Speaker 1: Yeah, oh what under little Briss's ouse, leader, rational self
Speaker 1: interest and individual ones.
Speaker 2: This is the Ran Brook Show, all right, everybody, welcome
Speaker 2: to here on Brook Show on this Monday, Sober twenty second.
Speaker 2: Pretty first, skipping ahead already second show today, and I'm
Speaker 2: really delighted to have with me today. Robert Mayhew rob It,
Speaker 2: for those of you who don't know who he is,
Speaker 2: is a professor philosophy at Seaton Hall University. He's been
Speaker 2: teaching there for over twenty years. Over thirty years. I've
Speaker 2: got an old bio. Doctor Maye's primary research interest is
Speaker 2: ancient philosophy, but he also has a serious scholarly interest
Speaker 2: in Ironrand and has done a lot of work related
Speaker 2: to iron Rand, from authoring books and editing, collection of
Speaker 2: essays and writing and speaking and doing talks regular talks
Speaker 2: at OCONN about irand Doctor Mehue also serves on the
Speaker 2: board of the Ironman Institute and the Anti Foundation for
Speaker 2: Objective Scholarship. Welcome, thanks for joining me.
Speaker 3: Great to be here. This is my first time and
Speaker 3: you had wondered about that on your earlier show. And
Speaker 3: yeah it's we been on panels a lot and all
Speaker 3: kinds of other stuff.
Speaker 2: Yes, so let's let's start with your interest in ancient philosophy.
Speaker 2: Maybe tell us a little bit how you got into
Speaker 2: ancient philosophy. What was the kind of the path that
Speaker 2: led you in that direction.
Speaker 3: Sure, it actually connects, I think to interest, you know,
Speaker 3: things that would interest your audience.
Speaker 2: I was.
Speaker 3: I thought philosophy was political philosophy when I was getting
Speaker 3: interested in ideas and reading iin Rand and or at
Speaker 3: least starting to. And so I was thinking, when it
Speaker 3: came time for my PhD, I would work on Hobbes
Speaker 3: and Locke and the Founding Fathers and try to show
Speaker 3: that Locke is very different from Hobbes and things like that.
Speaker 3: And then I was reading reading Atlas Shrugg for the
Speaker 3: second time, and I mean I had noticed the references
Speaker 3: to Aristotle before, but hadn't really done anything with the information. Okay, Aristotle,
Speaker 3: and then but this time it really caught Why is
Speaker 3: Aristotle the greatest of your philosophers? And why does she
Speaker 3: have a character reading this obscure you that this stuff
Speaker 3: from Aristotle's metaphysics in the Valley? And I thought, I
Speaker 3: want to look into this. Why Aristotle? You know, I'm thinking,
Speaker 3: you know what he's I don't think he's a champion
Speaker 3: of capitalism. And so I went to the very beginning
Speaker 3: of the complete works of Aristotle and it was the
Speaker 3: category worries, and it's you know it it. I couldn't
Speaker 3: see the value in it at all, but I but
Speaker 3: I became fascinated with that. And while doing that, I
Speaker 3: got really into not just Aristotle, but ancient Greek culture,
Speaker 3: and I kind of made it a mission to find
Speaker 3: out what was valuable in Aristotle. I started taking courses
Speaker 3: in ancient Greek because I knew if I wanted to
Speaker 3: make this my specialty, I needed, you know, to read
Speaker 3: the text in the original. And so that's how I
Speaker 3: got into it. And by the time I was, you know,
Speaker 3: really serious about doing graduate work, I I that was
Speaker 3: the field I wanted. And you know, I wrote my
Speaker 3: dissertation on Aristotle's politics, his his uh criticisms of of
Speaker 3: Plato's Republic, and that was that was that.
Speaker 2: So I was hooked. So so what what made you
Speaker 2: make that switch? That is what what took you from
Speaker 2: you know, the irrelevance of categories and metaphysics to no,
Speaker 2: I get it. This is amazing.
Speaker 3: I wish I remembered it, but it wasn't. It was
Speaker 3: just something about the breadth and the depth of his
Speaker 3: thought and trying to connect it to what Ainran said
Speaker 3: was valuable about him, because she it's very terse remarks,
Speaker 3: you know, the objective reality and sorry, the efficacy of
Speaker 3: the mind, and you don't really see that in those terms.
Speaker 3: I mean, she saw it in Arisotoa. She knew the
Speaker 3: history of his influence on Western culture. But I just
Speaker 3: became very interested in him generally, and then his critique
Speaker 3: of Plato, his criticisms of the forms of the communism
Speaker 3: of the Republic and all of that. And then I
Speaker 3: kind of I had this same interest in political philosophy
Speaker 3: that that really grew out of kind of my interest
Speaker 3: in reading dystopia novels and you know, anti communy, you know, Soviets,
Speaker 3: you know, criticism of the Soviet Union, and that com
Speaker 3: me into politics and and so it they kind of merged,
Speaker 3: and I started doing work on Ariosotle's politics, and but
Speaker 3: I wish there wasn't this aha moment. It was kind
Speaker 3: of just trying to figure out why would I Ran,
Speaker 3: you know, you know, recognize him. Then when I started
Speaker 3: to read the non fiction and she refers to him
Speaker 3: in for who, you know, for the new intellectual and
Speaker 3: you know he is the founder of you know, everything.
Speaker 3: And then she has that one line about everything we
Speaker 3: you know, our language, you know, progress, industry, it all,
Speaker 3: you know, the founding of America. She she laid on
Speaker 3: his shoulder, put on his shoulders, and that I found,
Speaker 3: it's kind of bizarre. It can't be right. And yet
Speaker 3: you know, so I really dug into that, and uh, yeah,
Speaker 3: that that kept me going for a long time, not
Speaker 3: just through through the pH d. But if you remember
Speaker 3: long ago when you when you organized conferences, you had one,
Speaker 3: that wonderful one in Italy, and and uh that's where
Speaker 3: I gave the lectures on I gave a pair of
Speaker 3: lectures Aristotle and the and the Renaissance, because I you
Speaker 3: know what she said that, you know, he made the
Speaker 3: Renaissance possible, you know, was against everything that you read,
Speaker 3: you know, you hear in in courses in medieval philosophy
Speaker 3: and in into the modern era. And I wanted to
Speaker 3: look into that. Yeah, I think they I think they
Speaker 3: exist somewhere. Someone at the time said you should write
Speaker 3: this into a popular you know, you should write a
Speaker 3: bokular book. I said, no, no, you know, I'm a scholar,
Speaker 3: and no one would would buy it anyway. And then
Speaker 3: I think two years later, Aristotle's Children came out and
Speaker 3: made millions. You know, it's all about timing.
Speaker 2: So so so was gonna ask, to what extent is
Speaker 2: it recognized in academia or among scholars that Aristota plays
Speaker 2: this role in the West. I mean, we've got Aristotle's children,
Speaker 2: We've got Caven the light right it was? I mean,
Speaker 2: but to what extent is that view unique time vand
Speaker 2: or is it becoming more acceptable within kind of uh philosophy,
Speaker 2: the history of philosophy.
Speaker 3: I think it's becoming more acceptable, But I think the
Speaker 3: way people interpret it is that the story is messier
Speaker 3: than you know, anyone you know statement can make. So
Speaker 3: when I was in graduate school, the line, the standard
Speaker 3: line was Aristotle was the philosopher of the Middle Ages
Speaker 3: and Plato was the philosopher of the Renaissance. And what
Speaker 3: they had in mind was that when Aristotle's works were
Speaker 3: rediscovered and reintroduced into the Latin West, I mean, they
Speaker 3: were immediately regarded as important, although they were also censored
Speaker 3: and put on lists. And you know, the Church was
Speaker 3: keeping an eye on that on it because they knew
Speaker 3: this was it wasn't kosher to mix religions. So but
Speaker 3: you know, and by the time you get to Aquinas
Speaker 3: for example, I'm actually by the I think it was
Speaker 3: twelve fifty four something like that, to teach philosophy in
Speaker 3: the universities in the Latin West was to teach Aristotle.
Speaker 3: And I mean he was so that's why they saw
Speaker 3: him as this medieval figure. And then in the Renaissance
Speaker 3: you get people like Galileo and others sort of pushing
Speaker 3: back or objecting to, rejecting this sort of ossified Aristotle
Speaker 3: that you know, Aristotle's view of the universe, his view
Speaker 3: of the solar system, that was you know, part of
Speaker 3: his philosophy. And at the same time, Plato's works, which
Speaker 3: weren't much known in the Middle Ages, were rediscovered in
Speaker 3: the Renaissance and people loved them. You know. You you
Speaker 3: get these, you know, all a lot of these figures,
Speaker 3: even some of the really good ones who saw themselves
Speaker 3: as Platonists. So it gets very confusing. But what what
Speaker 3: people are starting to just to spend more time I
Speaker 3: think working on, is is that that story doesn't really
Speaker 3: fit that that Aristotle. Yeah, there were these people who
Speaker 3: were pushing back against Arisotole. But even Galileo, for example, says,
Speaker 3: you know, while he's objecting to these these Catholic Aristotelians
Speaker 3: who won't look through microscope through through telescopes, he's also saying,
Speaker 3: I'm the real parapatetic. If you really understand Aristotle, I'm
Speaker 3: you know, because he wants to look at the world
Speaker 3: and use your reason to describe it. Yeah, and I
Speaker 3: think you see that. I mean, Aristotle's works were really
Speaker 3: influential at the University of Padua and where you had
Speaker 3: Galilee and William Harvey and people like that. Jim Lennox
Speaker 3: is doing work, I think on on the the Aristotelian influence, uh,
Speaker 3: the unacknowledged influence of Aristotle on on science and things
Speaker 3: of that sort. So this story that you have Aristotle
Speaker 3: arrives in the Latin West, he's influential on a Quinas,
Speaker 3: he becomes this dogma in effect, which in a way
Speaker 3: is true. That's what what happens. And then uh, and
Speaker 3: then you have these really good people who are you know,
Speaker 3: empirically minded in a good sense if there is one,
Speaker 3: and well, you know what I mean. And then you know,
Speaker 3: based on century observation and reasoning based on that and
Speaker 3: a good scientific method, and there's there's definitely an Aristotelian
Speaker 3: influence there, but it just doesn't it's not as clean,
Speaker 3: you know, clear cut as you would you would see.
Speaker 2: So that kind of understanding of the both the complexity
Speaker 2: of the story but the underlying the underlying value of
Speaker 2: Aristotle that is becoming more prevalent among the Stabians and
Speaker 2: Stabians philosophy it's not my.
Speaker 3: Fields, so right, haven't kept up, but you do get
Speaker 3: these popular books about you know, about Aristotle and his
Speaker 3: influence of the books you mentioned, and I wouldn't be
Speaker 3: surprised if there's more work of that kind. I mentioned
Speaker 3: Jim Lennox, but you know he has a nine Ran
Speaker 3: connection and not that that I mean, he could have
Speaker 3: done it independently of that, I think, but but there
Speaker 3: must be work on that. I mean, he's done work
Speaker 3: on even you know, Aristotle's influence on Darwin, and you know,
Speaker 3: there's there's these interesting connections that haven't been thoroughly explored.
Speaker 2: I think, and of course philosophy. I mean, like Aristotle's
Speaker 2: impact on you know, he impacts the culture and then
Speaker 2: the culture can impact an individual. It doesn't always go
Speaker 2: into direct line weed the person in order to So
Speaker 2: before we I want to go back to I want
Speaker 2: to go back to Aristotle and ancient philosophy. But tell
Speaker 2: us how you discovered iron Rand and kind of the
Speaker 2: influence she had on you in terms of kind of
Speaker 2: your academic trajectory.
Speaker 3: Well, I was reading in junior high, so I think
Speaker 3: it was thirteen or fourteen. I started reading these dystopian novels,
Speaker 3: and you know, I read Animal Farm, nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 3: Brave New World, and then my And this is, you know,
Speaker 3: if you were writing a novel, you wouldn't have your
Speaker 3: mother influence you. I mean, that just doesn't work. And
Speaker 3: so but there it is. I have to tell the truth.
Speaker 3: And she said, oh, have you read Anthem? That's one
Speaker 3: of those novels. And I said, no, I hadn't. So
Speaker 3: I read Anthem and it was clearly the best I
Speaker 3: know you could say that. I mean, nineteen eighty four
Speaker 3: was a longer novel, you know, it was. It was
Speaker 3: well longer, had a lot more events and stuff like that.
Speaker 3: But there was some thing about Anthem that I couldn't
Speaker 3: put my finger on at the time that was so
Speaker 3: much better and more inspiring. And I wasn't a really good,
Speaker 3: very confident reader. So I went looking for her other
Speaker 3: novels and I saw Fountain had no that's too fat.
