I’m happy to announce that I’ve joined the Advisory Board of the regenerated Institute for Objectivist Studies (about which I’ve previously blogged).
Tag Archives | Unethical Philosophy
Hey, Free Month
The deadline for submissions to the Alabama Philosophical Society’s undergraduate essay contest has been extended to September 1st, to make it easier for faculty to get the word out to promising candidates. The deadline for the regular program remains unchanged: August 2nd. The meeting is October 11-12, in Pensacola. Details here.
IOS Regenerates!
So, there is a new good thing in the world.
Back in 1990, in the wake of the Peikoff-Kelley split and Truth and Toleration, David Kelley founded the Institute for Objectivist Studies as an alternative to the rigidly dogmatic Ayn Rand Institute. (I assume I don’t have to explain to readers of this blog what the Peikoff-Kelley split was or why Kelley’s side was right; but I’ll be happy to do so if anyone asks.)
The Institute for Objectivist Studies changed its name to “Objectivist Center” in 1999, and then – as its focus shifted from academics to popular advocacy – to “Atlas Society” in 2006. (Strictly speaking, both the Objectivist Center and the Atlas Society date from 1999, with the latter beginning as a special project of the former, and in 2006 the two simply switched roles like substance and property in the Furth-Gill model of elemental change. Yes, there will be a test on this later.)
Now in 2013 my old friends Irfan Khawaja and Carrie-Ann Biondi (who also edit Reason Papers), have started up, with Kelley’s blessing (but no official affiliation), a new, more academically oriented outfit with the old name of Institute for Objectivist Studies, to uphold the banner of responsible Rand scholarship against the forces of ARIanism. Website here; blog here.
Congratulations and good luck to Irfan and Carrie-Ann! I won’t wish confusion to their enemies, because that’s the problem already.
A Pattern of Insubordinate Behaviour
I saw Oblivion the other night, like a great ring of pure and endless light …. It was pretty good, though the metaphysical issue was handled somewhat carelessly – and I could have done without the opening narration, which tells us nothing we can’t figure out as we go along if we’re paying attention.
Plus no one said the line!
Pensacola: The Choice of a New Generation
The 2013 meeting of the Alabama Philosophical Society will be October 11-12 in Pensacola. Paper submission deadline: August 2. Details here.
Sympathy for the Devil?
A question that Christian children sometimes (and Christian adults too seldom) ask is whether, if they should pray for their enemies, that means that they should pray for Satan – i.e., pray for Satan’s eventual reformation and redemption.
The traditional answer is that angels’ mode of existence, between time and eternity, is such that their choices do not take place in successive sequence but rather permeate their entire existence and so are irrevocable; hence an angel who chooses sin has no possibility of redemption, meaning that praying for Satan would be pointless.
But what exactly is this mode (“aeveternity”) intermediate between time and eternity supposed to be? Aquinas reviews several accounts of aeveternity and proposes his own. The problem is that, perhaps apart from one option that Aquinas dismisses as incoherent, none of the accounts seems incompatible with angels’ choices being revocable. In any case, if one can petition God, whose choices are supposed to be timeless – and if Catholics petition saints, whose choices are supposed to be aeviternal – then apparently trying to influence the choices of nontemporal agents is kosher, so why should Satan’s nontemporal character be a bar to hoping for him to mend his ways?
This is a purely hypothetical debate for me, since I don’t believe in Satan (nor in the coherence of a timeless agent’s interacting with temporal events, for that matter), but it’s interesting nonetheless. (I implicitly took a side in a story I wrote in high school.)