How We Know is the title of a recent book by Harry Binswanger. He presents his theory of knowledge based on Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy. He was a friend and associate of her for many years.
The book is well-written in my opinion and well worth reading. I agree with most of it. I will devote several blogposts to it.
Chapter 1 is titled Foundations. His foundations are the same as Ayn Rand's. I refer the reader to the Table of Contents using the Look Inside feature at the above Amazon link for what the fundamentals are.
He emphasizes consciousness being a biological faculty more so than Rand did.
"Conscious activities, whether sensory or conceptual, have, like the heartbeat, a biological function. Man has eyes for the same reason he has a heart: to sustain his life; vision is an adaptive, biological, life-sustaining capacity. The same is true of the other sense modalities: each provides man with life-sustaining information about the world.
And the same is true of the faculty of reason. The mind, the reasoning intellect is a vital organ. A biologist could not understand the heart if he did not know its biological function, and a philosopher cannot understand reason, or any other faculty of consciousness, if he ignores the biological function of that faculty" (p. 37).
He addresses what consciousness does for animals to prepare the stage for what it does for man.
Rand was rather skeptical about evolution. Binswanger is not. He defers some of his discussion of evolutionary biology until later in the book, but biology is prominent in Chapter 1.
He gives a different meaning to "self-evident" than most people. Self-evident means "available to direct awareness. "Self-evident" is not a synonym for "obvious." To one who has learned arithmetic, it is obvious that two plus two is four, but that truth is not self-evident; it is inferred by a process of comparison and counting. But that the page you are reading exists is not an inference; it is self-evident. The data of sensory perception are self-evident (23).
Ayn Rand said the last thing, too, but it seems unusual in philosophy. Neither The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Colliers-Macmillan 1967) nor the on-line Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy have "self-evident" as a separate entry.
You say the Rand doubted evolution. How did she think that human beings came about on this planet?
ReplyDeleteBob Kolker
I can't answer that question. When I said she doubted evolution, I relied on what I had heard. The best evidence of it is likely in Nathaniel Branden's The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand. URL: http://www.starways.net/lisa/essays/benefits1.html
ReplyDeleteIt says: "I remember being astonished to hear her say one day, "After all, the theory of evolution is only a hypothesis." I asked her, "You mean you seriously doubt that more complex life forms — including humans — evolved from less complex life forms?" She shrugged and responded, "I'm really not prepared to say," or words to that effect. I do not mean to imply that she wanted to substitute for the theory of evolution the religious belief that we are all God's creation; but there was definitely something about the concept of evolution that made her uncomfortable."
Merlin-thanks for the posts on Binswanger's book.
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome, JDR. There will be several more.
ReplyDelete