Speaker 3: I don't read these fat novels, you know. But you know,
Speaker 3: a couple of years later I did read it, of course,
Speaker 3: and then that led to Atlas Shrugged. And at the
Speaker 3: time I had no idea. I mean, neither of my
Speaker 3: parents went to college. I didn't have I didn't know
Speaker 3: what academia was or I was much more interested in
Speaker 3: in high school and backpacking around Europe and in saving
Speaker 3: up my money to do that. I didn't have any
Speaker 3: I didn't know what I was going to do. So
Speaker 3: you know, I went to college not knowing what I
Speaker 3: was going to major in or anything like that. But
Speaker 3: I was becoming interested in ideas, and especially politically ideas.
Speaker 3: And also during this time, I'm starting to read anti
Speaker 3: Soviet literature, a lot of it, and that tied in with,
Speaker 3: you know, when I finally got around to we the
Speaker 3: living that was there, So I'm becoming I thought of
Speaker 3: myself as conservative, but that there were things I didn't
Speaker 3: like about being a conservative, particularly because of iron Rand.
Speaker 3: Like you know, I read Wreckage of the Consensus. Okay,
Speaker 3: there goes the Draft. Because I didn't have a good
Speaker 3: integrated view, I thought, well, if I have to choose,
Speaker 3: I'm clearly a conservative, not a liberal. But then reading
Speaker 3: iron Ran, the more you read at this, the little
Speaker 3: parts of it get chipped away. No, there goes God,
Speaker 3: there goes the Draft. And it became clear that there
Speaker 3: was something very different about her. And then I did
Speaker 3: one of the most important things to do, I think
Speaker 3: when you're this point in your development. I went to
Speaker 3: a libertarian meeting and it became clear it was odd
Speaker 3: because someone had told me the Libertarians are the followers
Speaker 3: of Iron Rand, and what did I know. I was
Speaker 3: twenty or nineteen something like that. So I went there
Speaker 3: and they were so it was so I felt, you know,
Speaker 3: almost an esthetic negative reaction. And then there was a
Speaker 3: speaker there. This was the Maryland Libertarian Partner or something
Speaker 3: like that, and he was defending Palestine and the and
Speaker 3: the American Indians. And I'm thinking, well, as the kids
Speaker 3: say today, WTF, you know, what the hell is this?
Speaker 3: And then someone made a critical remark about iin Ran
Speaker 3: because I mentioned the influence and so in a way
Speaker 3: it was that was it for the libertarians, you know,
Speaker 3: that was that was enough? And then yeah, so she
Speaker 3: was really I mean, you know, clearly was an important
Speaker 3: influence in kind of getting me in the right direction,
Speaker 3: even a very you know, this is before I read
Speaker 3: anything about epistemology, and I believe I read Virtue of
Speaker 3: Selfishness by around twenty or twenty one, and reading the novel,
Speaker 3: but just reading it and so much of it, you know,
Speaker 3: going past. But I was kind of figuring out what
Speaker 3: I was. And you know, like I said, if they're
Speaker 3: not really integrated, if you hold a set of beliefs,
Speaker 3: because you know this is this must be I must
Speaker 3: be a conservative. So I guess they're in favor of
Speaker 3: the draft, I suppose, But those sort of things that
Speaker 3: aren't held very well, very totally, they're easily you know, uh,
Speaker 3: jettison and I mean reading Wreckage of the Consensus, Yeah,
Speaker 3: that is a violation of the individual rights. And then
Speaker 3: reading I think some of the brand and stuff. When
Speaker 3: I found that the University of Maryland had the the
Speaker 3: Objectivist New Newsletter and and those volumes, I kind of
Speaker 3: read through those and yeah, so that's that really got
Speaker 3: me in the in the right direction, and I even
Speaker 3: I found that one of the things I was very
Speaker 3: proud of. When when I was starting to write papers,
Speaker 3: it looked like I was gonna I was majoring in
Speaker 3: political science and minoring in philosophy. I started to look
Speaker 3: at what did I like about Iinrand's writing. I mean,
Speaker 3: this sounds presumptuous or whatever, but there was something very
Speaker 3: clear and logical about it, and I started trying to
Speaker 3: emulate that in the sense of at least having a
Speaker 3: good structure and all that. And I was getting good grades,
Speaker 3: and I got good feedback from my professors who liked
Speaker 3: my writing, and so that made me think, well, maybe
Speaker 3: I could, Maybe I could do what these guys are doing,
Speaker 3: because I really, like I said, I didn't have a
Speaker 3: clue of what academia was.
Speaker 1: And so I.
Speaker 3: Went to Georgetown originally to study political science or government
Speaker 3: I think they called it, with which the idea that
Speaker 3: I do political theory. And then after two years of that,
Speaker 3: they allowed me to do something which I think would
Speaker 3: be unheard of now. I jumped ship from the government
Speaker 3: department to philosophy and started working on ancient philosophy. And
Speaker 3: the first semester there it was just serendipity. Alan Gohel
Speaker 3: was visiting professor, and that was wonderful. It was really
Speaker 3: that was my first semester, you know, officially as a
Speaker 3: philosophy student, and I met Allan and then you know it,
Speaker 3: I was kind of set. So you know, by the
Speaker 3: time I got my my PhD, it was really just
Speaker 3: a question can I get a job or not? And
Speaker 3: that was that. But well, I should mention going back.
Speaker 3: I mean, the first conference was in eighty three and
Speaker 3: I went to that and and that really you know,
Speaker 3: the the not OCON, but it was the Thomas Jefferson Institute,
Speaker 3: I think it was called.
Speaker 2: And yes, there was the predecessor of OCON, so it
Speaker 2: was right right right, So I went on similar format,
Speaker 2: not exactly but some similar format.
Speaker 3: But they were every other year for sixteen weeks.
Speaker 2: What's that for two weeks?
Speaker 3: Yeah, three weekends, I remember, and it was it was
Speaker 3: amazing because you've got to meet people. And I met
Speaker 3: the person I ended up marrying, And I mean we
Speaker 3: met in eighty three, we hit it off in eighty five,
Speaker 3: and then why do you need another conference? So we
Speaker 3: didn't go in eighty sex. We got married in eighty
Speaker 3: seven and eventually by the by the time I returned,
Speaker 3: with one exception, I think I was teaching at the
Speaker 3: conferences and then you know I did that with the
Speaker 3: Lyceum conferences and all those and yep, well i've been
Speaker 3: you know, I've been involved ever since.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, but.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was just something about the ancient Greek culture
Speaker 3: that I really fell in love with, including you know,
Speaker 3: the tragedies, Sophocles and Homer. I've been returning to work
Speaker 3: on Homer. Yeah, that's all. It's all been.
Speaker 2: So tell us a little bit about your work on
Speaker 2: kind of the the I'm curious about Homer. About Homer,
Speaker 2: what kind of work do you do? Are you doing
Speaker 2: on him?
Speaker 3: And well, it's connected, it's not directly on Homer, although
Speaker 3: it kind of it sort of is. I became very
Speaker 3: interested in the lost works of Aristotle. All we have
Speaker 3: everything Plato ever wrote. Everything Plato wrote has survived Aristotle.
Speaker 3: We have about a fifth of what he wrote and there,
Speaker 3: but there's a lot of fragments. And fragments can mean
Speaker 3: either works that survive from antiquity that quote Aristotle a
Speaker 3: quota work that doesn't survive, or I mean more literal
Speaker 3: the Pyrus fragments something like that and one of the
Speaker 3: works he wrote. And there's kind of a big move
Speaker 3: now there's there's one guy in particular I've been working
Speaker 3: closely with at the University of Padua. The idea is
Speaker 3: that we need to reassess all the evidence for Aristotle's
Speaker 3: lost works, and the first work I have actually I
Speaker 3: have my books here, some of them. Anyway, I don't
Speaker 3: know if you can see that. Is it aristotle Lost
Speaker 3: Homeric Problems? Yeah, that and you know it's Oxford University Press,
Speaker 3: and I mentioned the Irate Institute.
Speaker 2: That's great with.
Speaker 3: Dollars of ancient philosophy, Lucus Caancer. But anyway, uh so
Speaker 3: that was the first work of his lost work that
Speaker 3: I've I published on and published a lot on. Namely,
Speaker 3: he wrote a work called the Homeric Problems, which was
Speaker 3: said to be in six books. That would have been
Speaker 3: six papyrus roles scrolls, so you know it would be
Speaker 3: a substantial work, and it was probably I mean, there
Speaker 3: was emerging a kind of culture where the they weren't
Speaker 3: sacred texts, but Homer's epics were very important to the
Speaker 3: I mean, if you were an aristocratic young male, you know,
Speaker 3: being educated, you would be reading and discussing Homer, I mean,
Speaker 3: and and and there'd be questions that would arise, and
Speaker 3: these became known as Homeric problems. And it was probably
Speaker 3: Aristotle who got this started, but there may have been
Speaker 3: and partly was it was to discuss you know, problematic
Speaker 3: texts or parent contradictions and characterization. But also there was
Speaker 3: there were critics of Homer, like Plato in the Republic
Speaker 3: says Homer should be banned and uh. And one response
Speaker 3: to that was to say, well, we'll, we'll, we'll interpret
Speaker 3: him allegorically. And Aristota rejected both of those, you know, Uh,
Speaker 3: he shouldn't be banned, you know, and for reasons deeper
Speaker 3: than just one's appraisal of Homer his view of art
Speaker 3: or literature anyway. But so I became really fascinated in that.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: And I've published well, this one book, uh and then uh,
Speaker 3: several articles where most of the fragments survive in the
Speaker 3: margins of the the manuscripts of Homer that have survived
Speaker 3: to the Middle Ages, right, And so they're very you know,
Speaker 3: they're difficult to read, and but I rely on mostly
Speaker 3: I rely on other scholars for that. But some of
Speaker 3: the some of the stuff I've looked at directly, and
Speaker 3: I'm just find that really fascinating. Uh to dig up
Speaker 3: this old Aristotle and and try to, uh, you know,
Speaker 3: figure out what what's going on?
Speaker 2: And uh so I'm curious now, So so what so
Speaker 2: we're all familiar I think with uh, with with Homer.
Speaker 2: So what what what value did Aristotle see in Homer
Speaker 2: that that obviously Plato did not.
Speaker 3: Well, Aristotle thought that Homer was the he was the
Speaker 3: paradigm of epic poetry. I mean, because Aristotle wrote a
Speaker 3: work in two books called the Poetics. The second book
Speaker 3: is lost, which was probably it was almost It was
Speaker 3: certainly on comedy, you know, ancient Greek comedy, the plays
Speaker 3: like Aristophanes and stuff, and also similar kinds of like
Speaker 3: there's a there was a genre called lampoons, and he
Speaker 3: probably talked about that as well. But the first, the
Speaker 3: first book of the Poetics, which is the one that survives,
Speaker 3: is on tragedy and epic and especially tragedy, but which
Speaker 3: I think Aristotle probably I think he regarded as a
Speaker 3: superior form to Homer. But he did think Homer was
Speaker 3: a genius and brilliant and the main difference, though because
Speaker 3: he thought he created I mean, he went under the
Speaker 3: assumption that there was one man named Homer who wrote
Speaker 3: both of these who wrote both of these plays. I mean,
Speaker 3: so modern Homeric scholars have very different views of those things.
Speaker 3: But he and there is a I mean, there's a
Speaker 3: reason why he keeps getting translated. He's continually discussed. I
Speaker 3: find there's something really fascinating about these Homeric stories, and
Speaker 3: they really they contain something of value for understanding, not
Speaker 3: just the kind of the archaic period that it emerged
Speaker 3: out of, or the Bronze Age culture that it talks about,
Speaker 3: but the classical period, because they regarded it as so
Speaker 3: such a value. Plato's problem was that he thought Plato
Speaker 3: thought literature and art, generally representational art, was anti philosophical.
Speaker 3: He thought that, you know, the forms. I don't know
Speaker 3: how much into Plato's metaphysics you want to get, but
Speaker 3: he was a metaphysical duellist. Plato thought there that this world,
Speaker 3: the world of our bodies and physical reality, was a
Speaker 3: quasi quasi real realm, a reflection of a greater you know, realm.
Speaker 3: The world of the forms, or the ideas called forms,
Speaker 3: I think is better. And this world is a kind
Speaker 3: of imperfect reflection of the world of forms art. He
Speaker 3: thought representational art was a copy of a copy. It
Speaker 3: was a it was an imitation of this reality, this
Speaker 3: material world, and so he thought it was the opposite
Speaker 3: of philosophy. Philosophy is supposed to, for Plato, involves turning
Speaker 3: your back on the evidence of the senses, trying to
Speaker 3: think more abstractly, using pure reason reason alone. That's why
Speaker 3: he thought mathematics was so important, because you know mathematics,
Speaker 3: it seems, you know, it might seem that that's what
Speaker 3: you're doing, turning your back on the sense is using
Speaker 3: pure reason, and then in kind of you suddenly will
Speaker 3: will grasp the forms or I'm being a little you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's more complicated than that. That's kind of a story.
