Not that it isn’t a good idea nevertheless. 
No, most of us in fact were leftists before discovering Rand. She didn’t reinforce our existing beliefs, she challenged them. Previously, I had considered myself some sort of vague “democratic socialist.”
No, Rand was vehemently opposed to the draft and spoke out against it many times. She said that the issues of the draft and slavery were the two greatest flaws in the Constitution. She supported a constitutional amendment abolishing it, and encouraged draft-age men to move to Canada.
I’m not sure you’re right. I think you are confusing the following distinctions:
[ul]
[li]Some philosophers assert the existence of an analytic-synthetic distinction. Analytic sentences, if you believe in the distinction and according to one common, but by no means universal, formulation, are true in virtue of the meaning of the terms used and the structure of the sentence. This would include propositions like “A = A” or “There exists a person X such that if Tim loves X, then X loves Audrey.” Synthetic statements are not analytic (this is probably the best way to put it). Thus included in synthetic statements are ones like “John Smith is six feet tall” or “Russia’s need for a warm-weather port, which port would have been jeopardized by a protracted Balkan conflict, is why that country mobilized so quickly in the wake of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.”[/li][li] Some synthetic proposition have relatively easy, non-controversial ways for determining their truth or falsehood. Statements like “John Smith is six feet tall” are an example. Other synthetic propositions are not so easily dispatched: the statement about Russia above is an example.[/li][li] Some predicates take more than one argument at a time. For example, the predicate “is-married-to” is binary. Thus a sentence like “Joe is married to” is incomplete and cannot be assigned a truth value until the second argument is identified or subject to a bound quantifier — “Joe is married to Susan” (true), “Joe is married to Abraham Lincoln” (false), “Joe is married to someone” (true), “Joe is married to everyone” (false), “Joe is married to no one” (false). Perhaps “good” is like this. Maybe “good” is really a two- or three-place predicate more fully realized as “X is good according to person P”, “X is good in culture C at time T”. This would make “X is good” incomplete in the same way as “X is married to” is incomplete. However, if we could fill in the blanks, as it were with the needed arguments or bound variables, we should then have a sentence which is either true or false.[/li][/ul]
And a lot of neoconservatives have been ex-Trotskyists. Funny how that works.
Your definition of philosophy is idiosyncratic, and not one philosophers would agree with in general. 1) is a false dilemma. 2) is simply false. 3) begs the question.
You’ll have to explain to me how “useful goal” and “improves the world” are not synonymous. I can’t think of any way for one not to be equivalent to the other.
If you really mean that, then you also have to admit the validity of this syllogism:
- Electrical engineering either does, or does not, exist to come up with ideas for how to make the world a better place.
- If it does not exist for that purpose, then no useful goal is being served by electrical engineering.
- If it does exist for that purpose, electrical engineers are extremely limited in their ability to test their ideas on society as a whole. And yet, that is the only way to verify whether an idea would make the world a better place.
It isn’t now, and never has been, the goal of philosophy to make the world a better place. It’s a field of inquiry, not an agenda. So the superficial answer is that it does not exist to make the world a better place, but that’s only because you’ve made a category mistake in applying that predicate. The dilemma you’ve proposed is nonsensical.
“Useful” is a subjective term, but I think that we’d agree that inquiry is generally useful in the same way that, say, theoretical physics is useful insofar as increased understanding is always generally useful. As someone pointed out above, the concept of “falsifiability” that you mentioned was most clearly articulate by a philosopher.
It does not exist for that purpose, so 3 is irrelevant.
They’re synonymous insofar as you are defining their equivalence, but your terms are opaque. Does academic study without immediate empirical consequences “improve the world”? Is String Theory useful, or Lacanian deconstruction?
Why go through the effort of inquiry if you have no particular belief that it has the potential to create something useful? If I was doing it for my own amusement, then certainly. But I’m not going to get paid to do something that’s only serving myself. Regardless of whether the philosopher inquires merely for his own amusement, the rest of society only gives him the opportunity to do so because they expect something good to come of it.
Curiosity? Idle amusement?
You’re making an empirical claim about the motivations of philosophers here. Do you have any evidence that they generally hold this belief?
I have, as a counterexample, a close friend who teaches philosophy at a university. His PhD was on the political philosophy of Hume, which has basically zero practical consequence no matter what conclusions he reaches about Hume (or “that fat bastard”, as my friend refers to him). Currently he’s just enjoying teaching, and what philosophical interests he has are far more immediately attached to his career than any sense of creating something useful
Why not? For many people, getting paid to be self-serving is an excellent position to be in. Why should philosophers not be similarly venal?
Society does not give philosophers (or take away from them) the opportunity to do philosophy. Society didn’t get together and say “let’s allow some to philosophize and thus improve the world.” My friend does philosophy because it interests him, and he can support himself and his family by teaching it. If you took away his professorship, he probably wouldn’t do philosophy, but some still would, mainly for their own interest’s sake, or perhaps to sell some books.
The basic mistake you seem to be working under is to imagine the field of philosophy as being somehow collectively purposeful. It isn’t. It’s just a lot of people doing it, and forming a professional community around it to foster the further pursuit of it.
Further to my point above. I’m not saying that philosophy professors are just milking the system for an office and a paycheck while they wank. I’m saying that few philosophers have strong or clear ideas about “improving the world” or having a large effect. They pursue philosophy by seeking tenured professorships in the same way that theoretical physicists do: They are interested in the area, they believe that greater understanding is a general benefit of what they do, and they can make a profession out of it, which makes it much easier to do good work within an area of inquiry.
