Metaphysics and Epistemology | David Gordon

Iran is best known for her novels Atlas Shrugged in The Fountainhead other works fiction that she wrote that defend the system of laissez-faire capitalism in in her work she shows that the businessmen are great creators they're the ones who promote economic growth prosperity and civilization and it's the government and who interferes with them and tries to block them and their people she turned second graders who don't envy who don't like the business creators and envy them and try to reduce everything to their own level and they interfere with the creations of the great businessmen of course John Galt is the best-known of these heroes and she's also known which very much associated with this praise for lessee for camp wasn't she's noted for her philosophy of ethical egoism she wrote a collection of essays called the virtue of selfishness now when in ordinary language selfishness is usually a bad word most people who say someone is selfish it means something like when all the district tray of desserts is set outer plate of cookies a person will grab all of them for himself and not leave any for other people she didn't mean when she was praising selfishness to be defending selfishness in that sense it wasn't that she thought people should behave in a boorish way however so she can't it isn't that she has the point of view of a character in one of PG Woodhouse's novel who says to the famous Butler Jeeves whenever anything comes up I always ask myself one question what's in it for me it isn't that isn't her point of view but on she's talking about egoism in the sentence of each person should regulate his life as to what will advance his own well-being what will preserve his own life however her view of ethics is one very much at variance with many things at least most people believe in ordinary morality for example she holds that under less a fair capitalism people who would not be able to live on their own efforts a disabled people or people who were mental problems would receive private charity and there be probably it would be much more prosperous there'd be much more scope for private charity but she doesn't regard charitable giving even this voluntary kind as anything particularly ethically mandated or even praiseworthy she just thinks people would do it since we tend to sympathize with one another but her views are here quite a variance with what at least most people tend to believe regardless of when they what they put in practice but and they say she's best known for this philosophy of ethical egoism and her defense of capitalism in her novels but this these views aren't what she regarded as the most philosophically fundamental she thought these views defend the captive capitalism and ethical egoism were consequences of more fundamental principles and what did she have in mind here underlying principle of her philosophy his best grasp if we look at the name of her philosophy objectivism what did she mean when she called philosophy objectivism by this name she meant that philosophy is concerned with the accurate grasp of existence with grasping reality now at first this might seem an odd principle to make your foundational principle not in the sense that we shouldn't try to grasp reality but on the contrary it seems odd in the sense that who aside from a few skeptics would deny that what we're trying to do in philosophy and all our intellectual activities is to grasp the truth who would would we find people who say well I'm not interested in what reality is or what's true what I just care about my own fantasy that would seem uncertain at any rate to be a strange position but ran didn't see matters this way at all in her view that she sees the entire history of philosophy as a battle between those philosophers would give primacy to existence and those who defend what she calls the primacy of consciousness now in order to see how her for you is plausible how this makes sense we have to understand what she means by existence and she speaks of the primacy of existence and what she meant was primary existence was primarily the physical world the world that's out there she didn't think that when people are born we immediately have a concept of the physical world in contrast with the mind but we do we did we do immediately have the notion of something out there something that's fixed something that is not subject to alteration just by thinking about it and she didn't deny that there was such a thing as consciousness and the contrary she affirmed it but she thought that consciousness was not primary when we say I say I'm thinking I'm thinking of something I my thought is directed outward toward reality if I said I'm thinking and you asked me what are you thinking about it wouldn't make sense to say well I'm not thinking of anything I'm just thinking so what Rann held is that in thinking I'm thinking of something I haven't there's an object to my thought and the object would be something in the external world something outside of my thought certainly if I said I'm seeing something another mental act I have to be seeing something that's out there wouldn't make sense say I'm just seeing I'm not seeing anything I'm just seeing things you might think but what about can't we see or think about images in our mind rather than an external object but in her you images or mental content of similar sort would be secondary they could only come an image could only come from something in the external world so the what's there externally in the world primary so she thought then to sum up that the mental is not primary the mental exists but it's directed outward and it also the men the mind is not composed of some separate spiritual substance it isn't why some people are called dualist satyrs both matter and mind she didn't think that the mind was some sort of independently existing entity that was composed of a different substance different type of ontological substance from the rest of reality she thought there were minds but they're not composed of some sort of mental