Speaker 3: But the idea is that art does not contribute to
Speaker 3: that at all. Art is it's a copy of a copy.
Speaker 3: It's someone a painter uses his sense perception to look
Speaker 3: at an artwork and he copies it. And it's often
Speaker 3: driven by emotion. And Plato seems to think that when
Speaker 3: their genius did happen, it was because the gods were
Speaker 3: speaking through you. Was kind of divine inspiration. It couldn't
Speaker 3: have been reason that was responsible for it. And that
Speaker 3: explains why. Since it's twice removed from reality, right removed
Speaker 3: from the truth, it's dangerous. I mean, after all you have,
Speaker 3: you have Homer has these gods that do horrible things.
Speaker 3: Let's face it, they're not Christian gods.
Speaker 2: And Christian God does pretty horrible things.
Speaker 3: Well yeah, well he does different horrible things. He becomes
Speaker 3: a man and gives us a philosophy that that destroys us.
Speaker 3: Whereas you know, Poseidon, you know, pretends to be a
Speaker 3: human being and the next thing you know, he's abusing
Speaker 3: women or something like that. So and also, I mean
Speaker 3: what really, For example, Plato was in the Republic, he
Speaker 3: particularly was found dangerous. That brilliant line of Achilles. When
Speaker 3: Achilles is in Hades, he's in the afterlife, he's kind
Speaker 3: of got the run of the place. And Odysseus, you
Speaker 3: know Odysseus, this is in a book eleven of the Odyssey.
Speaker 3: Odysseus sees him in says, you know, you don't have
Speaker 3: much to complain about. I mean, yeah, you're dead and
Speaker 3: you're here, but at least you know, you're a pretty
Speaker 3: big man on campus around Hades and Odysseus sorry, and
Speaker 3: Achilles says to that's did I mix that up? Yeah,
Speaker 3: Achilles says to Odysseus, I don't want to hear that, Odysseus,
Speaker 3: I would rather be the slave of a poor man
Speaker 3: on earth than king of all of the afterlife. Because
Speaker 3: for the Greeks, the afterlife it's just your memories, you know,
Speaker 3: they go to some place and you have. But but
Speaker 3: for the ancient Greeks, the earth is where it happens.
Speaker 3: You want to be our hero, it has to happen
Speaker 3: here on earth, and that's where all you have is.
Speaker 3: It's like being a grandmother saying, ask me about my grandchildren.
Speaker 3: You know, that's kind of what Hades is. And for
Speaker 3: someone like Achilles, no, I don't want any of that.
Speaker 3: He dies young. He knew he was going to die young.
Speaker 3: He chose to go to Troy, having been told that
Speaker 3: he could stay in Ithaca with no fame, but lived
Speaker 3: to an old age. He didn't want that. So but
Speaker 3: that that's a very brilliant expression of the Greek worldview,
Speaker 3: and Plato says, no, we don't want that. In the republic.
Speaker 3: That's going to teach soldiers that they shouldn't fear that
Speaker 3: they don't want the afterlife. You know, we want warriors
Speaker 3: going into battle thinking there's something better when they die,
Speaker 3: and you know so so Aristotle's rejection of Homer, I
Speaker 3: think is not just on literary ground. I mean Aristotle's rejection,
Speaker 3: sorry of Plato on Homer. It's not just on literary
Speaker 3: grounds that Plato didn't understand. Plato was pretty much he
Speaker 3: had an idea of art as didactic. You know, it's
Speaker 3: it's it's a moral it's a morality player or something like.
Speaker 3: That's a little unsophisticated, but that's sort of pretty much
Speaker 3: his view. And if you're gonna have art at all,
Speaker 3: it's got to it's it's got to encourage proper morals.
Speaker 3: And for Ariosot, I think he looked at Homer in
Speaker 3: a very different way. I mean, I don't know, you know,
Speaker 3: it's a story, it has a plot. In his view,
Speaker 3: it has characterization. You see, you can talk about this.
Speaker 3: That's kind of what these Homeric problems probably were raising
Speaker 3: questions Odysseus would I mean one of the ones I
Speaker 3: just have I have a paper coming out in well,
Speaker 3: God knows when these things come out because I may
Speaker 3: I send them in on the deadline. And then you know,
Speaker 3: who knows what academics do. But it's a Calypso offered Odysseus,
Speaker 3: you know, on the eye on Calypso's island, offered Odysseus immortality,
Speaker 3: and he said no. And so that became one of
Speaker 3: these problems. Why did Odysseus refuse immortality because Calypso and
Speaker 3: it's not boring Christian heaven. Calypso says, stay with me.
Speaker 3: You will be immortal, you will have pleasure in my
Speaker 3: bed every night. You will not grow old. And he
Speaker 3: says no. And you know, I'll take Penelope for all
Speaker 3: her aging. And so the question is why, And you
Speaker 3: know some people think, yeah, why and and I think
Speaker 3: it relates to that point about Achilles. It sounds really
Speaker 3: nice at first, right, you know, Eclipso is a nymph.
Speaker 3: She doesn't grow old. You know, she's she's kind of
Speaker 3: semi it's supposed to be really good looking, of course,
Speaker 3: and she says that I'm you know, I'm not growing
Speaker 3: old like Penelope. Right, And but again, for Odysseus, to
Speaker 3: be a man means to achieve things. And now this
Speaker 3: was probably, you know, part of the Greek culture that
Speaker 3: that we might pause over but and to achieve things
Speaker 3: that other people see as great accomplishments. That was really important.
Speaker 3: And if if, if, if, staying on an island with
Speaker 3: this really hot goddess for the rest of my life
Speaker 3: means that I'm going to disappear, you know, I'll be
Speaker 3: this obscure figure that no one's ever heard of. Again, No,
Speaker 3: I'm not going to do it. And there are other
Speaker 3: reasons as well, and and people talk about I mean, uh,
Speaker 3: there was one view was that, well, Odysseus was really
Speaker 3: smart and he knew that Calypso couldn't grant him immortality.
Speaker 3: Only Zeus can do that. So that's that's not as
Speaker 3: interesting an answer. And Arizontle's answered aren't really brilliant, you know,
Speaker 3: they're not as interesting as some of the other ones
Speaker 3: that might occur to us.
Speaker 2: But so so all of these lust wooks, I mean,
Speaker 2: you've you've got the one book on on on Homa.
Speaker 2: What else are you guys expecting to find?
Speaker 3: Well, a lot of it is not. Well, the work
Speaker 3: I'm I'm devoting most of my time to now is
Speaker 3: one called the zoka, which means animal matters, and one
Speaker 3: of the last conversations I had with Alan Godhealth was
Speaker 3: you know, we really someone needs to do more work
Speaker 3: on that, and I thought, yeah, yeah, I went ought
Speaker 3: to you know, I wonder who it's going to be.
Speaker 3: I know, I wasn't this is you know, this was
Speaker 3: I think the last year of Allan's life and he's
Speaker 3: been gone what ten years something like that, I think
Speaker 3: twenty thirteen so.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 3: But I then started to work on that. I thought,
Speaker 3: this is I kind of stumbled across it somewhere and
Speaker 3: I started looking at the evidence and wasn't satisfied with
Speaker 3: what had been written on it in the past. So
Speaker 3: I started working on it, and i've I have a
Speaker 3: couple of publications. One publication has appeared already, I have
Speaker 3: a couple in progress. But most of all I'm working.
Speaker 3: What I want to do is as part of this
Speaker 3: big project centered in Padua, in the University of Padua,
Speaker 3: I want to have an edition of the the the
Speaker 3: Greek and some Latin texts, translation and commentary. And that's
Speaker 3: what I'm working on now, and I'm hoping that'll in
Speaker 3: another year or so that'll be finished. Now I will
Speaker 3: say this, I think it's a more boring work because
Speaker 3: what I argue is that this was and one of
Speaker 3: the things Alan talks about in his works on aerosol's
Speaker 3: biology is that there was a collection of data stage,
Speaker 3: an organization of data, and then the explanation of the data,
Speaker 3: the causal explanation, and we have his works on the
Speaker 3: collection of data that hasn't survived. Well, that's what I
Speaker 3: argue that the zoeka is, the animal matters is and
Speaker 3: I'm one of the things. I spent a week in Padua,
Speaker 3: which is really lovely because it's thirty minute train ride
Speaker 3: to Venice, which is pretty cool, and it's a beautiful
Speaker 3: city in its own right. What I did is I
Speaker 3: worked with some of the people there and I looked
Speaker 3: at you know, I gave a two hour presentation of
Speaker 3: you know, the evidence for Aristotle zoeka in Byzantine etymological works,
Speaker 3: and you know, so I'm scraping the barrel right now.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's not a lot of stuff left. I've
Speaker 3: collected the material that exists. But I'm finding it a
Speaker 3: fascinating activity. Although if I had to choose, which work
Speaker 3: would you like to be discovered in the sands of
Speaker 3: Egypt or in you know, Papyrus, or in Herculeannium. I
Speaker 3: definitely want the work on Homer. I think it'd be
Speaker 3: a much more fascinating work.
Speaker 2: So do we know why Plato's survived and Aristotle didn't.
Speaker 3: I think the main reason is Aristotle. I think he
Speaker 3: appeared at the wrong time in a way, and it's
Speaker 3: a complicated story. But when when Aristotle died, there's stories
Speaker 3: about his library going to Theophrastus and Theophrastus giving it
Speaker 3: to his heirs, and they were a neglect the work.
Speaker 3: And this is why the archives is really important, and
Speaker 3: neglecting the work, and then it showed it was lost
Speaker 3: until fragments of it appeared in Rome centuries later. And
Speaker 3: there's those are the stories we get from Plutarch and Athena,
Speaker 3: these these ancient authors, and there's disputes about how much
Speaker 3: we should we could rely on. I don't think. I
Speaker 3: think his Lyceum which continued after he died, of course,
Speaker 3: I think it had. It must have had a copy
Speaker 3: of most of his works. I find that strange that
Speaker 3: it wouldn't. But it just happened that the rival school,
Speaker 3: Plato's Academy, which continued Plato's academy was in continuous operation
Speaker 3: from when he found it until five five twenty nine
Speaker 3: a d. When Justinian banned the teaching of any pagan philosophy.
Speaker 3: Aristotle school didn't do so well. That is, his Lyceum
Speaker 3: continued to work. And that's one of the things I'm
Speaker 3: interested in now is I've become more involved in Project
Speaker 3: Theophrastis that's recovering as much evidence as we can about
Speaker 3: the the followers of Aristotle in the early Lyceum. But
Speaker 3: I think his philosophy just wasn't as popular. It didn't
Speaker 3: catch on as much during the Hellenistic period after, you know,
Speaker 3: when when things changed very pretty radically from the Classical
Speaker 3: period to the Hellenistic after the death of Alexander the Great,
Speaker 3: and even before that with the the kind of the
Speaker 3: Macedonian conquest of the whole you know, the whole world
Speaker 3: in effect ultimately, and and and so what you get
Speaker 3: is Plato's philosophy, I think had was more popular. And
Speaker 3: then the new philosophies that emerged Stoicism, Epicureanism a bit later,
Speaker 3: skepticism of various forms, these had I think they were
Speaker 3: more influential, and I think, uh, and then a lot.
Speaker 3: I think a lot of the works just may have
Speaker 3: been not as interesting because Aristotol was you know, he
Speaker 3: wrote works that were probably collections of data about animals
Speaker 3: and collections of data about uh well, one of the
Speaker 3: works I'm interested in his Aristotol wrote a work on
Speaker 3: weather signs, and you know that is predicting, predicting the
Speaker 3: weather based on the you know, what what the birds
Speaker 3: are doing and what animal you know, if the setipedes
Speaker 3: are running towards the wall, you know, maybe there's going
Speaker 3: to rain. And I think he didn't believe all this stuff,
Speaker 3: but he thought that if a lot of people believed that,
Speaker 3: we should collect this data and see if there's anything
Speaker 3: to it. So I imagine some of those works were
Speaker 3: rather uninteresting to philosophers. In fact, it's it's not philosophy
Speaker 3: at all at all as we know it. And since
Speaker 3: it's very expensive to copy works, and I think they
Speaker 3: weren't interesting to a lot of people, and and so
Speaker 3: it's that's what I think happened. On the other hand,
Speaker 3: it's not just boring stuff. I mean, he wrote dialogues
Speaker 3: on justice, on on he wrote, you know, a treatise
Speaker 3: on the River Nile, and you know, an explanation of it.
