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The Tragic Rand

By on October 16, 2009 7

Will Wilkinson has a good anti-conflationist piece on Rand, here. (CHT Charles Johnson.) I posted the following quibble:

Excellent piece (and on related points see also my posts Ayn Rand’s Left-Libertarian Legacy and Ayn Rand and the Capitalist Class); but I think I disagree with you about the benevolent-universe premise; when she says that success is metaphysically normal, I don’t think she means this to entail that success (or even the possibility of success) is statistically normal. Admittedly I think she perhaps sometimes slides from the former to the latter in her later writings (as in her changing views on charity); but if so, that was a mistaken inference and doesn’t impugn the principle itself. By analogy (to make a Michael Thompson-y point): even if some plague caused most lions to be born with three legs, it would still be true that the lion is a four-legged animal or that being four-legged is normal for lions.

The Labyrinth of Fate, With Coffee

By on October 6, 2009 4
Puppets in Hell

Puppets in Hell

I’m back from the APS – which was fun, as usual.

For those in the Auburn area, there’ll be another session of caffeinated philosophy tomorrow at 5:00 at the Gnu’s Room (next to Amsterdam Café, near the corner of Gay and Samford). This time I’ll be part of a roundtable discussing free will; check out the poster here.

Milton in Paradise Lost describes the fallen angels in Hell enjoying a similar discussion:

Others apart sat on a hill retir’d,
In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute;
And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.

But Milton’s fallen angels didn’t have the benefit of the Gnu’s Room’s excellent coffee, so I’m sure we’ll get it all sorted out.

Justice As Squareness

By on September 25, 2009 42

The Pythagoreans held that “justice is a square number.” There’s dispute about what this meant. But just in case I ever decide to write about it, I hereby lay claim to first formulation (at least I can’t find precedent on the internet) of the ideal title for any such discussion: “Justice As Squareness.”

(Note: by laying claim I don’t mean, of course, forbidding anyone else to use it. I just mean that if I do eventually decide to use it, and someone else has used it in the meantime, they won’t be able to claim that I swiped it from them.)

(Note deux: and for those wondering why this title is ideal – “Justice As Fairness” is the title or partial title of four (well, three and a half) different works by John Rawls, as well as a phrase used frequently throughout, and made famous by, his entire œuvre.)

The Perils of Low Time-Preference

By on September 24, 2009 17

Ayn Rand and the World She Made

Anne Heller’s new bio Ayn Rand and the World She Made comes out next month, but Amazon has already posted the first chapter, and it looks pretty interesting. If you think that after reading Barbara Branden and Chris Sciabarra there’s nothing new to learn about Rand’s early years, think again.

I was especially struck by this passage:

When Rand was five or so, she recalled, her mother came into the children’s playroom and found the floor littered with toys. She announced to Rand and Rand’s two-and-a-half-year-old sister, Natasha, that they would have to choose some of their toys to put away and some to keep and play with now; in a year, she told them, they could trade the toys they had kept for those they had put away.

Natasha held on to the toys she liked best, but Rand, imagining the pleasure she would get from having her favorite toys returned to her later, handed over her best-loved playthings, including a painted mechanical wind-up chicken she could describe vividly fifty years later.

When the time came to make the swap and Rand asked for her toys back, her mother looked amused, Rand recalled. Anna explained that she had given everything to an orphanage, on the premise that if her daughters had really wanted their toys they wouldn’t have relinquished them in the first place.

Yup, her mother couldn’t have done better if she was deliberately trying to create Ayn Rand.

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