Ayn Rand in the college curriculum
Posted by TheLittleAustrian 8 years, 6 months ago to Education
The College experience in the liberal arts tradition is meant to expose students to many different perspectives and let those individuals make decisions for themselves. When thinking for oneself, Rand spoke that an individual should check their premises. I would hope, but ultimately am disheartened that many faculty who opposed these grants are letting their own biases and premises get in the way of promoting free and critical thinking. Instead, they seem to be open to active censorship of Rand's work.
As a philosopher and scientist I can say with assurance that CD's polemic does not speak for contemporary philosophy. His Platonist , Kantian, anti-science and reason view is contrasted with the growing Aristotle, Locke, Rand view of harmony between science and a philosophy based on observation of the real world using the cognitive process of reason based on identification of similarities and differences between properties of the particulars of existence. Rand's contribution to the Aristotle/Locke thread of philosophy was to build on their work to create a systematic complete philosophical system which integrates ethics with observation of the real world not the fantasy land of religion and idealism of cd. Rand's theory of universals is the first by a philosopher which both informs epistemology and is confirmed by contemporary evolutionary biology, sensory ecology, information theory, and biothermodynamics. A concrete example of the paradigm shift from idealism to rational empiricism in Philosophy is the forthcoming book in the Blackwell series of Companions to Philosophy, "A Companion to the Philosophy of Ayn Rand." These are not published except for the work of major philosophers.
Finally cd should know Quine, Goodman, Elgin and other contemporary philosophers have happily buried the analytic, a priori, and necessary schools of philosophy. But as Kuhn showed the old school represented by cd doesn't change as their world changes, they just have to pass away with old age to make room for the new and revolutionary, It's really nice to have a philosophy that fits the world as we experience it.
on my screen. -- j
.
The removal of public funding is a step in the right direction...successful alumni may well be capitalists and the colleges might have to get used to this. The article indicated that the donations were covert: If the funds were covertly attached to a requirement then that was wrong and should not be done. But if I were to make a donation specifically for a Chair in fungal phages, I would expect that this would be done in return for my money - and that not only would this not be wrong, but my name would be displayed on a wall somewhere as a donor. The fact that the University had not had a prior desire for a Fungal Phage Department is not a consideration; now they have one.
Jan
sl rewording
"What good would it do to give money for something no one wants to teach..." Well, were I rich enough to be able to endow some obscure college with a well-funded Chair for Fungal Phages, you would probably get researchers who were interested in that esoteric topic applying from all over the world to occupy it. This would result in undergrad students who knew more about fungal phages than profs in other colleges knew, and they would pick up good jobs in Big Pharma when they graduated. Then you would get a grad school program...etc. The obscure college might become renown for its innovative studies in fungal phages.
I don't know how it works in philosophy, but in science there is definitely a "build and they will come" entry point to success. If a failing college got Koch funding and made a really good set of Ayn Rand courses...Do you think it would it follow the fungal phage progression?
Jan
So I took "Intro to Logic and Critical Thinking" to get the credit, and it ended up being one of my favorite courses so far.
Creative ideas rely on both conscious and subconscious processing but the subconscious in not infallible and is not a substitute for conscious validation of ideas and not a substitute for epistemology. The "problem of induction" is epistemological, not psychology.
Whewell was heavily influenced by Kant. He does not "show how to do it".
Conscious validation comes when you have the hypothesis and Whewell called it "conciliation" where the hypothesis is tested against the known science looking for how it fits with the rest of knowledge.
Remember man has free will so logic is a tool and how one uses it is up to you. Rand knew her theory of concept formation was not the solution to the problem of induction but what I in my research on innovation and Dr. Peikoff have shown is that induction is the reverse of the validation of concepts. Darwin's discovery of how atolls are formed is a classic example. Prigogine's discovery of dissipative structure is also.
What Rand and Whewell have done is reduce the probability of failure in induction.
I have read a little of Quine and Kuhn. I see amazon has "Theory of Scientific Method", in paperback. I'll have to get a copy.
Please be sure and post when the on-line course becomes available! I would be very interested in it.
I also chose a college that downplayed the "humanities" and am glad I did. There was an emphasis, at least in promotions, on the "well rounded engineer" educated in the "humanities" for a small portion of the curriculum, and I naively started out taking them on good faith, but soon realized they were garbage. Now I know they were even more destructive than that.
You probably did get a lot of value out of your "Intro to Logic and Critical Thinking", but be careful of wrong and damaging ideas which may have been passed along with it. See Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (including the appendix with Leonard Peikoff's the "Analytic Synthetic Dichotomy", Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, and his lecture series especially on the history of philosophy and on logic. If you enjoyed the logic and critical thinking course you took, you will get a lot more out of these.
The distinction between the objective versus the subjective is only part of Ayn Rand's principle. She identified the intrinsic-subjective-objective trichotomy.
There is a thread on resources required to learn Ayn Rand's philosophy here on the forum: https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
College is a dangerous journey, from picking one, to making sure it does what it represented.
Why to the "Atlas Shrugged"-fearing faculty object to letting students decide for themselves, but don't mind if Bill Ayers is taught, Saul Alinsky, or if money comes from the one world Rockefeller Foundation, or other liberal donors. No the idea is to keep freed thouhht out of colleges.So, the economically ignorant students try to work for corporations with no ida of how capitalism is supposed to work. Worse, they have a resentment of it for not being socialism. Current colleges leave students ill-prepared for the real work place and in constant search for some Marxist utopia.
is to be taught in the colleges (and other public
schools)?--
Perhaps it would be a better idea to put all that
money together and start an Objectivist college
or university, avowedly and openly Objectivist
(just as Bob Jones University is avowedly and
openly Christian, and Notre-Dame University is
avowedly and openly Christian Catholic).