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A salesperson for philosophy
Professional philosophers usually get embarrassed when the name Ayn Rand comes up. Yes, she was a better writer than a thinker. Yes, she espoused political opinions which were unpopular in her time and have only become more so recently. None the less, as her “frenemy” Murray Rothbard commented, she was in some way better than a philosopher, she was a salesperson for philosophy, and many a novice who didn’t know Plato from a platypus first caught an enthusiasm for thinking by way of her novels and essays. Another difficulty with Rand was her resistance to classification or influence. Her disciples were obliged to believe that her system sprang out of her own mind without precedent, with the exception of the tolerably remote Aristotle, to whom she occasionally gave lip service.
If there were ever a genuine philosopher in bad need of a salesperson, it would be Max Scheler. Like Rand he was an embattled person who failed to live up to the high ideals of his thought, and for nearly a century he has been relegated to a second-tier position within the philosophical cannon. At first blush, Scheler and Rand would seem to inhabit opposite ends of the cognitive universe. He was a passionate personalist with mystical tendencies, and she was the cool intelectualist, willing and able to play the “atheist card” when challenged by traditionalist conservatives. Be that as it may, it seems to me that as thinkers Scheler and Rand share some basic similarities. Granted, one shouldn’t press these similarities too far. Scheler attempted to justify his philosophical claims by grounding them in methods of classic phenomenology. In contrast, Rand tended to assert her claims rhetorically, through the medium of fiction, and in spite of producing one small booklet on epistemology her promise of […]
They’re Trying to Shut Us Down
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