Speaker 3: He has all these interesting works that are well. He
Speaker 3: wrote works on medicine. I actually I published an article
Speaker 3: on a possible fragments from that work as well. But
Speaker 3: so I think it was a lack of interest in
Speaker 3: some of his works, that his school was not as
Speaker 3: influential as the other ones. Plus Plato wrote a set
Speaker 3: number of you know, fairly however, thirty four or whatever
Speaker 3: it is dialogues, and no, it's more going to be
Speaker 3: more than that, but they kind of were carried on
Speaker 3: by his school, and you know, they never really went
Speaker 3: out of favor. And by the time you get to
Speaker 3: the period, I mean, the crucial period is when they
Speaker 3: start copy papyrus onto vellum or or different you know
Speaker 3: kind of you know, into manuscript books that it's very
Speaker 3: expensive process, and the ones that people weren't interested in
Speaker 3: got lost.
Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, So is is the wook you've done on
Speaker 2: ancient philosophy all Aristotle? Or is it included other other
Speaker 2: Greek thinkers?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah, I know, I've done a lot of others.
Speaker 3: I didn't bring them all down here, but I brought
Speaker 3: some of them I got here. I wrote this is
Speaker 3: a translation of Plato's Laws Book ten. It's a translation
Speaker 3: with commentary in the in the.
Speaker 2: So you enjoy translating, what's that you enjoy translating?
Speaker 3: I enjoy having translated. So that is when I've got
Speaker 3: the finished product, I do like it, and I do
Speaker 3: like it, particularly when I think there's not a very
Speaker 3: good translation out there. And uh, yeah, so I like
Speaker 3: it and I like like. Right now, I have two
Speaker 3: contracts with Harvard University Press for translations, one of Aristotle's
Speaker 3: Nikomacky and Ethics and one of where I'm general general
Speaker 3: editor of a collection of it's called the Epuscula that
Speaker 3: means Latin for little works in a way. And they're
Speaker 3: not none of them are by Aristotle, likely even though
Speaker 3: they come down what's in his name, But they're probably
Speaker 3: by students of Aristotle. And they're kind of interesting works.
Speaker 3: And I'm doing a couple of them. And then I
Speaker 3: found other people who are experts in mathematics or music
Speaker 3: theory or whatever to do the other ones. And that
Speaker 3: one was supposed to be ready a year ago, but
Speaker 3: one person is holding us up, not me. But yeah,
Speaker 3: I enjoyed. I enjoyed the translation works I also did.
Speaker 3: This is the producust the Sophist. It's a collection of
Speaker 3: the fragments of his I dedicated that to to Leonard Peakoff, Uh,
Speaker 3: not knowing that after right when the book came out,
Speaker 3: I was asked if I would, And I actually have
Speaker 3: this one here too. I'm bragging. I'm sorry, I shouldn't
Speaker 3: do that. This is Theophrastus of on Winds. It's a
Speaker 3: it's the Greek text with translation and commentary. Had I
Speaker 3: known that I was going to be doing that, I
Speaker 3: would have dedicated that one to Leonard because I referred
Speaker 3: to him in one of my talks in Athens as
Speaker 3: iron RAN's Theophrastus. And he he called me and and
Speaker 3: said he he loved that description, and so I was
Speaker 3: I would glad because I kind of looked at it
Speaker 3: now in a way, I think he's much more than
Speaker 3: than iron RAN's Theophrastus. Theophrastus was the person who followed
Speaker 3: Aristotle on the school. He kind of did work because
Speaker 3: Aristota was a scientist as well as a philosopher. He
Speaker 3: you know, he kind of he did work in botany
Speaker 3: that Arizonto only got a start on. And he did
Speaker 3: work on you know, wins and and he wrote a
Speaker 3: treatise on fire and stuff. So he's not whereas Leonard,
Speaker 3: you know, wrote opar As as a favor to iron
Speaker 3: Rand in effect, and he kind of and I think
Speaker 3: he's in a different position. Theophrassis is among a group
Speaker 3: of people working in various sciences. Where Aristotle was aware
Speaker 3: that this is my theory given you know, the best
Speaker 3: of the knowledge, you know, and so if someone comes
Speaker 3: along and disagrees with him, that's no big thing. Whereas
Speaker 3: iron Ran, it wasn't a science. She wasn't a physicist, uh,
Speaker 3: and an expert in botany and things like that, where
Speaker 3: it all just kind of come together. She was a philosopher,
Speaker 3: pure and simple, and that is very different than than
Speaker 3: the science. And my point is that one of doctor
Speaker 3: Peakoff's roles, I think was to ensure the purity of
Speaker 3: the philosophy beyond her death to the extent that he could.
Speaker 3: And that's what and and unfortunately he was challenged to
Speaker 3: do that very early on by people who want to
Speaker 3: open objectivism up to anything. And uh, and I you know,
Speaker 3: to do that without in a you know, in a
Speaker 3: dogmatizing sort of way is really difficult. I think he uh,
Speaker 3: what he did in the eighties was was just and
Speaker 3: early ninees were really important from that perspective. So what
Speaker 3: what I see happening in the eighties in a way
Speaker 3: was in when when understanding objectivism came out. That was
Speaker 3: dealing with this the the rationalism in the movement, and
Speaker 3: then with fact and value and things of that. It
Speaker 3: was dealing with the subjectivism in the movement. And and
Speaker 3: so from that, you know, as in you know, Theophrastis
Speaker 3: was Aristotle's intellectual air, and he did what he did,
Speaker 3: but it wasn't the same and it wasn't as monumental
Speaker 3: I would say, an achievements as well. I mean, they
Speaker 3: both have hard acts to follow, Theophrastus.
Speaker 2: And because of Leonard, we will get to keep you know,
Speaker 2: we've got the full collection of Ironrand. We'll keep the
Speaker 2: full collection of Ironran.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, indeed disappear.
Speaker 2: And he made sure of that, so, you know, and
Speaker 2: they've all been published and do as good of a
Speaker 2: job as preserving aristotle stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think so. And even well Leonard in
Speaker 3: some of his more cynical moments where you know, even
Speaker 3: having new acid free paper so it survives the apocalypse.
Speaker 2: Put it into a nuclear roof bunker somewhere, bury it
Speaker 2: All and yeah, in Utah, I remember that there was
Speaker 2: a were supposed to get a mine, buy a mine
Speaker 2: in Utah and bury All was there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that sounds familiar.
Speaker 2: No, it was about two thousand, about two thousand, even
Speaker 2: before nine to eleven. Yeah. So, so you've done a
Speaker 2: lot of the Ancient Philosophy. You've also written a lot
Speaker 2: about iron Rand, and so tell us a little bit
Speaker 2: about the work you've done on nine Rand. I'm just
Speaker 2: wondering where you get the time to do both. I mean,
Speaker 2: you do all this and how you kind of mentally
Speaker 2: divide the two or do you see it as more
Speaker 2: integrated as maybe it appears. No? Not, I mean.
Speaker 3: I've enjoyed myself. No, at at this moment, I've kind
Speaker 3: of I've taken on too much. So I'm not really
Speaker 3: enjoying it as much as I have in the past.
Speaker 3: But in the past I really loved it when I
Speaker 3: had an Ancient Philosophy project or two and an iron
Speaker 3: Ran project. And so in the past that was working
Speaker 3: for doctor Peacock to edit the the the nonfiction work,
Speaker 3: the Marginalia, the non fiction work, the nonfiction writing course,
Speaker 3: and the Q and a and I think that's that's
Speaker 3: it as far as that goes, I think. And then
Speaker 3: and then I did Song of Russia, which I read
Speaker 3: the the Iron Ran and Song of Russia, which I
Speaker 3: really enjoyed, was.
Speaker 2: Kind of ARCHI that is, I don't think a lot
Speaker 2: of people are familiar with that.
Speaker 3: I don't have a copy of it here. That that's
Speaker 3: It's when I kind of I went back to my
Speaker 3: roots in a way, in the sense of when I
Speaker 3: was really interested in anti Soviet literature and Iron there
Speaker 3: it is. Uh, that's I think I Ran is the
Speaker 3: first Soviet dissident, the first person. I mean, there were
Speaker 3: some others who were more wishy while she but uh,
Speaker 3: what she took on was this whole idea of the
Speaker 3: in Hollywood the Communists were mistreated and isn't it horrible? Well, well,
Speaker 3: she she was asked to. She worked in Hollywood. She
Speaker 3: knew what was going on with the Hollywood Communists, how
Speaker 3: they were influencing filmed in very subtle ways, even say
Speaker 3: very clever ways.
Speaker 2: And she was asked to.
Speaker 3: At the HUAC hearings, the hearings for the what is it,
Speaker 3: the House on American Activities Committee, they held hearings to
Speaker 3: investigate communism in Hollywood, and she was called as a witness. Now,
Speaker 3: she didn't particularly she didn't really think that this was
Speaker 3: the proper function of Congress. I mean, she thought, if
Speaker 3: they're if they're you know, they if they're worried that
Speaker 3: there's actual foreign governments, uh, you know, influence, then then
Speaker 3: that's a proper understand you know, but that should be
Speaker 3: the FBI or someone like that having these congressional hearings.
Speaker 3: But she she thought that there was no one really
Speaker 3: speaking on getting really what was going on, and she
Speaker 3: wanted to talk about that, and unfortunately all they talked,
Speaker 3: all they asked her about was the film Song of Russia. Uh.
Speaker 3: And so that's what we have the information where she
Speaker 3: talks about, uh, what in what an obvious whitewashing of
Speaker 3: Stalinists Russia it is uh And so it's very interesting
Speaker 3: I thought to both get into the making of that film,
Speaker 3: what that said about Hollywood. It was an interesting time
Speaker 3: because I could interview one of this the one of
Speaker 3: the screenwriters of the play who later turned Soviet He
Speaker 3: turned evidence against the Hollywood communists. So he was treated
Speaker 3: like dirt for the rust and the whole idea of
Speaker 3: that the Hollywood Ten. You know that these people were
Speaker 3: horrible victims of of American oppression when they were defending
Speaker 3: Stalin and I mean were some of them, you know,
Speaker 3: into the eighties were we're defending the Soviet Union and
Speaker 3: and Scott and we're not apologetic at all. In fact,
Speaker 3: they want, they demanded that you know, they be treated
Speaker 3: as as heroes. And and I Ran, I think she
Speaker 3: had some both her testimony and the things she wrote
Speaker 3: about it, and I try to gather all that information
Speaker 3: together and to tell the story of it. And uh,
Speaker 3: and I enjoyed that project very much, but I also
Speaker 3: came to the conclusion at the end, I never want
Speaker 3: to read another Soviet dissident, you know, you know, any
Speaker 3: more stories about how horrible it was in the Soviet Union,
Speaker 3: although people ought to keep that alive, of course.
Speaker 2: And so so in addition, you've done the collections of
Speaker 2: essays on I Rang's novels.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was the next That was the thing to
Speaker 3: keep me going to have these Iinram projects. And I
Speaker 3: was very pleased about that because I kind of, with
Speaker 3: my own initiative sort of just started writing to academic presses.
Speaker 3: And that top tier ones weren't really interested, but I
Speaker 3: got Lexington Books, which was at least at the time
Speaker 3: was owned by Roman and Littlefield. They were very interested,
Speaker 3: and I was. It was we'd also reached a point
Speaker 3: where I thought, even if the the you know, the
Speaker 3: really top objectivist intellectuals didn't agree to write essays for me,
Speaker 3: we had all these other people who were coming up
Speaker 3: and uh so, yeah, I think they're terrific. I think
Speaker 3: they're really uh important essays. I also was very interested
Speaker 3: in doing all four and doing them in order, even
Speaker 3: though that that might not seem like a good idea.
Speaker 3: And I liked the the the historical parts of it,
Speaker 3: that is, the the information we have on on the
Speaker 3: on the history of the works and how they were written,
Speaker 3: and when, particularly with the earlier ones, we the Living
Speaker 3: and and Anthem, when Iran was really struggling to get
Speaker 3: things published, and whereas by the time you get the Atlas, shrug,
Speaker 3: there's not my history there except for the drafts, which
Speaker 3: are fascinating themselves, the drafts of of of these works,
Speaker 3: because by then she could pick her own publisher after
Speaker 3: the fountain Head. But yeah, so I'm very proud of
Speaker 3: those and I wanted kind of historical stuff, literary analysis
Speaker 3: and also philosophy, and and so there's really good, really
Speaker 3: excellent pieces in there by on car On Cargate, Terra Smith,
Speaker 3: Greg Sel, Mary Tora Buckman has some really good literary
Speaker 3: analysis in there. And yeah, and I'm and I was
Speaker 3: really pleased that aar I took the initiative to contact
Speaker 3: the publisher and see about making an arrangement to release
Speaker 3: them for free on I think it's new ideal, Right,
Speaker 3: it's or yeah, I forget be.
