Jerry Kirkpatrick's Blog, page 2

The Meaning of Logic

Aristotelian logic has been variously defined as the science and art of correct reasoning, of making correct inferences, or of correct thinking.  Ayn Rand makes the concept “correct” precise and fundamental by defining logic as “the art of non-contradictory identification” (p. 36). By “art” she means practice, or the practical application of concepts and principles to achieve a specific goal

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On the Path to Dictatorship: Why [Former President Trump] Must be [Elected]

This repost is from November 4, 2019, one year before the 2020 election, and last repost in my series of three for the current election season. The previous reposts were October 1 and September 5. The present repost has been edited to update it, changing such wording as “current president” to “former President Trump,” or some abbreviated version, and “reelect” to “elect.” In the spirit of sparing

           

The Danger of Emergency Powers: A History Lesson

Below is the second of three reposts in this election season on politics. (The third repost will be on November 1.) The present essay was posted on October 7, 2020, six months after the beginning of what I subsequently labelled covid totalitarianism. I used the terms in seven essays posted in 2021 and ’22.  Emergency powers, as we have learned in the past six months, are dangerous. Any

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What Americans Need to Learn about the Left

Below is a repost from July 18, 2022, that is important for our upcoming election. Most of my previous posts from 2017–22 have political themes and many are linked in the article below. I plan to repost another political essay in October and, again, on November 1. Note that links to my book Applying Principles are to a free, downloadable pdf.  A retired English professor from Emory

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Space, Time, and Causality

Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts answers many so-called problems in philosophy. One of these is Kant’s claim that such concepts as space, time, and causality are innate (“a priori”), independent of sense perception and therefore of reality. Whatever we are aware of are phenomena, appearances in our minds, not the noumena of true reality. The positivists took this a step further and declared all

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Defensive Habits as Obstacles to Exercising Our Free Will

Ayn Rand divides human volition into two stages: focus and thought. To focus means to direct and control our attention to something in particular, a landscape or a problem to be solved, or to let our minds wander. This, she has compared to throwing a switch (Peikoff, 58). The second stage is the focus of our thinking to acquire knowledge without contradiction and to keep our subconscious

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The Place of Emotions in Science

Thoughts underly our emotions. As psychologist Edith Packer (140) says, paraphrased, “When we are feeling something, we are thinking something.” The opposite also is true—when we are thinking something, we are feeling something, which means we have emotions running through our minds whether we are aware of them or not.  Consciousness, to borrow a word from William James, is a stream,

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On the Feeling of Standing a Foot off the Ground

In a 2009 post (Applying Principles, 363–65) titled “Life in Three-Quarter Time,” I wrote that the three-quarter time signature in music, especially as exhibited in the Viennese waltz, represents to me the “expression and symbol of effortless joy.” In a variation on this theme, beyond the three-quarter time signature but still in music, I would like to talk about another feeling or emotion I

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The Metaphysical versus the Epistemological as Applied to Consciousness

In Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts (chap. 1, 2), influenced by Aristotle’s fundamental premise of the primacy of existence, Rand makes an important distinction between the metaphysical and the epistemological. Metaphysics, in contrast to the special sciences, studies all of existence—reality, the universe as a whole. This includes consciousness, which is a natural, not supernatural, part of

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The Concept of “Getting At”

When my wife, philosopher Linda Reardan, and I read a new writer whose ideas do not quite fit our established notions, we ask ourselves “what is this person getting at?” The ideas are not ridiculous, to be dismissed out of hand, nor do they strike us as correct identifications of the facts of reality. “Getting at” means these writers are attempting, in their own way and depending on their

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