The Desolation of Philosophy

Why yes, that title is a reference to Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy. This here's a Reality Check, with special emphasis on Philosophy Fail.

• So this one blog called "Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature" is pretty good at pointing out flaws in her writing, but unfortunately, it usually does it from a Hume/Popper empiricist standpoint—which is sorta like refuting Louis Farrakhan by citing Mein Kampf.
  
  See, empiricism is actually worse than Objectivism. Objectivism, at least, is not self-refuting; Rand just makes the same error as Maimonides, and identifies Being with Formal Part ("Existence is Identity", in her formulation).
  
  Empiricism says truth can only be attained from science or math...which statement is not attainable from science or math. For example, Hume, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

  If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

  Unfortunately, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding contains no abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number, nor experimental reasoning concerning fact and existence. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
• Huh, the part in that book, about the missing shade of blue, is a glimmer of intelligence—despite his best efforts to evade Aristotle ("school metaphysics"), Hume is forced to fall back upon abstraction. Only he doesn't know it, and doesn't realize he's just refuted himself.
• Karl Popper, likewise, when he said all attempts to reason about ethics are really just rationalizing your preferences? Kinda looks silly when you realize that, apart from a few works on epistemology, every effing thing he ever wrote is about ethics, specifically social ethics.
  
  Hey Karl: an Open Society is just your preference; you—by your own admission—can offer me no rational basis that I, too, should prefer it.
• Speaking of, you know how people claim you can't derive an "ought" from an "is"? Where the hell have they been? See, they're right that you can only derive from axioms, which must either be granted or self-evident. But Adler found a self-evident proposition that contains an "ought": "We ought to do that which is really good for us." That proposition is self-evident, since contradicting it is nonsense—neither "We ought not to do that which is really good for us" nor "We ought to do that which is really not good for us" is a tenable position. Anyone who thinks he's asserting either will be found, on examination, to actually be asserting something like "We ought to do something which appears bad for us, but is pleasurable...and therefore is really good for us", or "We ought not to do something good for us, because we don't deserve it...and therefore it is not really good for us."
  
  Pretty cool, huh?
  
  Now, of course, the question becomes "What is really good for us?", but that, if you're accustomed to the uncertainty inherent in thinking about virtually everything, is a much easier question to answer.
• Apparently Ayn Rand thought that words without definitions aren't words, but animal noises. Which is funny, since "existence" is a word without a definition. No, seriously, there are a number of undefinable words in philosophy: "one", "existence", "not", "other"...basically all the really important words.
  
  But let's just remember that her degree was in Social Pedagogy. That is, the bastard child of education and social work.
• Another of her silly little soundbites is, "To be is to be something." That's her identifying form with being. But there's another problem with it. Namely, that sounds pretty smart in English (which uses the same word for the copula as for the existential expletive), but it sorta breaks down in any language that doesn't. I mean, in German, that'd be "dasein ist zu etwas sein"; in French it'd be "y avoir est être quelque chose". Even better, in Korean, it'd be something like "ittdareul mu-eon-ga ida io" (we both know Ayn Rand would use haoche in Korean). Though one can construct a copula in Korean with "ittda", it's not the standard way of doing it—making it much more obvious she's trying to construct a metaphysical argument on the basis of wordplay.
  
  Nevertheless she's not entirely wrong. Formal part, after all, is any existent thing's connection to being (though, indeed, she has it backwards—a thing is only a thing at all because it exists). This is what Christians mean when they say one's soul belongs to God; it's also what Christians mean when they say God is the creator (since, as Existence itself, he's the cause of existence). Notice that I said God causes existence, not coming-into-being. That's a distinction a lot of people don't get, and the reason a lot of Westerners think they're being put on when Hindus say they believe their cyclical cosmos nevertheless is a creation by God.
• So another thing she says is that civilization consists in the maximization of the individual. Now she was a raving, though probably unconscious, racist, so of course she meant Western civilization (thus leaving China and India out of the reckoning): but she's wrong. The Romans always beat the Germans because the Germans fought for individual glory rather than as a unit. Now, if for "civilization" you read "Christendom's contribution to civilization" and for "consists in" you read "includes, along with little things like inventing science", the statement is correct, but since she also hated Christians you can bet she wouldn't say that.
  
  She also said that the lives of savages are wholly dominated by the tribe. Now, to me, that's funny: because there is no word for tribe in any of the four Native American languages I'm acquainted with, and that's obviously the sort of people she had in mind. They've got clans, but that only determines things like inheritance, incest avoidance, and which prayers you do. Most Native American cultures (get this) aren't collectivist enough to have developed the concept of "tribe"—the closest they get is "people who talk the same language as us". Any of that group, though, who aren't your neighbors—any of them whose affairs are not directly concerned with yours, in other words—have no claims on you beyond non-hostility.
  
  The real story is, of course, that, except for Christendom, the more complex a society is, the closer it is to pure collectivism—the reason being that Nash Equilibrium thing I mentioned. Greeks and Romans were probably fairly hard socialist/light communist, except the Spartans, who made Stalin look like Barry Goldwater. The Chinese and Indians, on average throughout their histories, are about as collectivist as Mussolini or European socialism—less collectivist than the Greco-Romans, but that's because of the ameliorating influence of Buddhism. It gets fun in the Americas, since you can compare peoples in one region, like the Navajo to the Hopi (the former are far more individualistic than the latter...and had a much lower level of organization and technology at contact), and also within one language group (Comanche, Hopi, Aztec, in ascending order both of cultural development and collectivism).
• Oh, hey, lots of people, not all of them Objectivists, define materialism as the denial of the reality of mind. Only, no, it's entirely possible for a materialist to believe there's such a thing as mind (though it would have to have strange quantum characteristics to resolve probability waveforms).
  
  A materialist is more properly defined as one who denies the reality of natures, or identities—in Aristotelian terms they deny formal and final causes, and restrict themselves to material and efficient causes. They also usually deny the reality of "wholes" (philosophical atomism)—or sometimes the reality of collectives (most simplistic individualism is a form of atomism). The smartest of them rapidly cease to be materialists, since that denial of wholes forces them into an infinite regress whose only escape is Buddhist non-duality.