Speaker 2: Released as essays as independent essays.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're they're they've kind of released them slowly over
Speaker 3: going back the past year or so, and so you
Speaker 3: can find those online. And I think they're real. They're
Speaker 3: real gems because when they came out, people were aware
Speaker 3: of them and were reading them and thought, yeah, this
Speaker 3: is great stuff. But you know, the next generation comes
Speaker 3: along and and you want to keep those because of
Speaker 3: it's it's it's there's not a lot like that out
Speaker 3: there because a lot of the stuff that's being written
Speaker 3: by iron Rand is really bad. But about iron Rand,
Speaker 3: did I Yeah, about iron Rand is really bad and
Speaker 3: from people who don't know what they're talking about. This
Speaker 3: includes some of the biographies that are out there. But
Speaker 3: there's also I think there's one Iron Rand as a
Speaker 3: Jewish thing, you know, person.
Speaker 2: I don't read these books, but I hear about them.
Speaker 3: But yeah, and then I mean I I reviewed, I
Speaker 3: wrote a review. I didn't want to do it, but
Speaker 3: I figured if I didn't say yes, someone else would
Speaker 3: and not as good. I was asked to review a
Speaker 3: book by It was on in Rand and Chernichewsky. There's
Speaker 3: this Russian, you know, nineteenth century Russian egoist, socialist, nihilist, anarchist,
Speaker 3: you know, the whole bag, right, And I've heard this before,
Speaker 3: the idea that he was an influence on iin Ran
Speaker 3: and the book was so bad. It was so shocking.
Speaker 3: But I think people don't have the same standards if
Speaker 3: it's Iron Ran, because okay, any stuff that some historian
Speaker 3: can come up with, they would never in a million years.
Speaker 3: I think if someone in ancient philosophy tried to to
Speaker 3: have such a shoddy job of making connections between between
Speaker 3: two thinkers, at least I haven't seen works like that.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I think for the time being, these these
Speaker 3: are essay collections are really really valuable, and there's some
Speaker 3: real gems in there, and I'm glad you can find them,
Speaker 3: you know. You know, the New Ideal has been publishing
Speaker 3: them fairly regularly, and I think they've gone through them.
Speaker 3: I don't know if they've done all of them, but
Speaker 3: a great many of them.
Speaker 2: Well it's great because now there's such a ball. So
Speaker 2: any of you who are interested in any of these
Speaker 2: essays or I says about any of the novels, you
Speaker 2: can find them online. They're easy to access. Any projects
Speaker 2: you're working on right now in terms of oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: there's a there's.
Speaker 3: I guess the iron So that's what it looks like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've got I've got them all here behind me.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Is are you working on any project right now? No?
Speaker 3: And I'm really I want to find and an iron
Speaker 3: Ran project. I've done a lot of talks recently on
Speaker 3: iron Rand and atheism and her unique approach to to atheism,
Speaker 3: I mean, the form it takes, the arguments against the
Speaker 3: existence of God, things of that sort. I kind of
Speaker 3: miss the bus on that one because the time to
Speaker 3: write a book on that would have been when the
Speaker 3: new atheists were out there and I was just doing
Speaker 3: other things and I was working on and I talked
Speaker 3: to Ankar about working.
Speaker 2: On on the stuff.
Speaker 3: But it's you know, it's finding the time. So that's
Speaker 3: you know, it's in the back of my mind. It
Speaker 3: might be better for me in retirement.
Speaker 2: I mean, a lot of these atheists are finding God,
Speaker 2: so maybe now's a good time. Yeah, that's a good
Speaker 2: time to remind them of better arguments.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Or if they're not finding God there they're cultural Christians
Speaker 3: or something like that, and that's a good that's a
Speaker 3: good point that that. Yeah, these days are I.
Speaker 2: Think it's a great time because they're all questioning, they'll
Speaker 2: all have these doubts and now is a good time
Speaker 2: to bolster the case. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'm so I've been working on you know,
Speaker 3: I've given the number of talks even on the ontological
Speaker 3: argument as esoteric is as that is. I'd also like
Speaker 3: to find another archive product. I'd like to go look
Speaker 3: at the drafts of of the or you know, with
Speaker 3: the Living and Anthem and see if I can come
Speaker 3: up with a project there. You know, I like the
Speaker 3: idea of digging through the archives and I think it
Speaker 3: will become easier to access the material and all that,
Speaker 3: and so something like that. It's in the back of
Speaker 3: my mind. It's just I've got so much ancient philosophy
Speaker 3: stuff I've I've said yes to, so it'll be a while.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I definitely I want to write more on
Speaker 3: on Iran, that's for sure. But there's I should mention
Speaker 3: one piece that I wrote a long time ago but
Speaker 3: will be appearing. There's the Iran Society. Philosophical Studies is
Speaker 3: a series published by University of Pittsburgh Press, really beautifully published.
Speaker 3: They recently published Terry Smith's book Egoism Egoism Without Permission,
Speaker 3: which really I recommend that book. But the series, the
Speaker 3: collection of essays series that I referred to they have.
Speaker 3: I think the next one that will be out is
Speaker 3: on Aristotle and iron Rand or iron Rand and Aristotle,
Speaker 3: I forget what title they arrived at, by Jim Lennox,
Speaker 3: edited by Jim Lennox and Greg sel Mary and I have.
Speaker 3: I have a piece in there on iron Rand and
Speaker 3: Aris iron Rand as a as Aristotelian literary aesthetics. So
Speaker 3: it's comparing Aristotle and iron Rand on literary aesthetics. So
Speaker 3: you've probably heard a version of it in the two
Speaker 3: thousands at some point, yes, yes, But finally it's you know,
Speaker 3: it's ready to go, you know. So yeah, things are happening,
Speaker 3: and I think you know, you go to a conference
Speaker 3: and you're introduced to a young objectivist intellectual you've never
Speaker 3: heard of, and that's, you know, a really good time
Speaker 3: for someone who's been around for a while, I imagine
Speaker 3: like you, that's always a good sign that you know,
Speaker 3: whoa you know, there's more and more of them and
Speaker 3: fresh blood fresh yeah yeah, yeah, so that's that's very encouraging.
Speaker 3: And and and we have I mean, I've liked the
Speaker 3: fact that you know, well Alan is Alan God health
Speaker 3: has gone now, but but he was a big scholar
Speaker 3: in ancient philosophy. It's terrific having you know, Greg who's
Speaker 3: often been really good with feedback on the translation projects
Speaker 3: of mine. And in fact, we just had a workshop
Speaker 3: on Eudemian Ethics book eight in Austin that Greg kind
Speaker 3: of hosted and we we kind of organized that together
Speaker 3: where mostly just reading Greek and looking at my translation
Speaker 3: with Greg and Jason Rhyans and good for a certain
Speaker 3: kind of person that is a blast, you know, that's
Speaker 3: and I'm one of them.
Speaker 2: So it was it was terrific.
Speaker 3: So it's nice that I have this this overlap, that
Speaker 3: there's you know, the's always been a few people interested
Speaker 3: in Greek philosophy among in the objectivist universe. And I
Speaker 3: hope that some some younger ones on the horizon. I hope.
Speaker 2: I don't know, but I hope so too, hope so too.
Speaker 2: All Right, so we've got a bunch of questions. Uh,
Speaker 2: this is good. So actually, this I think is so
Speaker 2: this is some Adam. Let me just let me just wait.
Speaker 2: I've got a few thank yous I need to do.
Speaker 2: Let's say, Carolina, thank you, Jonathan, and these are stickers, Shelley, Mary,
Speaker 2: Eleen Mary Lean again. All right, cool, Oh I didn't.
Speaker 3: I didn't. I was worried I was going to brank,
Speaker 3: bankrupt you tonight or something.
Speaker 2: That we're doing great, We're doing great, Okay, Adam. Adam
Speaker 2: has a fifty dollars question, and he says, I don't
Speaker 2: know a lot about philosophy, but it is very interesting.
Speaker 2: When do you think ran most voog just from Aristotle?
Speaker 2: From what I think I know, he spoke of averages
Speaker 2: when it comes to behavior, inherent purposes, and a lodge
Speaker 2: l of government.
Speaker 3: Well, that's a lot of different issues.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think.
Speaker 3: She always spoken very general terms that his metaphysics was
Speaker 3: recognizing that, you know, existence exists, things are what they are,
Speaker 3: which is the flip side of you know, A is
Speaker 3: A is the you know, he talked very in very
Speaker 3: serious terms about the law of non contradiction, and so,
Speaker 3: you know, the basics of its metaphysics as she described them.
Speaker 3: But you know, jettisating all the I think she calls
Speaker 3: it the nonsense about the moving spheres and you know,
Speaker 3: the prime mover and all that stuff, which is really
Speaker 3: in a way it's kind of astronomy or or something
Speaker 3: like that. Not exactly, but because he calls you know,
Speaker 3: he refers to gods and things like that, So she
Speaker 3: she doesn't accept that. I mean, she would accept, you know,
Speaker 3: the importance of logic. Now he mentioned some things in ethics,
Speaker 3: they're gonna be real differences. I don't know about the average.
Speaker 3: I mean, she doesn't have a theory of the mean,
Speaker 3: you know, virtue as a mean between extreme you know,
Speaker 3: so so the details will be quite different in her
Speaker 3: ethics and in Aristotle. You could say in very broad
Speaker 3: brush terms that you know, they're both virtue ethicists. I
Speaker 3: think I would call them. I know, in the case
Speaker 3: of Aristotle, this is sort of a controversial issue. I
Speaker 3: think they're both egoists in the sense that the purpose
Speaker 3: of a person's life is to achieve one's own, you know,
Speaker 3: happiness in those terms, but that how he formulates it
Speaker 3: and and all of that. There's gonna be a lot
Speaker 3: of divergences. But the person to ask there is Greg
Speaker 3: So Mary. He's done some really excellent stuff on the
Speaker 3: differences between Aristotle and iron Rand on ethics. He gave
Speaker 3: a talk at Aristotle's Lyceum on an aspect of this topic.
Speaker 3: I'm pretty certain I haven't seen the table of contents recently,
Speaker 3: but the work I just referred to the Aristotle and
Speaker 3: nine Ran volume. Greg will have something on that, and
Speaker 3: there must be lectures of his available that where he
Speaker 3: talks about these issues. So and then in politics, by
Speaker 3: the time you get to politics, you're so far removed
Speaker 3: from the basis that. Yeah, to say he has a
Speaker 3: larger role of government, Yeah, that's true, but it's such
Speaker 3: a strange context, the ancient Greek world. You could focus
Speaker 3: on the positives he rejected Plato, he rejected explicitly, And
Speaker 3: that was my doctoral dissertation in my first book was
Speaker 3: Arizotl's criticism of Plato's Republic. And there are these kind
Speaker 3: of themes running through his criticism. And it's not just
Speaker 3: the he's not criticizing the forms and all that in
Speaker 3: this in the part of the politics I'm talking about,
Speaker 3: he's criticizing the communism of the republic aristotol Is. He
Speaker 3: says Plato is focusing too much on He's trying to
Speaker 3: create the unity of an individual human being out of
Speaker 3: a city, and that destroys actual individuals. And so he
Speaker 3: has a lot of good things to say about why
Speaker 3: we don't need philosopher kings in fact, why we need
Speaker 3: you know, there is the rule of law rather than
Speaker 3: a rule of kings. You know, he has a kind
Speaker 3: of a side where he sorts of defends kingship in
Speaker 3: certain context. But I think that's a nod to his
Speaker 3: Macedonian patrons.
Speaker 2: Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 3: And I remember when I was working on the Marginalia,
Speaker 3: iin Ran gets to a point I think in uh,
Speaker 3: in John Herman Randall's work Aristotle, which she would which
Speaker 3: she praised, she gets to the point where he discusses slavery,
Speaker 3: and she writes in the margin something like, oh, Aristotle,
Speaker 3: you know, like you know, say it ain't so, but
Speaker 3: you know, what do you expect? What can you expect
Speaker 3: from you can't have I think a really an actual
Speaker 3: advocate of individual rights when there has there is no
Speaker 3: conception of rights yet, and you can have you know,
Speaker 3: he talks about freedom, and he says positive things about freedom,
Speaker 3: but his conceptualization of what freedom is is very dubious
Speaker 3: in certain aspects. So by the time you get to
Speaker 3: to by the time you get to politics, it's they're
Speaker 3: they're no longer worth comparison comparing. However, they are worth
Speaker 3: comparing when you get to their aesthetics. And that's what
Speaker 3: I do in the article I mentioned earlier.
Speaker 2: And where do you put them? In epistemology? What is
Speaker 2: the theory of knowledge? How do they compare?
Speaker 3: Again, just in broad bruck brush strokes, he believes in
Speaker 3: you know, the efficacy of reason based on sense perception.
Speaker 3: He believes that you know nothing, as Thomas aquinas, but
Speaker 3: nothing reaches the intellect that doesn't come through sense perception.
