Greg Salmieri

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1,054 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2013 last heard Jan 2021

Greg Salmieri’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Elucidations · Episode 73: Greg Salmieri discusses Ayn Rand's moral philosophy · 15 Jul 2015 podcast

is significant.

I think she's a figure like these kind of enlightenment reformers in that way.

Yes.

Uh a way to start is to notice that she was both a philosopher and a novelist, and at least with respect to her ambitions, she was a novelist first.

And I think thinking about some of what her interest and aims in literature are are helpful in thinking about her approach to philosophy.

So she was what she thought of as a romantic novelist.

She admired particularly Hugo, but some other people in this tradition, and

What's striking about this kind of novel and what she really took from it is there are grand scale moral conflicts.

They're motivated by people who have intense, passionate, personal commitments to their causes, to whatever it is that are the aims that they're seeking in the novel, to their values.

And there's a focus on this intensity and personal character in the romantic literature movement and also on big moral themes.

And she thought in the better romantic writers, the ones who were deeper, people like Hugo and Hawthorne, as opposed to people like Dumas, who were romantic but less deep, more superficial in their characterizations, she thought there was a lot of thinking about the personal choices and the personality.

that went into the kind of central values that define someone's life course.

So these aren't taken as a given that say, I'm for the king and then we have a dramatic conflict of what I need to do to save the king's daughter, but rather there's a lot of character development involved in the thinking about what are my central commitments in life.

And so this kind of forms the context for her thinking about ethics, because she's thinking about what should the central commitments in life be, what should a life be about.

And she's at once very focused on the idea of heroism or extreme virtue or what is it to be really virtuous.

But while she's has that as an important theme in her thinking, there's also the idea of personal commitment, what makes it your value, your choice, your fighting to

save your love and so the personal character of the commitment to the values.

is very significant to her.

And you see it that coming out in her thinking about egoism and in her meta ethics and in all kinds of places.

So she's a ethical egoist.

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