substance so given these views she rejected idealism which is the philosophical doctrine that held by Bishop George Berkeley in the 18th century among other that only mind exists Berkeley Hill there was no such thing as matter there were just ideas and acts of thought so she rejected that and she also rejects the notion of a separately existing realm of universals and understand what her view is here we have to get what is a universal well suppose I say I'm looking at Bank ins considered various red objects I'm looking at a red pencil or red wall a red brick I can say what does do all these objects have in common the property the redness you can say that's like an adjective redness now there are some philosophers who held that aside from these individual entities that have the redness redness itself exists apart from these entities we can talk of the read itself not just read things and she rejected that review she said there no independently existing universals we find just properties are held in objects now given this way of looking at things it's not surprising that she condemned Plato it was the great Greek philosopher because he held one of his primary doctors his famous theory of forms where he accepted this view that universals exist separately from the various entities that have them and he not only accepted independent universals in the sense of independently existing properties he thought although his view varies at various times in his dialogues that all entities were really copies of some sort of other world that consisted of ideal properties or ideal object so there was the we could say existing tables kind of a table I can see in front of me right now are really just a copy of the ideal or perfect table and these in turn these forms or universals were unified in some kind of system and there was a supreme form Universal of form of the good that really was the ultimate principle underlying the set of forms so Rand rejected that view and she held that when Plato advanced it he was really succumbing to irrationalism he was rejecting reason because to her reason is something that must work from from concepts that we obtain through the sentences but Plato claimed that we could have a direct knowledge not a sensory censoring knowledge but had direct knowledge of the world of these universals that we wouldn't grassroot sensory means so she regards this as a type of irrational ism and she felt that the Plato had inaugurated a whole tradition of philosophy that a rationalism in this kind and that this was it had serious effects on the whole subsequent history of philosophy the great mathematician philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in his process in reality 1929 said the history of philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato so if you accept that account then rands view would have a consequence that a great deal of a history of philosophy is wrong now what I'm trying to do now is just give you an overview of rands entire system and then we're going to concentrate in some of the lecture day a bit more on the metaphysics and epistemology I should say what I'm trying to do now is just give you an overview of her now Plato's main enemy and in rands view the source of the good tradition in philosophy which is supposed to this bad platonic irrationalist view was Aristotle although there residues of Platonism in Aristotle's thought he rejected the independently existing world of forms he thought universals just exist in objects so aerosol will say go back to our earlier example of the red pencil the red brick the red wall he would say well there are these objects that hat are red but there's no such thing as redness that exists apart from these objects Iran's universal so we'll see later isn't the same as aerosol but she thought this was definitely a step in the right direction now one further very important point about rands thought is as you will have gathered already from my mentioning that she condemned Plato for mysticism she regarded religion and belief in God very negatively her philosophy is very firmly based or has was one of those key principles atheism a rejection of existence of God and why does she reject God well you can see already why she would be led to this position for what I said about the primacy of existence in the sense taking the physical world as primary or more to consciousness now if God exists in at least God is taken in the traditional said God is the creator there's a spiritual substance who created the world as we Genesis 1:1 in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth so if you accept belief in God in this way you would be saying that the existence the world that it's given to us in the senses the physical world depends on consciousness namely God's consciousness and this violates the fundamental principle of her system now despite her atheism though she takes it surprisingly favorable view of st. Thomas Aquinas the great medieval philosophy the great usually considered the greatest philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church it this is rising at first because Aquinas not only believed in God he thought that he could show he could prove by reason that God exists now of course she rejected Aquinas proofs for existence of God but she thought that Aquinas had developed the tradition of Aristotle much further he put in certain of his works such as work on on on the emotions and on on various other topics he had extended Aristotle's thought and in reviving Aristotle he broke with the Platonism of the earlier Middle Ages now there's some authorities on Aquinas who think that he quite was pretty much retained much of platonism that she didn't accept that interpretation and randon the philosophers in her her tradition or her followers such as Leonard Peikoff told the viewer that this revived Aristotelian ISM of Aquinas led to the Italian Renaissance that the italian renaissance was fundamentally Aristotelian this is a very controversial view there historians such as ernst Aesir great a german history philosophy