Speaker 3: So he's very good in those very general terms. He
Speaker 3: regarded logic as really important and things of that sort.
Speaker 3: But again, there's a very I found it a superb course,
Speaker 3: but I don't know how easy it is. But Greg
Speaker 3: saw Mary gave a course years ago on Aristotle's theory
Speaker 3: of knowledge something like that where he goes into detail
Speaker 3: about all the you know, the different kinds of intellectual
Speaker 3: virtues and what's going on. And it can get very complicated.
Speaker 3: And I guess the real point of comparison in epistemology
Speaker 3: would be their theory of concepts. And iron Ran describes
Speaker 3: Aristotle as I forget the expression she uses now, a
Speaker 3: moderate realist, that's it. And there's I think real questions
Speaker 3: as to whether that's whether Aristotle was actually even better
Speaker 3: than that. I mean, he was certainly better than than Plato,
Speaker 3: he was better than the Sophists. But how close he
Speaker 3: is to object? I mean you can find passages that
Speaker 3: sound like measurement omission, but you know, but what you
Speaker 3: can make of that? I mean, we want we don't
Speaker 3: want to massage Aristotle into into iron Ran, but I
Speaker 3: think she would say the important thing is he's pro reason,
Speaker 3: he's this worldly. He recognizes, you know, things are what
Speaker 3: they are. I mean, the primary objects of reality, according
Speaker 3: to Aristotle are the physical, the entities around us, and
Speaker 3: he recognized entities, and he made the distinction between entities
Speaker 3: and attributes and entities and actions, and all of that
Speaker 3: is crucially important. And she's she recognized that.
Speaker 2: Good Baker enjoyed, he says, enjoyed your reason in ancient
Speaker 2: Greek drama lectures? Do you have any more work? And
Speaker 2: ancient plays of poetry? Also? Are the other objectivists working
Speaker 2: on these topics? And if so, what kind of things
Speaker 2: are they working on?
Speaker 3: I don't know of anyone working on ancient Greek literature
Speaker 3: like that. Uh, that was one of my funnest I
Speaker 3: enjoyed myself with that course very much. It was also,
Speaker 3: if I could brag, it was the one lecture, the
Speaker 3: one class where Leonard Peakoff sat in. When I did,
Speaker 3: I applied his view, his theory of how to analyze plays.
Speaker 3: I applied that to Escalus's Agamemnon, and he was thrilled.
Speaker 3: And I was thrilled that he was thrilled. And I
Speaker 3: really enjoyed that course generally. So thank you for you know,
Speaker 3: you never know what happens these courses that we gave
Speaker 3: decades ago. Now I think that's right. I think it's
Speaker 3: decades plural that whether they just kind of float into
Speaker 3: the ether or whether people are still listening to them.
Speaker 3: I've not done in my own teaching. I've I've kind
Speaker 3: of worked on some of these plays that that aren't
Speaker 3: in that course that you know, the Youth, the Euripides, Medea,
Speaker 3: and Sophocles. I think oedipis the King. No, I may know.
Speaker 3: I did oedipis the King in that course, and Leonard
Speaker 3: did antike it. But anyway, I've done some other things,
Speaker 3: but I haven't given lectures on it or anything of
Speaker 3: that sort. I did translate a play of Aristophanes called
Speaker 3: The Assembly of Women, which is Aristophane's critique of egalitarianism
Speaker 3: and communism. It's a fascinating play.
Speaker 2: Richard asks what Plato's forms, a rejection of concepts and
Speaker 2: inability to understand them, or something else.
Speaker 3: I think you could say it was both of those
Speaker 3: first two. Now it's difficult because you could say in
Speaker 3: some respects his heart was in the right place, and
Speaker 3: that is, he thought it was really important that the
Speaker 3: concepts we work with this is our language, universals, that
Speaker 3: they be objective, would be our language, that is, or
Speaker 3: to put it that way, that they refer to something
Speaker 3: that is absolutely true, that absolutely exists. So he was
Speaker 3: resisting the sophists who claim that justice is just. It's
Speaker 3: obeying the law and if you can get you know,
Speaker 3: if no one's watching, you can get away with it.
Speaker 3: There is no it has no harm to you. There
Speaker 3: is no justice. It's a human construct, as you know,
Speaker 3: the postmoderns might say. He was rejecting that, and for
Speaker 3: good reasons. He thought it was very important that there
Speaker 3: we could that we think there there must be something
Speaker 3: that justice refers to that is what it is right,
Speaker 3: and the same with the other virtues and other concepts
Speaker 3: like the human human being, for example. It can't just
Speaker 3: be a bunch of stuff that people make up. He
Speaker 3: thought that was very dangerous and and we would collapse
Speaker 3: into we might say nihilism or something like that. So
Speaker 3: he was aware of that. He also thought it was
Speaker 3: very important to answer people like Heraclitis who thought that
Speaker 3: you know, you look at the world, there are no
Speaker 3: real entities. It's just all this flux. And I think
Speaker 3: Plato thought the only way to combat that into him,
Speaker 3: to improve it is to say, yeah, yeah, that might
Speaker 3: be true. Of this world. Things come into existence, go
Speaker 3: out of existence were constantly changing, but it's not true
Speaker 3: of the other the forms. So he wanted he didn't
Speaker 3: know how to come up with an objective view of
Speaker 3: concepts of universals, and so it's easy to criticize him
Speaker 3: for doing it the way he did, and he deserves
Speaker 3: some of that criticism, I think, but I also I'd
Speaker 3: want to cut him a little slack because I think
Speaker 3: his motives were to some extent, you might say or good,
Speaker 3: let's say, that'd be a better way of putting it. However,
Speaker 3: if you try to achieve in trying to defend that view,
Speaker 3: you start to denigrate sense, perception, denigrate this world. Then
Speaker 3: there's got to be something wrong with you. There's something
Speaker 3: not healthy, not good, and it likely connected to a
Speaker 3: sort of contempt for the world around him and a
Speaker 3: kind of a lofty conception of what philosophers were that
Speaker 3: was not at all admirable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Paul asks, Doctor Peacock says, quote, the arbitrary has
Speaker 2: no epistemic status. Is that a statistically likely assertion that
Speaker 2: is without evidence? An arbitrary assertion? Oh now, is a
Speaker 2: statistically likely assertion that is without evidence and obituary you assessed,
Speaker 2: I don't get that. How can this well, it could
Speaker 2: be without evidence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's okay, I think you would say. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's you know, whatever, meteorologists assume that there's an eighty
Speaker 3: percent chance of a thunderstorm tomorrow. I don't quite get it.
Speaker 3: Or there's there's a fifty five percent chance that Trump
Speaker 3: will win, which is not to say he's going to
Speaker 3: get fifty five percent of the vote, right, Yeah, So
Speaker 3: I mean I don't I don't get claims about likeliness. Now,
Speaker 3: I could imagine a case where you know, you're reading
Speaker 3: what is that Picketty, the guy who wrote Capital, you know,
Speaker 3: who comes across some statistic and it's purely arbitrary or
Speaker 3: the best example, in fact, I have my students read
Speaker 3: this Alex Epstein's first book, What is it called The
Speaker 3: Morality of Fossil Fuels?
Speaker 2: Is that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, a moral moral defensive. There's a chapter in there
Speaker 3: about that claim that was going around that nine percent
Speaker 3: of all climate scientists believe that, you know, global warming
Speaker 3: is happening, it's caused by human beings, and it's dangerous.
Speaker 3: He debunks that. I mean, he he analyzes that, and
Speaker 3: it's if if you see what's behind that, then that
Speaker 3: would be a statistic. That is, it is arbitrary, and
Speaker 3: the people who malvet are just you know, accepting something
Speaker 3: passively or are purely dishonest, and either one of those
Speaker 3: is an unattractive thing to be. But I don't know
Speaker 3: if that's really addressing your question. But and I really
Speaker 3: don't know statistics.
Speaker 2: But he's also he adds this Boltzmann brains seem arbitrary,
Speaker 2: but not alien life. No hard evidence for either, though.
Speaker 3: I don't know Boltzmann's I don't know what both Boltzman's
Speaker 3: brains are. For alien life, you have to ask why,
Speaker 3: why would you ask the question? So if that is,
Speaker 3: there has to be a reason for raising it. Is
Speaker 3: there any chance that there is our living beings somewhere
Speaker 3: in the Andromeda Galaxy? Now, course, from last I read
Speaker 3: the Andromeda Galaxy had a trillion stars now, but I
Speaker 3: don't know, how do you assess the question? I would say,
Speaker 3: in a kind of unsort of not philosophical at all. Way, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I guess you know.
Speaker 2: I mean it's arbitrary because you have no evidence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, but there's no evidence except for the fact
Speaker 3: that we know that there's one planet where life has emerged.
Speaker 3: We know that scientists have discovered what is it exo planets,
Speaker 3: the ones that are outside of every solar system. They
Speaker 3: have identified ones that seem to be earth like in
Speaker 3: the range of temperatures that are you know, YadA, YadA, YadA.
Speaker 3: So you could say that you know it. Whereas in
Speaker 3: sixteen hundred, if someone speculated about life outside on a
Speaker 3: planet other than Earth, that was purely arbitrary. It wasn't
Speaker 3: really based on anything, whereas now it's quite different. But
Speaker 3: I don't have you know, but if someone so, if
Speaker 3: someone said there's no evidence of life on you know,
Speaker 3: in other galaxies, I don't know what would the point
Speaker 3: of a statement like that be except you know, okay,
Speaker 3: they haven't landed here yet or we haven't communicated with them.
Speaker 3: But so and there has to be a good reason.
Speaker 2: Question what evidence means in this context. Yeah, yeah, there's
Speaker 2: life on Earth. That's evidence, Yeah, indeed, And and then
Speaker 2: there's evidence that the planets like this exist. As you said,
Speaker 2: that constitutes evidence. So it really evidence doesn't mean this
Speaker 2: specific concrete that you're looking for that life another planets.
Speaker 2: Therefore I need evidence of literal life and another planets.
Speaker 2: It means the evidence that the context, the whole you
Speaker 2: know is possible, right, I think there's an equivocation of evidence.
Speaker 2: Adam says, for Robert, who were the philosophers who influenced
Speaker 2: a comedies?
Speaker 3: Oh that's a good one. And I don't know the
Speaker 3: answer to that. I just don't. That's Greek mathematics, and
Speaker 3: that's one of those Greek mathematics and Greek music I'm
Speaker 3: pretty bad on. Yeah, so I have to plead ignorance here.
Speaker 2: I just don't know. But he says, doctor me Hugh
Speaker 2: is incredible. It seems like he's already done the work
Speaker 2: of three lifetimes. I love hearing him talk about his
Speaker 2: passion and accomplishments.
Speaker 3: Nice. Thank you? Who are that?
Speaker 2: Oh that's I think I know who that is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you, Mary.
Speaker 2: Elene Adam follow up to Rand Divergence from Aristotle. Question,
Speaker 2: any issues will you you divute from Rand? Have you
Speaker 2: found any contradictions in her philosophy of objectivism?
Speaker 3: No, I mean it's a it's a system. I would say,
Speaker 3: you know, there are some areas of her philosophy that
Speaker 3: I just don't know, Like, for example, I could not
Speaker 3: give a lecture on measurement omission, but I've read it
Speaker 3: I've read doctor Peacock version of it. It all sounds like, yeah,
Speaker 3: this is this is the answer, this is the solution
Speaker 3: to the problem of universals. But I would never say that, well,
Speaker 3: I don't know it really well. Therefore, I'm open to
Speaker 3: the possibility that she's wrong on something. I don't look
Speaker 3: at it that way. You know, there might be things
Speaker 3: I disagree with, but none of them are important or fundamental.
Speaker 3: I don't have strong views on dancing, but I don't
Speaker 3: think tap dancing is my favorite. But you know, I'm
Speaker 3: open to persuage. So it would be on the level
Speaker 3: of that, or a kind of novel. You know, maybe
Speaker 3: there's a novel she liked that didn't do much for me.
Speaker 3: But I have a hard time.
Speaker 2: You wouldn't consider objectivism, no.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, that's not objective. Oh so, oh yeah,
Speaker 3: he's specifically asked about objectivism.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 3: And I find one of the reasons, it's such an
Speaker 3: integrated system. That's an area where I think she differed
Speaker 3: from Aristotle, and why Aristotle's followers could could go in
Speaker 3: different directions from Aristotle. Is it such an integrated system.