Fine, I’ll buy that explanation. But all that explanation is saying is that item #2 of my list was true; philosophy (as practiced by professional philosophers) doesn’t serve a useful purpose. And if that’s true, then unless you’re a professional philosopher, how well Objectivism does among philosophers is irrelevant. It just doesn’t matter one way or the other because the study itself doesn’t matter. All the non-philosophers in the world are only interested in “philosophy” as a set of rules or guidelines that, if followed, make the world a better place.
I agree with you here, in the end I do think that the point of philosophy is to guide us to make this a better place.
IOW, “I eso con que se come?” 
That is a common saying in Latin America that in a few words tells people that are proposing fantastic new ways to do things to tell us how the new ways have to be digested or swallowed and with what ingredients.
As for the current status of Ayn in Philosophical academic circles:
This is one of the major differences between Rand and the philosophical establishment. To her, philosophy is not only important in people’s daily lives, but essential. She would have dismissed any subject that didn’t have any relevance. She even wrote a book called “Philosophy: Who Needs It?”
*"Philosophy is the science that studies the fundamental aspects of the nature of existence. The task of philosophy is to provide man with a comprehensive view of life. This view serves as a base, a frame of reference, for all his actions, mental or physical, psychological or existential. This view tells him the nature of the universe with which he has to deal (metaphysics); the means by which he is to deal with it, i.e., the means of acquiring knowledge (epistemology); the standards by which he is to choose his goals and values, in regard to his own life and character (ethics) – and in regard to society (politics) . . . .
"In order to live, man must act; in order to act, he must make choices; in order to make choices, he must define a code of values; in order to define a code of values, he must know **what **he is and **where **he is – i.e., he must know his own nature (including his means of knowledge), and the nature of the universe in which he acts – i.e., he needs metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, which means: philosophy. He cannot escape from this need; his only alternative is whether the philosophy guiding him is to be chosen by his mind or by chance.
*
Sadly, there aren’t many of today’s philosophers, or their students (including the ones in this thread) who would agree with any of this. And I believe this is one of the reasons why fundamentalist religion is on the rise. It provides its believers with a comprehensive philosophy to live by . . . which is exactly what Objectivism does. Unfortunately, both systems are obviously flawed, but there’s no other competition. As you can read in this thread, the philosophical establishment no longer bothers with anything that’s actually of use to people.
While hansel’s insouciant dismissal of the notion of philosophy, as a general field of logical intellectual inquiry, being “responsible” for anything is appealing in a rigorous “philosophy is a kinda/sorta/maybe science” sense, it does sort of weaken the appeal of the study of philosophy as a powerful, meaningful and useful thing to undertake.
If your motivation is to improve the world in any immediate sense, I wouldn’t recommend philosophy as a field of study, no.
Philosophy does, in general, try to answer the question “how should I live?” Most philosophers who make some kind of significant mark in the history of philosophy offer some take on ethics and what’s a good life.
However, philosophy, like science, deliberately constrains itself by its method of rational inquiry. And like science, if you start with an end result and try to bend the method to achieve it, you corrupt the method and lose all certainty and credibility that the method normally grants. If you want the method to give your results some guarantee of correctness, you have to let the method work. One way to describe philosophy as an activity just is pursuing rational inquiry wherever it leads.
And the reason Objectivism is obviously flawed, and not taken seriously by the academy, is that Rand started with the result she wanted and tortured her method to get it. She’s bad at rational inquiry.
Plenty of philosophers are ready to offer prescriptions for how we should live. Peter Singer is the most obvious example, but there’s no shortage of others publishing books and sitting on bioethics boards and publishing columns in the New York Times.
As for more general usefulness, the study of logic in the early 20th century informed a great deal of early computer science and the pursuit of artificial intelligence. Philosophy of language informed the field of linquistics. Mathematicians and scientists are generally quite happy to engage with their philosophical counterparts where they overlap. The field of cognitive science is half philosophy of mind and language.
What the field collectively doesn’t try to do is take responsibility for leading us all out of the darkness. They’re happy to teach anyone with the patience to become rigorous, rational thinkers, which is obviously beneficial to society. But very few think that they’re Plato, and the history of philosophy supports their humility.
I mean, seriously Panache: You want more people trying to create mass ideological movements?
And yet…
Cooking either does, or does not, exist to come up with ideas for how to make the world becomes a better place.
If it does not exist for that purpose, then no useful goal is being served by cooking.
Jerking off either does, or does not, exist to come up with ideas for how to make the world becomes a better place.
If it does not exist for that purpose, then no useful goal is being served by jerking off.
You don’t even know what philosophy IS.
[quote=“Sage_Rat, post:57, topic:549990”]
This is a mischaracterization of the facts of my case, and my arguments, neither of which you or anyone else here is sufficiently familiar with to comment upon as an example of how lack of formal education results in “unworthwhile” arguments. I don’t want or intend to resurrect it, I merely ask that people stop referring to it in a variety of ways that are incorrect.
You don’t know what you think you know; ironically demonstrating the fact you sought to illustrate…that your own lack of education about the facts of my legal case lead you to make an argument that is not worthwhile. 
Words are being placed on my lips (or my fingertips) that were not uttered by me.
Ayn Rand’s philosophy attracts people when they are young. Neoconservativism attracts people when they are middle aged.
In the late 1960s neoconservatism emerged among liberals who had become skeptical about the ability of the government to solve social problems. The civil rights legislation and the War on Poverty had been followed by five years of black ghetto rioting and more durable increases in black social pathology.
After the first Gulf War neoconservatism segued into confidence about the ability of the U.S. military to solve international problems. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have discredited the optimism of neoconservatives as much as the failure of government social spending discredited the optimistic liberalism of the 1960s.