you thought the italian renaissance was primarily platonic but she didn't accept that view and there are other historians such as paul oscar chris teller who hold the same view she did that Aristotelian ISM was prop was very important in the Renaissance now another philosopher who came in in the in the in this 16th or 17th century that she thinks very much is a bad guy was Descartes Rene Descartes the founder of so called Cartesian tradition Cartesian is based on de cartes name so what what why did she view Descartes as an enemy you seen in her history philosophy is really a struggle between good guys and bad guys you know she was an excellent novelist and she knew how to tell a good story so she can make the history of philosophy seemed to be very much into a battle of good and bad people so she makes it very interesting now Descartes in his thinking said he wanted things meditation said he wanted to try to doubt anything that could possibly be doubted so after this method of doubt was was applied what was he les left with while his own thinking he said he can't doubt that he thinks and if he's thinking then he exists so he can't doubt that he exists now Rand rejected this starting point not of course because she doubted the people thought or existed but she said if this is what her followers called an inside out philosophy you're starting with your own consciousness or thinking and then saying how can I proceed from that to prove the existence in the external world so from her point of view this is the wrong way to go what your spouse is do is start with of the world out there and that's primary existence exists remembers the fundamental slow so we don't start with trying to think of what's in our conscious for go from what's in our consciousness to what's really out there we now come to the main villain in the entire history of philosophy in this in her view was Immanuel Kant now why did she have such a negative view of Cohn well as she interpreted conned Kant thought that we don't perceive reality as it is as it is in itself on the contrary the mind has a certain set of categories that it uses to construct reality so what worse we perceive is what Kant called the phenomenal world the world as it appears to us in rands view this amounts to saying that the mind makes up reality so this is worse and Descartes because they cart in her view was just saying how do we we're starting with the mind how do we get from the mind to the real world Kant was safe a mind makes up the real world so this in her view is much worse and she thinks of Conte and his successors such as Hegel and Nietzsche is inaugurating modern irrationalism that they had the view that really the mind is making up the world and one of the fundamental points in rands entire thought is that ideas about metaphysics a study of what the ultimate foundations of existence and epistemology of theory not have consequences for practical affair for history really these are the metaphysical epistemology the most fundamental determinants of history so she in the work of one of her followers when in Peikoff was a literary are called omnis parallels Peikoff argues that Kant's philosophy led ultimately to the Nazis because the Nazis rejected reason and thought really they could impose their will on reality they could impose their fantasies of racial domination on reality and in rands view this ultimately stems from from a Content approach I should mention just as interesting point might find interesting when this book by pink ah first appeared I did a very critical review of it and it's got me into quite a bit of trouble with supporters of rant I'm still I rather inclined to think better the book than I did when I wrote their review although I still have problems with it but this is a view that the book you should read the book if you can because it shows how important rent the ran things ideas about metaphysics and epistemology are in their practical significance now again continuing the this overview Rand's philosophy has distinctive doctrines in epistemology as well as in metaphysics if our aim in philosophy is to grasp the world as it actually exists the real world out there according to Rand the way to do this is that the world that we have to get all our concepts by abstraction from the census so according to ran the mine begins as a blank slate in the Latin phrase that John Locke used the mind is a tabula rasa blank slate we don't have in her view innate ideas or instincts she said variance here with certain some views in modern biology and psychology but that's her view we don't have innate ideas or instincts and when we say the sentences look I perceive things say again we say before we have ideas or concepts the senses can perceive similarities and differences in things say let's go back to our example where they say we're looking at a red pencil red brick red wall and say let's imagine is but before we have the color concept we don't have the idea of red we can see these red objects probably be a very young if we don't have a color concepts yet but according to ran that we the sentences can grasp what the similarities and differences of these objects aren't the senses we'll be able to see what they have in common mainly their color and then the mind can put aside the differences and get a similarity namely the red color and then mine would get a concept of red now once you've gotten some concepts you can combine them in and get a very elaborate system of concepts and built up and very highly structured but according to her all the concepts have to really come from the senses we start with the sensory concepts if there's a concept that you have someone do you have that can't be traced ultimately census ran thinks this is a meaningless concept so all properly foreign concepts have to be abstracted from the census not necessarily immediately but you have to have some kind of you have to be able to trace them back to sense perception in her you and now also if our aim in philosophy is to respond adequately to reality this has definite consequences