Speaker 3: So I find that even when I encounter people who
Speaker 3: you know, I agree with everything she says, except her
Speaker 3: views on modern art or something. If you really dig,
Speaker 3: you stark to see that No, no, you are getting
Speaker 3: other things wrong besides her aesthetics. And it's it's a
Speaker 3: it's fascinating how that that works in a way, but
Speaker 3: it really is an integrated system. Uh, you know, and
Speaker 3: I've not I've not encountered anything on the contrary that
Speaker 3: I find the more I read, you know, and go
Speaker 3: back to those essays you haven't read in a long time,
Speaker 3: it's like, wow, that is clarifying that connection. And I've
Speaker 3: done that recently with with going when I started taking
Speaker 3: you know, becoming very interested in in her views on
Speaker 3: the arguments against the existence of God and you know,
Speaker 3: her particular view of of atheism. You find how brilliant
Speaker 3: the philosophy is and how tight knit and how everything's connected.
Speaker 3: And if you go wrong on plug in, if you
Speaker 3: go wrong on on one little area, you start messing
Speaker 3: up the kind of a cascade effect.
Speaker 2: So Liam asks, why is Plato so dominant despite being
Speaker 2: wrong about everything? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Well, where is he dominant? I mean he where what?
Speaker 3: Who has he influenced? And you know, he's he's kind
Speaker 3: of the the philosopher of religion. I think, uh, and
Speaker 3: I mean it's you know, I think it was W. T.
Speaker 3: Jones who said that the biggest irony in Western philosophy
Speaker 3: was that a Quinas merged Christianity and Aristotle. That was
Speaker 3: just bizarre. The early Christians loved Plato. In fact, some
Speaker 3: of them thought Plato was so good that he had
Speaker 3: to have stolen it from Moses. That that is, you know,
Speaker 3: from Jesus wasn't around yet, but it was. So you
Speaker 3: see that in early philosopher Philo of Alexandria, and and
Speaker 3: Justin Martyr and some of these early Christians, they love
Speaker 3: Plato and they were right to do it. Augustine said
Speaker 3: that it was it was the Platonists. He never read
Speaker 3: Plato in the original, but he said it was the
Speaker 3: Platonists that allowed him to see that it made sense
Speaker 3: to believe in spiritual beings entities that had no physical embodiment.
Speaker 3: The Plato, you know, Plato did that. So you know
Speaker 3: he's wrong on those issues, But the people who are
Speaker 3: influenced by him don't think he's wrong. They think he's brilliant.
Speaker 3: And that's often how it goes. I mean it content
Speaker 3: is even a worse example. How could he be so influential,
Speaker 3: influential given what he's done and what he says and
Speaker 3: how wrong he is?
Speaker 2: And maybe maybe you'll understand this question because I don't.
Speaker 2: This is from the synthetic, analytical synthetic that caught him.
Speaker 2: How does objectivism account for the ontological difference between sin
Speaker 2: and send s without reducing all complexities to MIAs send
Speaker 2: s s C I E n d E S s
Speaker 2: E I.
Speaker 1: S C I N d E S.
Speaker 2: Between don't. I don't understand I n n s E
Speaker 2: I n d E S.
Speaker 3: I don't understand it. I understand the the objectivist rejection
Speaker 3: of the analytics synthetic dichotomy.
Speaker 2: But that is uh.
Speaker 3: And doctor Peacoff wrote a brilliant essay that was attacked
Speaker 3: that was attached to the I T O E the.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, I don't understand the question. You neither.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sorry about that.
Speaker 2: So Joseph asked, have you written or done anything on
Speaker 2: da Vinci, particularly his Aristatilianism, his integrations across multiple disciplines,
Speaker 2: and the elements of Platonism that infected some of his thoughts. No,
Speaker 2: I've not.
Speaker 3: I've read on it, but I haven't. I haven't done it.
Speaker 3: I went to the da Vinci Museum in Milan this
Speaker 3: past summer where you can see his his inventions are,
Speaker 3: are you know people created them? That's kind of an
Speaker 3: interesting but I've not, and I've actually not read him
Speaker 3: in years, so I can't. I can't.
Speaker 2: Recently we had his biography what's his name? Quote? The
Speaker 2: guy who did Steve Jobs. I forget to aufor name. Anyway,
Speaker 2: da Vinci's life is pretty amazing, all right. So analytics
Speaker 2: synthetic echoonomy says, what's meant is being and beings? So
Speaker 2: how does objectivism account for the ontological difference between being
Speaker 2: and beings without reducing all complexities to mia beings. I
Speaker 2: still don't understand the question.
Speaker 3: I don't. I don't understand that either. I mean, the
Speaker 3: the analytic synthetic dichotomy is that there's two kinds of statements.
Speaker 3: An analytic statement is like, you know all bachelors are
Speaker 3: male because you know, bachelor by definition is an unmarried man, right,
Speaker 3: And that's an analytic statement. You can you can see
Speaker 3: it's true just by analyzing the words, whereas a synthetic
Speaker 3: statement would be water boils at one hundred degrees celsius
Speaker 3: at sea level or something like that. That's a synthetic statement,
Speaker 3: according to this view, because you can't analyze it just
Speaker 3: on the basis of the terms. Now, Einran rejects that entirely,
Speaker 3: that all statements are analytic or synthetic, depending on how
Speaker 3: you look at it. And her view is that if you,
Speaker 3: I think she calls it the anti effort in one
Speaker 3: of the marginalia, the anti effort mentality that if you
Speaker 3: really understood everything there is to know about a concept
Speaker 3: in a statement, you would see that it's quote unquote analytic. Now,
Speaker 3: and she wouldn't put it that way. But so for example,
Speaker 3: you say, you know, ah, you know, all bachelors are men,
Speaker 3: you know, just by yeah, uh, And you compare that
Speaker 3: to a synthetic statement like iron floats as iron sinks
Speaker 3: in water. Now, her view was, if you know all
Speaker 3: there is to know about water and all there is
Speaker 3: to know about iron, and all there is to know
Speaker 3: about you know, et cetera, that that that it's all there,
Speaker 3: it's it's not somehow not quite as clear or or
Speaker 3: not quite as crisp beneath.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: You know, a statement like like the the the analytic ones.
Speaker 3: Now what about beings and being and beings?
Speaker 2: I don't you know? The analytic synthetic dichotomy is his
Speaker 2: that's his handle, that's his name. Oh, so the question
Speaker 2: is not related to his name. Oh, the questions related
Speaker 2: to something in Heidiger's philosophy. I don't know how well
Speaker 2: you know Heidig. I don't know Heidige at all. Shendesk
Speaker 2: refers to individual entities while sham.
Speaker 3: That those are German words.
Speaker 2: Fundamental concepts of existence.
Speaker 3: No, I don't like Heidigger at all. If I quote him,
Speaker 3: it's all at all. It's it's to make fun of him.
Speaker 3: I have a paper coming out on Eudemus on infinity.
Speaker 3: Whereas Eudemus was a follower of he was a colleague
Speaker 3: of Aarsol. He was one of these people who was
Speaker 3: around when Aristotle died. He went back to Rhodes and
Speaker 3: started kind of in a Riscitilian school there, and he
Speaker 3: he wrote, uh, you know, he defended Aristotle's views on infinity.
Speaker 3: And at the end of the paper, I quote Heidegger
Speaker 3: on on infinity. I wish I could remember, but he's
Speaker 3: he's kind of you know, if you want to talk
Speaker 3: about infinity. You can't use science. Science is can't handle
Speaker 3: the concept of infinity. But that doesn't mean it's bad
Speaker 3: to talk about infinity, because you know, all that means
Speaker 3: is science can't handle it. And he goes on to
Speaker 3: talk about it, and I think I Ran quotes it somewhere,
Speaker 3: and I'm trying to think where she she quotes the passage,
Speaker 3: but it might be an it oe where you know, uh,
Speaker 3: you know, the attempt to analyze, you know, infinity, it
Speaker 3: you know it it melts in the crude acid of
Speaker 3: logic or something. In other words, you know, I discussed
Speaker 3: the topics, but I don't use this mundane logic and
Speaker 3: scientific reason that you people down there. I now, maybe
Speaker 3: I'm interest in not interpreting Heidegger correctly, but I've always
Speaker 3: found him impossible to read, and not because he would
Speaker 3: weigh over my head. I mean, I find higher mathematics
Speaker 3: impossible to read, and that's my problem because I'm ignorant.
Speaker 3: But reading Heideger, I think, you know this is this
Speaker 3: is Nietzsche's poets muddy their waters to make them appear deep. Well,
Speaker 3: it happens to philosophers too, and Heideger, I think, is
Speaker 3: one of them. My understanding is he's more difficult than
Speaker 3: Kant in Germans.
Speaker 2: Ok. Wow, so cold, writes. I'm reading Plato right now,
Speaker 2: can't wait to move to Aristotle. Do you have any
Speaker 2: advice on where to start with Aristotle? Any advice about
Speaker 2: reading him or Plato?
Speaker 3: I would say with both of the Plato's is a
Speaker 3: little easier because you can start with the shorter what
Speaker 3: are called Socratic dialogues, like the Youth of fro and
Speaker 3: the Lockeyes, and you'll read the famous apology, which his
Speaker 3: defense speech. Things of that story they can be lovely.
Speaker 3: And I'm teaching a seminar on the republic right now.
Speaker 3: That's the whole of the Platonism is all there. It
Speaker 3: starts off with ethics, but it ends up being his metaphysics,
Speaker 3: is epistemology, his ethics, his political philosophy, esthetics. It's all there,
Speaker 3: and it's an interesting dialogue. I must say. With Aristotle,
Speaker 3: my recommendation is to follow your values. What is of
Speaker 3: interest to you. If you like ethics, start reading his
Speaker 3: work on ethics. If you like his politics, start reading that.
Speaker 3: If you're interested in literature, read the poetics. For the rest.
Speaker 3: It gets difficult if you're interested in meta physics. If
Speaker 3: you jump right into the metaphysics, that can be pretty difficult.
Speaker 3: You know, maybe get a copy and flip through the
Speaker 3: table of contents, find a topic. I mean, his discussion
Speaker 3: of the law of non contradiction is fascinating.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: He talks about God in some places, which is sort
Speaker 3: of strange, but it can be very difficult.
Speaker 2: To read.
Speaker 3: And same with his logical works. I've stayed away from
Speaker 3: them because they're really difficult. I mean, I've read them,
Speaker 3: but I don't it's not something I write on. So
Speaker 3: that would be my advice with with Aristotle.
Speaker 2: Oh, here's a question you've been waiting for. Are you
Speaker 2: voting for Trump or Harris?
Speaker 3: I'm abstaining and I'm hoping Harris wins. I've and I
Speaker 3: respect objectivists who take a different approach. I take very
Speaker 3: seriously the idea and I did this very early on.
Speaker 3: I really liked the principle that Iran says, there are
Speaker 3: limits to the lesser of two evils. And if you
Speaker 3: can't find more more positive than negative in you know,
Speaker 3: the evil candidate, you know, the worst candidate, the non
Speaker 3: ideal candidate, you know, abstained, and that's what Uh, that's
Speaker 3: what I'm doing. I was hoping the Republican Party would
Speaker 3: be shocked by Trump and and you know, his his claim,
Speaker 3: you know, his his behavior. Uh, and would would come
Speaker 3: up with someone halfway decent? I mean, you know, we're
Speaker 3: we're pining for the days of Mitt Romney, right, yeah,
Speaker 3: I would you know, Uh, yeah, that's just you know,
Speaker 3: I don't know about George Bush, but so yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean Trump is impossible. I think I think he's destroyed
Speaker 3: the Republican Party and and the creatures who were coming
Speaker 3: up in his place are in some respects more dangerous.
Speaker 3: They're worse because they're articulate, they're intelligent, they read books,
Speaker 3: and they're not sociopaths, and you know, but he's made
Speaker 3: them possible in a way. And I would say in
Speaker 3: this connection, I think it was in twenty twenty than
Speaker 3: we did that podcast together, you on car and and me.
Speaker 3: I thought that was really good and I thought it
Speaker 3: was it's worth listening to again, where the three of
Speaker 3: us talked about the president presidential elections, and we focused
Speaker 3: on we spent a lot of time talking about Iron
Speaker 3: Rand and the what she says about presidential elections. And
Speaker 3: I think we did a really good job, and that's
Speaker 3: that's worth you know, surprise, surprise, A lot of those
Speaker 3: issues are still alive now. But I would there are
Speaker 3: some things in the case of Trump that I regard
Speaker 3: is unforgivable. I mean, we could make a long list,
Speaker 3: but I mean saying he loved the dictator of Korea,
Speaker 3: his his admiration for thugs, for Putin, it's abysmal. And
Speaker 3: I made the point in this podcast that he's so
Speaker 3: bad that even if he does something good, you can't say, well,
Speaker 3: he's done this. The good things he does are an embarrassment.
