People don't like her because they disagree with her conclusions and what they assume are her methods. In order to understand her methods you must understand her epistemology. This requires reading her nonfiction systematically (and Peikoff's). Here's a Reddit reaction to Rand's response to a letter: http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1reias/til_th... especially see this response: http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1reias/til_th... She's completely misunderstood and misrepresented. There are countless examples of this. In politics, she's seen as the epitome of all…
This makes me happy too! I went to conferences back in the early 90's and they were a lot of fun, watershed moment in my life. I hope you have a great time, you'll meet a lot of interesting and good people. I remember our exchange back in August, I'm glad you followed up on it and it sounds like you are really learning. I've been studying Rand for over 25 years and I recently reread PWNI and learned some new things and I am amazed at her insight. Regarding my comment on the article, it was really just an "excited utterance" when I realized that the "shut up and calculate" and "bury the…
I started a course in philosophy during my first year of university. I studied CS (in the UK, where you don't typically go far outside your major) but I'd always been curious about the humanities and thought it worthwhile to learn about all fields of knowledge. I'd also read about philosophy for laymen books as a teenager. In the first lecture, I remember being surprised at how rational and logical the lecturer was. However, in the second lecture, we started getting into the details of different theories of meta-ethics. I was interested in the topic, but the presentation was exactly as you…
There are two fundamental epistemological issues with respect to reason. i) how do we form concepts and what (in reality) do they refer to and ii) how do we reason from specific observations to general conclusions and validate our conclusions (i.e. not deduction but induction). Both of these problems were known (and unsolved) by the Greeks. Ayn Rand (in my judgment) solved the first problem, the problem of universals. How do we form concepts (classes) and how are they connected to the actual things subsumed by the concept. Her answer was that concepts are formed on the principle of…
I think distinction should be made between academic tradition of philosophy and personal need/practice of philosophy. My favorite essay on this topic is https://courses.aynrand.org/works/philosophy-who-needs-it/ . It is based on a lecture given by Ayn Rand to the graduating class of West Point Military Academy in March 1974. Some people will be alarmed by the name, Ayn Rand, so I will post few snippets and then you can choose to ignore or read the ~10 minutes essay. The assignment I gave myself for tonight is not to sell you on MY philosophy, but on philosophy as such. The best way to…
I was a fanatical Ayn Rand devotee at the age of 17. I highly recommend Ayn Rand to intellectually inclined, socially outcast 17 year old boys who enjoy reading about rough sex, if only because she is less obscure than Nietzsche. ("Less obscure" being a relative term--Rand took great liberties in redefining everyday words like "selfishness", "altruism", "mysticism", "sacrifice", and so forth, quite possibly without realizing it. As confusing as that may be, it's possible to learn and apply Rand's definitions of these words to make sense of her. Interpreting Nietzsche is a much higher order of…
With regards to rationality is good I was responding to that not claiming that, please read the thread. In this case it is you that needs to properly read my reply. That's the second time you've misread my post (the first was the [insert Objectivism here] bit). I want philosophy to help guide me through life, yeah. Whereas you want philosophy for, um, what exactly? I feel like there's a lot of empty rhetoric in your responses. First you just keep asserting that individuality and certainty are impossible. You think you've made the case for this by mentioning the words 'context' and 'vacuum'…
To summarize, the reviewer likes Ayn Rand and her work but thinks the author's life showed a huge capacity for self-deception because: a) as a kid in Russia, she was really into novels b) she had a higher opinion of the man she loved than others did c) she moved from a ranch in California to NYC, and was convinced this was best for her actor-husband d) she took amphetamines (under doctor's prescription) e) was publicly bitter about a perceived betrayal by another lover f) claimed no philosophical debt except to Aristotle (she has received no scholarly attention by the students/disciples of…
I think learning it all on your own is not efficient even for a genius. At the very least (assuming you are a genius) you should do a double major in Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering and a minor in philosophy at a mid- or top-tier university. EE and ME are the practical expression of the foundation of classical physics. Einstein's early work was related to integrating these two fields. In short (I am a bit sketchy on the exact details since it has been a while), before Einstein there was an odd inconsistency in Maxwell's equations whereby the results differed if the magnets…
I'm with you. "It's all just chemistry" is sufficient for me for most things, but I worry a lot more about epistemology, which is why I have spent some time studying it. Until recently, there were two basic camps on "how we know stuff." The Rationalists and the Empiricists. The Rationalists thought that knowledge was came from mental abstractions, not from reality. For example, Plato believed that we could all access the "ideal" world of "forms" by just introspecting. The medieval scholastic philosophers tended to be very rationalistic - they made arguments about abstractions not connected…