is-ness" in terms of actuality. "Is" and "ought" are united in the activity of a rational being actualizing its potentialities, and its good consists in its perfection so defined. This serves as a unified Aristotelian-Randian solution to the so-called is-ought problem and provides the most complete account to date of a eudaemonistic ethics.

Where Aristotle and Rand differed is on how to account for rationality as the essence of human beings. They were in agreement that rationality was the form or organizing principle of a human being, but rationality as a universal remained to be accounted for. And that's why Ayn Rand wrote her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Aristotelian jury, I present to you Allen Gotthelf's paper, "Ayn Rand on Concepts: Another Approach to Abstraction, Essences, and Kinds".

It is by using this approach to abstraction that Gotthelf and I drew the conclusion that Rand more than any other philosopher to date was essentially equivalent to an Aristotle as a philosopher.

And she didn't have a Plato-caliber philosopher to learn from, neither. It was all first-hand.

And it's a leading solution to the so-called problem of induction, too.

Aristotle-admirers, perhaps you might want to take a second, closer look at Ayn Rand.

That is all for now.

Thus spoke the Ultimate Philosopher. :-)

[CLIFFHANGER: What if Aristotle himself attended Rand's epistemology workshops?]

Quine and Peikoff

It is now "conventional wisdom" over there in the hallowed halls of Analytic Philosophy (like there's something in Analytic Philosophy that isn't "conventional wisdom"?) that Harvard's Willard van Orman Quine was probably the most significant philosopher of the last half of the 20th century. This is due more to "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) than any other Quine article, and it is that very article where the traditional analytic-synthetic distinction comes under attack. It also happens that Leonard Peikoff wrote an article attacking the distinction, "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy," (1967) in The Objectivist, which was under the editorship and squarely under the philosophical guidance of Ayn Rand. The basic Objectivist package-deal here - a good package deal, as it happens - is Ayn Rand's theory of concepts and Peikoff's essay on the analytic-synthetic distinction. If Rand and Peikoff basically do the same substantive work that Quine did, then they deserve every bit a spot up there among the most significant philosophers of the century.

I've read Peikoff and Rand and understand their arguments quite clearly. I've tried to read Quine and gave up trying to understand after a few pages. Here lies the fundamental difference between Objectivism and Analytic Philosophy. The practitioners' brains are simply wired/habituated to think, argue, and write differently. Academic philosophy journal articles excel in being highly technical and obscurantist. I think the model promotes a certain kind of elitism that essentially cuts off a lot of professional philosophers from rabble out there the Ayn Rand-types would appeal to. So the academic "conventional wisdom" is that it's hard to take Objectivism seriously unless or until its proponents put their ideas in academic peer-refereed journals - an effective device for separating the worth-taking-seriously from the "cranks."

Now that Objectivism is beginning to make notable inroads in the academic publishing realm, the infrastructure of the academic "conventional wisdom" on Rand is beginning to crumble. Further, Objectivism isn't the only philosophical movement that has leveled significant and notable criticisms against the analytic style of philosophy; Continental and Existentialist philosophy have also noted the detachment of analytic-style philosophy from the concerns of everyday people and life. The compounding factor here with Rand is that whispering she's an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism (/whisper), and the CW says that's a no-go. But then again, Rand's theory of concepts is of greater philosophical significance than her advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism, based on her own insistence on the primacy of epistemology over politics and on the nature of the rule of fundamentality applied to philosophical hierarchy.

Rand was fundamentally an advocate of a neo-Aristotelian, non-Platonized form of reason. This puts her right there in the philosophical mainstream, as Aristotle-without-Plato is just what the mainstream has been yearning for, for who-knows-how-long now. (Aristotle is the Philosopher of Common Sense, see, and the conscientious philosophers try to emulate Aristotle by taking a humpty-dumpty they were handed from their forerunners and doing their best to merge it with common sense, somehow.) So the task ahead is to translate that message into terms the philosophically inclined can appreciate and understand.