Speaker 3: And I think I mentioned the time, you know, moving
Speaker 3: the capital to Jerusalem of Israel, and and pulling us
Speaker 3: out of the Peace Accord, the the what is the
Speaker 3: Paris Accords, the Environmental Accords. Those would be great from
Speaker 3: anyone else, but when you come from him, it's just
Speaker 3: this more nutty stuff from this guy who's now you know,
Speaker 3: in is RFK really going to be.
Speaker 2: Hell, he's gonna ban non organic food, I mean either
Speaker 2: going to eat organic or not eat at all.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So yeah, Trump is not Now. You know, there
Speaker 3: was a day when I thought, you know what, I'm
Speaker 3: going to bite the bullet and I'm going to vote Democrat.
Speaker 3: I'm going to vote for Harris. And then I went
Speaker 3: online and started reading her position, and I thought, no,
Speaker 3: if she had come out with a really strong pro
Speaker 3: Israel statement that made it clear that she repudiated that
Speaker 3: she had nothing to do with that wing of the Democrats,
Speaker 3: and she didn't do that.
Speaker 2: As far as I'm concerned, and she never did. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So that that episode is on New Idea. You can
Speaker 2: find no YouTube. It's called Thinking about the US Presidential Elections.
Speaker 2: It was taped in September of twenty twenty, I think
Speaker 2: twenty eighth or twenty ninth of September, and you can
Speaker 2: find an online. So it's it is available.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, and two elections ago, I said, I,
Speaker 3: you know, I don't support Trump. I think he's really dangerous,
Speaker 3: but I could kind of understand YadA, YadA. I won't
Speaker 3: say that now. I don't understand why any of us
Speaker 3: would would vote for for Trump. Yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, John asks, in editing Rand's Q and A,
Speaker 2: did you act did you accurately transcribe Rand's answers to
Speaker 2: questions such as the morality of smoking and using sacharine? Oh?
Speaker 3: Well, this is an awkward kind of question because I
Speaker 3: was asked by doctor Peacock if I would edit the
Speaker 3: iron RAN's Q and A. I mean, I think I
Speaker 3: broke the subject with him, and he talked about he
Speaker 3: had to be edited or you know, Penguin wouldn't go
Speaker 3: for it, and that he was going to oversee the editing.
Speaker 3: And now that there was there was no there wasn't
Speaker 3: any you know, I I would edit her and then
Speaker 3: he would have suggestions and I would edit a bit
Speaker 3: more and he would you know, I know, you need
Speaker 3: more editing here. And I was aware at the time
Speaker 3: that people are not gonna, you know, like this, but
Speaker 3: I assumed people would could be good spirited for almost
Speaker 3: because almost all of it is available, and you know,
Speaker 3: any of the cuts that were made you could see,
Speaker 3: and I mean, it's I think it's possible that I
Speaker 3: made cuts that I shouldn't have, but I stand by
Speaker 3: the work. But if it weren't for the fact that
Speaker 3: the the a State of iron Ran was behind the
Speaker 3: project and had control of it, I I probably would
Speaker 3: have done some things differently, but then it wouldn't have
Speaker 3: been published by pay when it would have been a
Speaker 3: different kind of book. Now, I don't remember that particular one,
Speaker 3: but there was some issue that that Leonard had issues about,
Speaker 3: but I just don't remember it. So if if if
Speaker 3: you have the original and you're comparing it to the
Speaker 3: Q and A, and the Q and A is different
Speaker 3: in a way that you don't like, then I you
Speaker 3: should you should blame me. I mean, I I did it.
Speaker 3: What can I said? I'm not gonna throw Leonard under
Speaker 3: the under the bus because I could have you know,
Speaker 3: if if I objected to something, I could have said so,
Speaker 3: and sometimes I did and sometimes he said okay, and
Speaker 3: other times he didn't.
Speaker 1: And you know.
Speaker 3: There it is.
Speaker 2: Bakers as a donation for Robert's future translation of Nick
Speaker 2: Nick Niki Machine Ethics. Ethics.
Speaker 3: No, there's too many good ones, or at least okay
Speaker 3: ones out there, so that one I'm not going to do.
Speaker 3: I'm doing the Eudemian ethics now, which is the kind
Speaker 3: of the the neglected step chot uh okay.
Speaker 2: I didn't realize there were two ethics books.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there are two. There actually there's four ethical works,
Speaker 3: but two of them are by Aristotle. One of them
Speaker 3: the Magnum Moorlia. People disagree, but but he probably wasn't
Speaker 3: by him. And then there's one called Virtues and Vices,
Speaker 3: which is likely not by him, almost certainly not by him.
Speaker 2: But yeah, Andrew says, was there any ancient philosopher philosophy
Speaker 2: that identified the principles of the initiation of forces evil?
Speaker 2: What was Aristotle's position on force in social dealings?
Speaker 3: I can't think of anyone who who puts it in
Speaker 3: those terms, the initiation of force, I don't think so.
Speaker 3: I mean, they have words like abuse and thing of
Speaker 3: that sort, but what they talk about is there are crimes,
Speaker 3: there are acts of injustice, and they would include you know,
Speaker 3: murder and rate and things of that sort. But it's
Speaker 3: treated as if these are wrong because they're unjust. That is,
Speaker 3: an innocent person doesn't deserve to be treated this way.
Speaker 3: And in creating a civil society, you're going to have
Speaker 3: laws that that if if it's a just society, you know,
Speaker 3: et cetera. So it's not it's gonna there won't be
Speaker 3: a conception of rights. There a conception of of the
Speaker 3: initiation of force. If if there is anything that comes
Speaker 3: close to that, I'm not aware of it.
Speaker 2: And to us asks can you put you on in
Speaker 2: his place? And explain to him the romanticism applies to
Speaker 2: not just literature but all the fineants.
Speaker 3: No, you've asked the wrong person here, because I no.
Speaker 3: I think I believe I've heard that exchange that you're
Speaker 3: talking about. And if I remember correctly, I agreed with
Speaker 3: your own what your own said. I think maybe at
Speaker 3: the end of what your own said, you conceded a
Speaker 3: little bit about maybe you'd call the David romantic or
Speaker 3: something something like that. But I think there's a there's
Speaker 3: a really good Q and A about that in the
Speaker 3: Q and a book Ein Rand addresses that, and I
Speaker 3: can still hear her voice. This is from the There
Speaker 3: was a kind of extra Q and a session that
Speaker 3: went off topic which was wonderful in the in the
Speaker 3: nonfiction writing course, and someone asked her a question about
Speaker 3: romanticism and painting. Would you call this one? And she
Speaker 3: said something to the effect of, you know, sometimes, yeah,
Speaker 3: there's something like that, but basically someone has to do
Speaker 3: the work that she did in literature. Yeah, that is
Speaker 3: she reconceptualized what we what romanticism was. Now, she didn't
Speaker 3: rip it out of its historical context. Romanticism is something
Speaker 3: that happened in history in the history of art. And
Speaker 3: it's not something that you could, you know, say that, oh,
Speaker 3: that's what Homer was doing. Now you might look at
Speaker 3: you know, he's heroic and romantic art, but it was
Speaker 3: something particular. And what she thought was that the people
Speaker 3: who talked about Romanticism, they they conceptualized it improperly. They
Speaker 3: said things like the Romanticists and in really really bad ways.
Speaker 3: The Classicists were the ones who concerned with reason, and
Speaker 3: the Romantics rejected that in favor of emotion and national
Speaker 3: identity and things like that. She said, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: that is that is such identification through non essentials. What
Speaker 3: was really going on was with Romanticism was an emphasis
Speaker 3: on values and on the independent choices and values of
Speaker 3: the artist. And what you see is, you know, it's
Speaker 3: not you know, some kind of music from the you know,
Speaker 3: the medieval period where that all kind of sounds alike
Speaker 3: or whatever, or certain kinds of sonnets or something. Well,
Speaker 3: I don't want to get into poetry, I guess, but
Speaker 3: romanticism you see that it's it's it's the recognition of values,
Speaker 3: and that means that human beings have volition, they make
Speaker 3: choices that are based on values and it's the interaction
Speaker 3: of those choices that create a plot. That that's why
Speaker 3: the plot is so important in romantic literature. So she's
Speaker 3: reconceptualizing what and that's why she called it what is Romanticism?
Speaker 3: Because it needed to be identified. And it's brilliant because
Speaker 3: she doesn't, you know, she goes into a field and
Speaker 3: even if you ask kind of experts in romantic literature
Speaker 3: who are the major and they'll mention five people and
Speaker 3: not mention Hugo and you know, so with her, you know,
Speaker 3: you go as tops and Dostievskin and and they're very
Speaker 3: different from from from Tolstoy. And so she did some
Speaker 3: really heavy lifting intellectually to say the least to do that.
Speaker 3: And what she said in this one little Q and
Speaker 3: A is you have to do that. Someone has to
Speaker 3: do that. In the field of the visual arts, for example,
Speaker 3: and I imagine, I mean there's been some work that's
Speaker 3: been done and that, you know, and not just by objectivists,
Speaker 3: but I know Toro Buckman was starting to do some
Speaker 3: in painting. He has a really excellent essay on cosper
Speaker 3: David Friedrich, who regarded himself as a romantic and saw
Speaker 3: himself as a romantic painter. But what it would mean
Speaker 3: what were the painters who were calling themselves romantic, what
Speaker 3: were they doing that was different from other schools, and
Speaker 3: what were their motivations? And did it have anything to
Speaker 3: do with the philosophers who were calling themselves romantic, who
Speaker 3: seem you know, Schopenhower seems very different from Hugo. I mean,
Speaker 3: I'm rand had to do that work, and you have
Speaker 3: to do that work in all the visual fields. What
Speaker 3: you can't do is or it can't because people do.
Speaker 3: What you shouldn't do is claim that romanticism is anything
Speaker 3: that I like, anything that especially that it glorifies human
Speaker 3: beings or something like that. And you know, you can
Speaker 3: make in a there could be an a static statue
Speaker 3: of a of a human being, and what would make
Speaker 3: it romantic? Maybe it is, but maybe it's it's not,
Speaker 3: Maybe it's something different. Someone has to identify what exactly
Speaker 3: romanticism is an apply because literature it's a conceptual, you know,
Speaker 3: it deals with concepts, and so you know that's something
Speaker 3: very different. And so if ein Ran identifies that what's
Speaker 3: central to it is not only the artists own value
Speaker 3: judgments and and values generally, but also that the the
Speaker 3: the characters in the fiction, uh, have free will and
Speaker 3: they're acting according to it, and it's all integrated by plot.
Speaker 3: What would that mean for a painting, It's it's really
Speaker 3: it's quite difficult, uh, I mean to to sort that out.
Speaker 3: So I I tend not to use the term. And
Speaker 3: if you're talking about I mean, there are some painters
Speaker 3: in their historians who speak of a period that is,
Speaker 3: you know, Romanticism in the visual arts, and certainly Romanticism
Speaker 3: and music. And I mean, at a gut level, roch
Speaker 3: Mononoff seems different to me than Bach. But how I
Speaker 3: would identify that. Yeah, that's not my area at all.
Speaker 3: But but yeah, so I would. I would not. I
Speaker 3: would not put your own in this place.
Speaker 2: I would this time anyway, Thank you, Eric, Sorry Andrew,
Speaker 2: next time. All right, So they and a little synthetic
Speaker 2: economy is going to try you one more time, see
Speaker 2: says follow up, Being, which is sin is what comes
Speaker 2: before existence? Sind this for Plato, for instance, being would
Speaker 2: be thefones for Aristotle, it's nature.
Speaker 3: I don't think anything comes before existence. And I don't
Speaker 3: know that we would have a basis for conversation about this,
Speaker 3: because existence exists. It's the very first thing. And even
Speaker 3: being you know, I ran quotes Arizonal and metaphysics deals
Speaker 3: with being qua being not just another way of talking
Speaker 3: about existence as such as she puts it. So those
Speaker 3: are those are synonyms in a way. Now, maybe if
Speaker 3: I gave it some thought, which I haven't done, I
Speaker 3: would think that there's existence emphasizes different, something different.
Speaker 2: From because he says not existence existence existence.
Speaker 3: Okay, I I don't think I have anything to say
Speaker 3: about this existence. Yeah, I mean the Platonists talk about,
Speaker 3: you know, something that's even beyond existence, but that well
Speaker 3: non existence. Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't yep.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would have to read something in more detail
Speaker 3: than this. I apologize if we're not connecting.
Speaker 2: All right, I think that's it. Okay, we've run out
Speaker 2: of questions. We've gone two hours. That's great.
Speaker 3: Yeah I was. I would worry that you'll be hearing
Speaker 3: crickets after forty five minutes with you know, a big guys.
Speaker 2: So yeah, there's people are interested, people are interested.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've enjoyed it. Well, we can do it again sometimes.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, this was fun. Yeah, absolutely we should do it
Speaker 2: again and into some of these issues. Thanks Rob, yeah,
Speaker 2: my pleasure to you too, but bye.