Path: utzoo!hoptoad!vixie!paul
From: paul@vixie.UUCP (Paul Vixie Esq)
Newsgroups: alt.individualism
Subject: Re: Objectivism? Who he?
Message-ID: <864@vixie.UUCP>
Date: 14 Apr 88 07:06:24 GMT
References: <5430002@otter.hple.hp.com> <5430005@otter.hple.hp.com>
Reply-To: paul@vixie.UUCP (Paul Vixie Esq)
Organization: Vixie Enterprises, San Francisco
Lines: 42

In <5430005@otter.hple.hp.com> cwp@otter.hple.hp.com (Chris Preist) writes:
>Interesting... One of you says no, and the other, yes! Well, I shall have to
>read myself, and find out. 

I wish more people would.  Noone is to be trusted in passing judgement on
philosophical ideas, except oneself.

>By the way, Aristotle may not have written anything, but others have. I found
>out about the trichotomy through the works of Kant, Kierkegaard, Ayer, 
>Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Russell, Popper, Sartre, Haack, Quine, and of
>course, our dear friend Plato. Rand isn't the only philosopher in existance,
>you know! :-)

Yeah, I know :-).  I knew (and I was quickly told) that I would catch some
flak for that comment ... but I had a few other things to say about it and
I thought I'd try to make the discussion run for a few iterations, without
me puking forth a huge load of verbiage all at once.

Of the philosophers you named, I am unfamiliar with the ideas of Kierk.,
Ayer, Popper, Haack, and Quine.  Of the rest, *none* of them formulated the
(objective,subjective,intrinsic)/(whatever,you-want,to-call-it) trichotomy
in quite the same way Aristotle (and later, Rand) did.  And, certainly, none
of those I recognize fall on the side of the objective.  Skeptics and mystics,
the lot of them.  Plato chief among the mystics, I might add.  Aristotle, as
his student, inherited some of it -- but he was the _first_ philosopher in
history to come out on the side of objective reality, and Rand was one of
the _last_ (so far), other than _her_ pupils and various quasi-original
Aristotelian (sp?) scholars presently making non-waves in the philosphical
community.

So you see that my earlier comment, teasing though it was, was motivated
by a (small, I admit) battery of actual facts :-).

>I shall probably be back in a month or so, to give you my verdict on Rand..

A month?  After a month, I was strongly intrigued.  After several years, I'm
still not an expert.  I hope your policy on verdicts is a flexible one...
-- 
Paul A Vixie Esq
paul%vixie@uunet.uu.net
{uunet,ptsfa,hoptoad}!vixie!paul
San Francisco, (415) 647-7023