for ethics as well now in rands view ethics is really based on biology in this sense that man is different from other animals other animals survive by instinct there they've been built by evolution a certain way to respond in various ways to things they're likely to come across so they they know they instinctively know how to act in various situation but man remember in her view has no instincts so human beings have to rely on reason in order to survive so given this fact that we have to rely on reason in order to survive she thinks that the a what the this gives us the purpose of ethics and the standard of ethics that each person is Teague whose reason to secure his own survival as a reason being so because in we have no instincts we have to use reason order survive and this gives us the clearest ethic now if a man wants to survive he has to how he has to how can he do that well one thing he has to do in order to survive is to establish a political system based on recognition of individual rights and particularly recognition of property rights and he also has to establish a system of laissez-faire capitalism because this is the only economic system that will enable human beings to attain prosperity and promote their own survival so here her views on economics are very similar to those of literary fund Mises whom she admired she didn't like Mises philosophy all that much but she did think highly was economics and just as means does she stresses that it's through social cooperation through the free market is how human beings can attain prosperity we did we don't have to fight each other there's no basic conflicts between people but we can cooperate there's a harmony of interests among people that's promoted if we have free market and if we have a free market recognition of individual rights then in her view there's only a very limited role for government government really exists for protection and justice defense and there is it's she is just we don't have as we do today government redistribution redistribute swell government is strictly limited however she didn't accept and she explicitly rejected the view held by Murray Rothbard that defense and protection justice can be handled by the market as well she was a min arc is not an anarchist she thought that in each territory there should just be one Protection Agency she didn't favor competing private protection agencies now this is completes the overview that I want to give a Rand's philosophy and what I want to do now and will continue in the next lecture is to go into more details about rands metaphysics and epistemology and look at how sound the arguments are that she advances for her views now the fundamental principle of objective is metaphysics is the law of identity a is a and connected together with this the law of non-contradiction nothing can be both a and not a at the same time in the same respect but as I say I'm looking at a table now well the table is the table and it can't be the case that this table is both the table and not a table now that seemed perfectly straightforward but in the way these principles are understood by most modern lynch logician they're taking a purely formal sense what i mean by that is it logicians would say suppose you have some statement that has the form both a and not a then you can reject that statement it's a malformed statement it violates Locke non contradiction but log by Denby in non contradiction don't tell you much by themselves they just say they don't really tell you what the nature of the world is they just say whatever the world is it has to conform it it has these these laws are true they're purely formal statements Objectivists understand the law of identity in a much more far-reaching way and to understand their views we have to introduce some philosophical distinction some distinctions are very common in modern philosophy and here to get the Objectivist point of view the key essay to read is one by Leonard Peikoff called the analytic synthetic dichotomy if you're able to get a copy of rands book introduction to Objectivist epistemology in the second edition it's readily available in paperback I'm sorry I couldn't put it on I didn't want to put it on the reading list because it's not available online but you can find this inexpensively very easily so this book has P coughs si and I think it possible everyone should try to read this it's a very important essay to get the Objectivist view of metaphysics so philosophers often distinguish between two kinds of statements analytic and synthetic an analytic statement is one that's true just because of the concepts that which it consists in a synthetic statement is one that isn't true just because of the concepts of which it consists it's one that you would know to be true or false just by testing just from experience now example will make this distinction clear let's consider the statement all bachelors are unmarried well I don't have to go out into the world and test this I don't have to say well all bachelors so far have turned out to be unmarried but maybe there's one I'll find that is married it's part of definition of bachelor that a bachelor son marries I'm not going to find anyone that's marry there can't be married bachelors is ruled out by definition but let's contrast that with the statement bachelors tend not to live as long as married men I don't know whether that's true but if it is true it would be something we could only find out by investigation it isn't part of the meaning of the terms in that proposition that married men I mean the bachelors tend not to live as long as married men that makes that statement true there's nothing about bachelors that has anything to imply anything about how long bachelors tenants of live but I don't agree with this distinction they think there isn't a separate kind of statement that's made true just from the meaning of the terms as a pup as opposed to another kind of statement that's just learn to be true from experience they hold that there aren't any analytic statements there isn't a separate