There is a criticism of ITOE by Gary Merrill posted on Usenet in the early 1990s. ("Usenet? What's that? Is that like Twitter or somethin'?") Merrill's review hones in on Rand's polemical style, which does leave something to be desired, but he does not discuss the content of Rand's theory of concepts. If one focuses on Rand's polemical style, it does become a convenient way to dismiss her as a thinker. ("If she doesn't take much care with respect to other thinkers' ideas, how much care could she take in presenting her own?" Actually, that would be a pretty lame basis for dismissing a philosopher's views. They do tend to spend a lot more time on their own views than those of others, after all. Or is that not true in the very conventional-wisdom-like world of academic philosophy?) Anyway, he then hones in on Peikoff's "Analytic-Synthetic" essay as an example of the same bad tendencies he sees in Rand, because it is evidently ignorant of the fact that Quine's essay had attacked the distinction some 15 years before. "Peikoff is dishonest or incompetent, take your pick." Now, come on. Please.

First off, the criticism may well be self-defeating, for if Peikoff did launch a pretty definitive attack on the distinction without knowledge of Quine's essay or its significance, then that indicates a great deal of originality on Peikoff's part. Second, Peikoff was in a very unique position, that of being a Ph.D. from a respectable graduate program in philosophy and of having had Ayn Rand as a long-time mentor. He has described the mental turmoil the back-and-forth between Rand's methodology and theirs put him through. Now, in the time that Peikoff was in the academy, studying the history of philosophy with focus on "the status of the law of contradiction in classical logical ontology," there's no compelling reason to think Quine's essay or its significance had become well-known in philosophy. This is the time, remember, that academic philosophy was so dominated by positivism that Yale's Brand Blanshard wrote a whole book, Reason and Analysis (1962), covering this dominant tendency. This book Peikoff most definitely would have been familiar with (having been reviewed by Branden in The Objectivist), but I don't see a reason that he should have known about Quine's essay. Best as I can tell, Quine didn't begin to attain his status until about a generation (surprise, surprise?) after "Two Dogmas" appeared, and the field had been cleared.

I just find it noteworthy that the CW-pick for "most significant philosopher since Wittgenstein" and Ayn Rand's best student both attacked the analytic-synthetic distinction. Just like I find it noteworthy that - as the academics are now beginning to discover - Ayn Rand's ethics is the best legitimate heir to Aristotle's on the contemporary field. Just like her politics is the best legitimate heir to that of "lightweights" Locke, Jefferson and Spencer.

Anyway, we know what happens if the analytic-synthetic distinction goes. That means all the pretense surrounding Immanuel Kant crumbles. (I already know it crumbles when it comes to ethics - my "area of specialization" - given the clear and immense superiority of a eudaemonistic ethics over Kant's formalism.) But if that pretense deflates, . . . then what happens to the pretense surrounding the analytic-philosophy model, of which Kant was a supreme practitioner? Maybe if Quine had written in terms non-specialists could understand, we wouldn't even be so much as wondering whether Peikoff was or should have been familiar with "Two Dogmas"?

Platonic Realism vs. Science, Evolution, Etc.

Question: How badly does Platonic Realism interfere with science, secularism, evolutionary biology, etc.?

The scientistic response to Platonic Realism (PR) is that it violates scientific principles - empirical observability and verifiability (I'll leave "falsifiability" aside for now), testability, explanatory power, and other related concepts.

It's safe to say that PR is anti-scientific because it violates a central principle of cognition as such: induction. A fully philosophically-worked-out theory of induction wasn't made possible until the 20th century; that theory itself, of course, would have to be inductively-based. Induction is axiomatic-level; to try to deny it is to reaffirm it. Plato's Realism by its very nature is not inductively-based, but pure floating abstraction in the most applicable and fitting sense. By consequence it has no explanatory power (philosophically, this irresolvable problem is stated in such terms as "problem of partaking," a nice precursor to Cartesian "mind-body problem" given the basic principle involved: the commonsense-impossible "interaction" between the supernatural and the natural). By being an intrinsically floating theory, it cannot be reduced to the perceptual, hence the reason there is no testability, observability, or verifiability.

