The thing about Rand is that she’s an absolutely atrocious philosopher. Her “arguments” are riddled with more holes than 49ers defense. Plus ethical egoism isn’t exactly a new idea. Sidgwick provided a far more compelling case for it in Methods of Ethics than Rand ever did long before she was even born, even if he did ultimately reject it.
Fleischmann and Pons sparked debate too, but you’ll never hear them listed with Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.
Plus, she died quite a few years ago. The OP asks for people still alive.
I’ll hold to my assertion in the previous thread that none of today’s philosophers is a keeper. To rehash my argument, an enduring philosophers must tackle the big issues that are above merely current issues. Hence Augustine, for instance, took on the issues of fate vs free will, the source of happiness, the proper organization of society, and the chances for redemption. All topics that will be relevant for as long as there are human beings. Unsuprisingly, Augustine is still read widely by ordinary folk as well as students of philosophy.
The philosophers of today are too concerned with making their arguments fit the framework adopted by the mass of people today. Hence when that framework collapses, their philosophy will no longer be relevant. And I firmly believe the framework will collapse. We have lived in a post-modernist world for almost a century, yet I see few signs that it can be sustained. I believe Hilaire Belloc’s assertion that postmodernism is inherently self-poisoning, and the edifice wlil collapse before the century is out. (I also believe that Belloc will still be widely popular after centuries have passed.)
If Ayn Rand is a philosopher, then so are Edward Belamy, Upton Sinclair, and Dan Brown. Placing bits of other people’s philosophy into a potboiler doesn’t make one a philosopher. Belamy, once the most succesful American author of all times, is forgotten now because his books were thuddingly bad as books; they functioned only as propaganda. Propaganda has no lasting value. Hence Sinclair, Rand, and Brown will fade as well.
Well, sure, but only the “hot” parts.
(Probably a phenomenon peculiar to Tennessee, in MN, its all about the Logical Positivists…)
I’m not arguing the quality of her philosophy - just whether or not her name will be remembered as a 20th century philospher. I think it will.
Personally, I agree with you about the quality of her philosophy - especially her attempts to extend it to every facet of life. She spent too much time trying to ‘prove’ that people who adopted her philosophy must have the same taste in art, for example. Ridiculous. She was a ‘quack’ philosopher who didn’t know what she didn’t know. I think she had a few reasonable insights, buried in a lot of twaddle.
She wrote a lot more than fiction. She wrote non-fiction philosophy books like, “An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”, which were intended to be more scholarly.
Except that in the long run, to be remembered as a philosopher you have to either turn out very high quality work or found an important and influential school of thought. Neither of these apply to Rand. She’s a philosophical footnote at best, far more significant as a social movement than as thinker.
Deepok Chopra. 'Cause that’s how bad it is.
Well, he’s been dead a while, but Marshall McLuhan counts.
One of the first communication-age philosophers.
Alive? The man who wants Information to be Free. Eric S. Raymond, author of the Cathedral and the Bazaar.
the PC apeman writes:
> But I suspect future philosophy will draw more and more on non-philosophers in
> the vein of Richard Dawkins or John Searle.
Searle is a philosopher:
No mention of Noam Chomsky yet? He made some significant contributions to theoretical linguistics, and the Chomsky Hierarchy is one of the first things taught to students of formal languages.
Peter Singer?
Yeah, I wondered if someone was going to call me on that. Searle is most definitely a philosopher with all the bona fides. It was lazy of me to lump him in with someone like Dawkins without explanation. Searle’s head is in the world of philosophy, but like Dawkins, his feet are firmly in the realm of science. It’s from there that he tries to move back toward the philosophical. In his words…
"How do we get an account of ourselves as conscious, mindful, free, rational beings that we can make consistent with our concept with the rest of the universe as consisting entirely of mindless, meaningless physical particles and fields of force?
Searle’s starting point is in the second half of that question. His lectures go on to deflate dualism and centuries of other philosophical hoohaw. His arguments advance outward from current cognitive and computer sciences and makes few, if any, unsubstantiated leaps. His CV is misleading, IMHO. I see him as having jumped the gap over to hard science, not so much as a practitioner but as an advocate. He works his way back from that foundation, along side the likes of Dawkins and Sagan, toward philosophical questions.
Is philosophy just a fashion? In other words, can progress be made (as in science and mathematics) or is progress impossible (as in music and theology)? The former disciplines have ways of being wrong, the latter ones do not. Is there a way to be indisputably wrong in philosophy?
If philosophy is a fashion, only the tastemakers count although an ‘unsung genius’ (Van Gogh) might be rediscovered if he fits a later movement. Further, styles move in cycles so what is horrible and unmentionable in one era is natural and genius in the next. If it is not, only the people who are right count and everyone else is simply forgotten. (Quick, name the father of phrenology!)
There are many ways to be indisputably wrong in philosophy. There just aren’t any ways of being indisputably right.
Rand herself said that she will be remembered as someone who asked some interesting questions, and I believe she was right. Who will be remembered, though, will be the person who starts out with her questions and finds the right answers, filling in all the gaps in Objectivism, especially in her epistemology. And Objectivism (if he still calls it that) will be the better for no longer being associated with Rand and her unfortunate personal life.
The difference is, philosophers invent systems of thought, which they can be said to “own.” Scientists discover what is out there in the material universe, which somebody would be bound to discover sooner or later.
Influential – I’m sure if Bertrand Russell were alive writing his History of Western Philosophy today he would probably feel obliged to devote a full chapter to Rand, as he did to Marx (or else a chapter on modern libertarian and anarchist philosophers generally – Rand, Nozick, etc.).
But Russell is long dead. And so is Rand. Read the thread title.
Sartre may be dead but existentialism is still around.
Nope.
Both create models of how things work. The difference is that, like religion, philosophy is generally nonfalsifiable. (yeah, I’m sure there are exceptions)
I don’t know much about his other work, but based on his Chinese Room argument and his anti-“strong AI” stance, I’d say he’s purely a philosopher. I don’t see how that’s based in science at all; it seems to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Alan Turing’s so-called “Turing Test” paper (which is actually a paper on moral philosophy, and to my mind makes Alan Turing a better philosopher than John Searle). Russell & Norvig (two actual computer scientists) demolish the Chinese Room argument in their textbook on AI.
It sounds like you know more about him than I do, though. Can you point me to any good primers on his work? What I know of it leaves me entirely unimpressed, but my sources are AI advocates who are obviously biased.