set of truths of meaning now related to the analytic synthetic distinction is another distinction between a priori and a posteriori truths not a priori truth is one that can be known just by thinking about it an a posteriori truth is one that has to be known through experience as you can see this is this distinction between a priori and a posteriori is very closely related to the previous distinction between analytic and edek and in fact some philosophers line up these two distinction exact exactly with each other they'll say all and only analytic statements are priori and all and only synthetic statements are a posteriori I take again all bachelors are unmarried is something I could find out to be true just by thinking about it but batteries tend to live not as long as married people is something I could only know to be true by investigation I couldn't know it just by thinking about it so again some philosophers line up these pair at this these two pairs of distinction exactly same way they're philosophers who don't con thought there's some propositions that are a priori you could know just by thinking about them but are synthetic or ones that are or give you knowledge of the world but isn't available just by because of the meaning of the terms in the statement so Kant thought their propositions that are not analytic they're not true just because the meaning of the term but nevertheless you could know to be true just by thinking about them so that's a very controversial for you now the objective is as you would expect reject the ah priori because they say all truths come from experience all our concepts come from experience of there aren't any priori truths without philosophies often make a third distinction and this is one between necessary and contingent troops now in this necessary truth is one that couldn't have been otherwise whereas a contingent truth is one that could have been otherwise in this distinction often but not all philosophers lines up with the other two distinctions back between analytic and synthetic and operatory a posteriori let me give you an example suppose let's go back to our now hackneyed example all bachelors are unmarried well this couldn't possibly be false we couldn't find a situation which we come across a married bachelor as long as we keep the meaning of the term this call to meaning turn Kazakh it isn't that they're in the actual world the world we're living in bachelors are unmarried but maybe there's some where it's science fiction world in which bachelors are married is just there's no possible situation no possible world in which bachelors are married so it's a necessary truth that bachelors are unmarried but suppose we take the statement I'm now giving a lecture well that seems contingent we could certainly imagine circumstances which I'm not giving this lecture II suppose I just decided I don't want to give a lecture so it's contingent I wouldn't be giving one is continuum that I'm giving the lecture you would probably expect given the way I explained how physically Objectivists reject the distinction between analytic synthetic and also reject is a priori a posteriori they would also reject necessary prophecy that's distinctly necessary contingent and they largely do but the way that they do this is surprising you would expect them to say there aren't any necessary prop and this in fact is exactly a path taken by the great 20 century philosophy philosopher WVO Quine who rejected analytic statements and also operatory statement he also said there aren't any necessary statement but the Objectivist don't take this path on the contrary they hold that aside from human choices everything else in the world is necessary so everything that exists in the world necessarily exists with all its poverty so for Objectivists all of the properties of an entity are part of its essence their necessary properties so suppose we find that light travels at approximately 186,000 miles per second then in their view it's part of the definition of life that it traveled at that speed there's no possible world in which light travels at a different speed this is a defining characteristic of light so the objectives view is that all of an object's properties hold of necessity now an object's properties include its causal property suppose we say the earth has a causal property of being able to attract certain objects to it by gravitation this is also an essential property it's one that holds of necessity so all the properties renata including its causal properties are necessary properties now the further claim they make is that nothing can come into existence without a cause something can't just pop into existence they take that to be violation of the law of identity also so we can see this if they hold these two doctrines that nothing can come into existence without a cause and that all an object's properties aren't necessary then this has a consequence well what about the ultimate constituents of the world suppose we say certain things are caused by other things then we get to things that don't have a cause but we just got to ultimate constituents of things then what would we say about them well since they they don't have a cause they can't come into existence so therefore they've existed eternally the ultimate constituents of things have existed internally and further it's nested that they have all their properties necessarily so in the object of this view there couldn't have been another set of ultimate constituents so in the next lecture we'll continue going into more detail about Ren's metaphysics and epistemology we'll try to go over some of the arguments that see how valid some of the arguments are that she advanced for her views Oh

Channel: misesmedia

Views: 12,141

Rating: 4.736527 out of 5

Keywords: David, Gordon, Mises, Online, Academy, Course, Ayn, Rand, Philosophy, Capitalism, Liberty, Libertarian, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Education, Objectivism

Id: X591KnB551U

Length: 48min 6sec (2886 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 20 2011