The question that initially occurred to me in the context of this thread was whether PR is empirically false given the established theory of evolution. The question came to mind because in evolution there are no Eternal Forms, but always transitional forms, and that the form of Man (in scientific terms: human DNA) was not actualized until some point in time, which means the form of Man is contingent, finite, etc. I'm guessing - without having given the matter much thought at all yet - that there is a proposed workaround of some sort to shelter PR from this particular refutation. After all, we might simply say that it is arbitrary, referencing beings entirely beyond the realm of the empirical, making it empirically unverifiable as well as unfalsifiable.

And adept advocate of PR might say that its not being "empirical" is not a philosophical problem, and that philosophy needn't be beholden to science (rather than vice versa). But the more adept philosopher than that, will say that PR is nonetheless arbtirary and fails to be inductive.

Aristotle is in a weird limbo-area on all this. His philosophical method was admirably inductive, but he was still limited by his own variant of Plato's Realism, also known as Moderate Realism. The first, first question I asked myself in the context of this thread was, "What was holding Aristotle back from positing what Darwin did over 2,000 years later? Was he lacking in the relevant empirical observations?" (I'll note here that Ayn Rand did not given an opinion on the theory of evolution when the subject came up. My best guess is that she did not regard herself as someone in a position - such as that of a biologist - to render a verdict on the matter. However, biology was one of Aristotle's chief areas of focus.) The supposed positing of the seed of evolutionary theory would be based on a straightforward observation of similarity between man and very similar animals - it might well have to involve higher primates. But if Form is thought to be eternal and unchanging, then the very notion of humans and other primates having a common ancestor might not even occur.

I'll just note in passing that PR as well as Moderate (Aristotelian-Thomistic) Realism is all-too-convenient cover for creationist views about our origins. Indeed, the notion of there being such a thing as Eternal Form, absent a Creator, is weird, to say the least, and probably incoherent. Aquinas performed a most understandable integration in his context. Let not this inference stand in place of the other (cosmological and ontological) arguments for God's existence, however.

The very problems stated here are the main reason scientists have basically cast off philosophy as useless to their field. Post-Aquinas and the Scholastics - with Bacon and others - modern science, called "natural philosophy" at the time, took on its own form independent of philosophy. At the same time, it has also had remarkable practical success - way more success than the humanities have had, in the meantime. (The Humanities are so screwed up that there may well have been regression since that time.) Some (understandably ignorant) scientists have used this track record of comparative progress as a victory cry for science and a reason to dismiss philosophy.

Here's what happened with the development of science: Well, first, there was Aquinas bringing Aristotle back into the fold, bringing with him a revival of this-worldly concerns. This led to the Renaissance and to the scientific revolution. Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, however, would have been of limited use, at best, in formulating the basic methods of the natural sciences. Now, simply as a matter of practical necessity, rational principles of natural philosophy had to be discovered and formulated - and they were. The basic methodological principle? Induction.

Induction is the basic method of learning and cognition. It involves a painstaking process of organizing sensory observations into a coherent generalizable whole, in which later observations and theories build upon the earlier ones. Einstein, for instance, had the same knowledge-base Newton had to work with, and then some. So in some important, crucial and relevant sense, Einstein's theories did not contradict Newton's. Newton wasn't all of a sudden overturned and repudiated; Newton was working from a more limited base of knowledge, is all.

This point might not matter much to the practical scientist - their working methods get results, and that's mainly what matters to them - but it does indicate a proper epistemological approach. Theories can turn out to be wrong; observations cannot; the role of epistemology is to determine what conclusions and theories are warranted given the knowledge-base, such that later conclusions do not contradict earlier ones. (Philosophy's role is to explain in underlying terms how it is that induction is practical; it has something to do with these things called identity and causation, concepts pretty darn well undermined by Pragmatism and plenty other bastardizations of inductivist method to come out of analytic philosophy in the last century-plus. Thanks a lot, Kant.)

The reason that science made leaps and bounds over philosophy in the last few hundred years is that science was based on induction, while philosophy was not. Philosophy, at the hands of Descartes and the rest, floundered; these thinkers failed to identify at root the principles of induction as applied to all areas, including philosophy itself. Their basic anti-inductive psycho-epistemological paradigm, emulated en masse by philosophers to this very day? Rationalism. (And a heaping dose of social metaphysics thrown in for good measure.) That paradigm, however, is about to change, thank Rand.

(Note: I write this without yet having read Harriman's The Logical Leap.)