Monday, October 19, 2009
'The Evel Knievel of leaping to conclusions'
It's an Ayn Rand smackdown. ... I enjoyed these lines:
It's an Ayn Rand smackdown. ... I enjoyed these lines:
William James once argued that every philosophic system sets out to conceal, first of all, the philosopher’s own temperament: that pre-rational bundle of preferences that urges him to hop on whatever logic-train seems to be already heading in his general direction. This creates, as James put it, “a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned … What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is — and oh so flagrantly! — is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is.”
