I’ve written before about the 1979 Starlog article “The Science Fiction of Ayn Rand” that introduced me to Ayn Rand – and thereby, ultimately, to philosophy in general, and Aristoteleanism and libertarianism in particular. So, one of the defining moments of my life, really.
Anyway, the first page of the article is now online as an image file here, including the (not especially good) painting of John Galt by the then-less-famous Boris Vallejo; and the rest of the article can be found in ASCII form here.
It all started here, folks.
Not too sure where else to ask these questions. I hope here works (since this post is about the origins of AAE and my question is about several posts from AAE’s first year (not counting In a Blog’s Stead)).
I argued a couple days ago with a law professor/Christian author who claims atheism and/or darwinism is incompatible with even minimalist forms of moral realism, moral universalism, or even truth in general.
I argued on two fronts (one metaphysical, one not (I hope)): (1) Nagel’s panpsychism is an example of an atheism that rejects materialist darwinism and can hold that propositions have truth-value. (2) Aristotle’s ethics doesn’t depend on any metaphysics to advance virtuous-activity-accompanied-by-a-sense-of-pleasantness as the ultimate goal of human life, and therefore makes it false that only a theistic metaphysics can ground morality (more broadly: that it takes any metaphysics to ground morality). On the second point I received some pushback.
I went back to the compelling 5 part saga with Mr. Vallier. Here are my questions: (1) Can hylomorphism be viewed properly as an epistemic position (or maybe just a logical position) rather than a metaphysical or ontological position, regardless of what Aristotle calls it? I mean, it seems that hylomorphism is just what follows from the distinction between constitutive conditions and enabling conditions when applied to our notions of experience. (2) Does Eudaimonia as man’s telos require hylomorphism to be true or any metaphysics to be true? (3) Was Mr. Vallier ever able to give up the ghost in the machine?