Today I learned (from an Egyptian Students’ Association poster – apparently verified here) that the Library of Alexandria (the current one, obviously) houses the sole backup copy of the Internet Archive.
Why yes, said the first little pig, I’m going to rebuild my house, and I’m using all straw again.
I finally paid out the drakhmas to get the proceedings (both print and electronic, so over $100 total) of the Athens conference I went to in 2008. Here’s my contribution: “Thrasymachus and the Relational Conception of Authority” (in Patricia Hanna, ed., An Anthology of Philosophical Studies, vol. 3 (Athens: Athens Institute for Education and Research, 2009), pp. 27-36).
And here’s the abstract:
Thrasymachus defines justice as the interest of the stronger/rulers. Hence one might expect him to hold that when the stronger/rulers act in their own interest, they are being just. Yet Thrasymachus says just the opposite – that when the stronger/rulers act in their own interest, they are being unjust. This apparent inconsistency is to be explained by Thrasymachus’s having a relational conception of the notion of stronger/ruler; to act in the interest of the stronger/ruler is to act in the interest of someone stronger-than-oneself, of a ruler-over-oneself. Hence when a subject acts to benefit the ruler, he acts justly, by putting a superior’s interests before his own; but when the ruler acts in his own interest, he acts unjustly, since he pursues his own interests and defers to no superior.
This is something I think almost everyone who teaches Plato’s Republic gets wrong.
Sheldon has a nice post on why proper individualism is not atomistic – wherein he cites Aristotle, Spencer, and … me!
In related news, I’ve argued elsewhere that it is the least atomistic forms of individualism that have the strongest claim to be called radical individualism.
The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies now has online archives. Here, selfishly (appropriately), is a list of links to my own JARS articles over the past decade:
The Benefits and Hazards of Dialectical Libertarianism (2.2, Spring 2001)
Keeping Context In Context: The Limits of Dialectics (3.2, Spring 2002)
Praxeology: Who Needs It (6.2, Spring 2005)
Reference and Necessity: A Rand-Kripke Synthesis? (7.1, Fall 2005)
A Beauty Contest For Dichotomies: Browne’s Terminological Revolutions (8.1, Fall 2006)
Interpreting Plato’s Dialogues: Aristotle versus Seddon (10.1, Fall 2008)
Most of those were my side of debates with other people, so you should probably go read their side too. Plus lots of other good stuff. Here.
No commentary seems adequate, so I’ll just post the thing:
I forget whether I’ve announced this previously, but my 2000 monograph Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand – currently running, insanely, from between $199.99 to $1115.92 on Amazon – a) will soon be reprinted by the Atlas Society, presumably once more in the $15-20 range; and b) in the meantime is available online for free here. (The orientation of the pages makes it tough to read online, though. But there’s probably some fix for that. Or you can kill a tree and print it out. I have no idea why it says “Ashgate,” which is the publisher of my anarchism/minarchism anthology, but not of this book.)
Here’s another version, this time with the orientation correct. (CHT bile.)