Reddit reviews Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology (Ayn Rand Soc Philosophical Stu) (Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies)

You might be especially interested in Chris Matthew Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical for a comprehensive and careful overview of Rand's philosophy as well as its place in the "dialectical" tradition of thought (rooted in her case in Aristotle rather than Hegel or Marx). One thing to keep in mind is that Rand considered politics to be subordinate in the philosophical hierarchy to epistemology and ethics, which are the focus of Sciabarra's work as well as those of Allan Gotthelf (also a leading Aristotle scholar) and Tara Smith.

>The epistemological ideas form Rand come from Max Stirner, and Egoist and epistemological relativist whose ideas on how man operates in society are directly opposed by Kropotkin's book, along with Rand's, which came from Stirner.

You don't know jack shit about Ayn Rand. The only philosopher to whom she acknowledged an intellectual debt was Aristotle, and noted Aristotle scholars today (Gotthelf, Lennox, Miller) who also study Rand recognize major similarities between the two.

For anyone who wants to read what someone with an actual fucking clue about Objectivism has to say about her epistemology, this book (edited by Gotthelf) came out just in the last few days.

I don't anticipate the Rand-bashers having the combination of guts and intellectual wherewithal to attack Gotthelf's interpretations as unsound. Their past performance is too pitifully bad to expect anything remotely of the sort. The only activity they seem capable of mustering these days is simply downvoting comments which factually defend Rand's ideas against ignorant attacks.

>If ascribing knowledge to S requires S believing a true proposition...

Ascribing conceptual knowledge to S requires S believing a true proposition. Perceptual knowledge (like that held by other animals) does not.

>...how does light hitting retinas or synapses firing cross from non-propositional, non-believed non-truth to propositional, believed truth according to Rand?

Just like any other animal, your brain automatically learns to put the sensations of light hitting retinas, etc. together into perceptions of entities. The starting point of human conceptual knowledge is this stage of entity perception.

The human being then focuses on certain entities from current and remembered perceptions, seeing their differences and relative similarities. Entities that can be differentiated from all others and viewed as similar to each other in certain respects can be mentally grouped and integrated into a concept. The perceptible characteristics the entities have in common are retained, but the specific measurements of those characteristics (differences within the range of "similarity") in each particular are omitted. This would be a first-level concept of a type of entity (say, "rock" or "table.")

Rand's theory of perception and conceptualization is covered in much greater detail in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology

Once someone has concepts, he can form propositions and apply them to the situations/states/attributes of perceived entities. This is something like a reverse of the process of concept formation. The process of concept formation is like an induction (particular to general) and the process of concept/proposition application is like a syllogistic deduction (general to particular.)

>Asking the questions you did means that you don't know philosophy. They were not real questions.

They were certainly real questions, questions very much associated with philosophy. My question was about your standard for evaluating the truth of a philosophy, a question of epistemology. Your first post indicated that the way you evaluate the truth of certain arguments is whether other people, those who are stated experts in philosophy, agree or disagree with them.

I thought this could not be your ultimate standard, so I asked, hoping for a clearer presentation of your view. Instead, I get the answer that either states that the standards of philosophy are readily apparent, or that I am a lost cause for inquiring into your personal metric for evaluating truth.

What I got after that was more examples of appeals to authority and majorities, with no discussion of the content and arguments of Rand's work. What's more, the appeals to authority are false in fact.

> Ayn Rand is not considered a serious scholar by academics, nor by anyone who studies real philosophers like Kant or Sartre.

Allan Gotthelf, who is considered a high-quality thinker and writer on Aristotelian philosophy, has written many books and articles on the topic of Rand and Objectivism in a very positive light.

http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Their-Role-Knowledge-Philosophical/dp/0822944243

http://www.amazon.com/Metaethics-Egoism-Virtue-Normative-Philosophical/dp/0822944006/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397776414&sr=1-5

http://www.amazon.com/Ayn-Rand-Philosopher-Wadsworth/dp/0534576257/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397776414&sr=1-9


But go ahead, laugh me off.

EDIT: Wrong preposition.