Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

So I’m only about forty minutes in, so you may address this later, but I’m always curious about libertarians who were influenced by both Rand and Hayek, because that’s always seemed to me an unstable combination. Both in theory and in…

In reply to Roderick Tracy Long. Pages 6-9. Thanks! Helpful to have the link to your paper right here, handy to return to. Great insight, this paper in full. LikeLike

In reply to boydstun. For anticipations of aspects of Rand’s theory in Aristotle, Abelard, Aquinas, and Brentano, see: https://cdn.mises.org/qjae9_3_1.pdf LikeLike

In reply to boydstun. (oops -this continues the immediately preceding comment) Repetitions of same or similar things in the mind-independent world does not a universal already make; Rand and Aquinas evidently agree there are no readymade universals jus…

My paper “Universals and Measurement” (U&M) was published in the spring of 2004 in JARS. In December of that year, there was a paper read and discussed at the session of the Ayn Rand Society, and that was the paper “Rand and Aquinas on the Problem …

In the years after composing this paper (2002–03), I learned of a “pale anticipation” of Rand’s measurement-omission perspective on concepts way back in the fifth or sixth century. My studies of Roger Bacon, a contemporary of Aquinas, led me to study B…

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41560253?seq=1 Firstly, my usual caveat on the theory. There are, I say, some indispensable concepts we should not expect to be susceptible to being cast under a measurement-omission form of concepts. Among these would be the logical constants such as negation, conjunction, or disjunction. The different occasions of these concepts are substitution units under them, but…

People on the American Right sincerely seem to believe that “woke” ideology is so terrible and pervasive a phenomenon that it can be compared to a conspiratorial form of totalitarianism sweeping the country. David Brooks, in The New York Times: My friend Rod Dreher recently had a blog post for The American Conservative called “Why Are…

So it looks like decades of activism are finally, very gradually, starting to pay off in the form of polarization within the Democratic Party over Israel and Palestine. This didn’t happen by activists’ genuflecting before the prevarications and dogmatism of the mindlessly pro-Israel wing of the party, including Joe Biden. It happened through open, unapologetic…