Greg Salmieri
speaker
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
We'll talk about what that means in a moment.
And then the other thread I think that goes into thinking about Rand thinking is a tremendous admiration for we think of it as two things, but they're very related and very related in her mind.
One is technology, the fact that we live in a high-tech culture, things like skyscrapers, airplanes, she was, you know, greatly admired and appreciated, these kinds of accomplishments.
Yeah.
and also kind of enlightenment valoration of reason.
And this is another respect in which I think she it's useful to think of her in connection with figures like Locke or Bacon.
even in a way Descartes, although she was very down on him and somewhat on lock too, I should mention.
But a valoration of reason, what it is to have a reason as central to your life.
uh what it is to hold reason as an absolute is how she put it.
And if you combine having this valoration of reason with this being very interested in passionate commitment to values and seeing the values as personally yours that you're very committed to,
you're going to want to think a lot about the rationality of basic value choices.
What makes values objective, what makes them right, in a way that doesn't thereby make them somehow impersonal or obedience to some standard outside the self that feels imposed.
So I think those two kind of sets of issues you can see as motivating a lot of her thinking.
Now where does she come down on things?
Well, metaphysically, that is with respect to her view of reality, and I don't think this is something we'll talk very much about, but she was what's sometimes called a metaphysical realist.
She believed that the world exists independent of the mind and that the
the role of the mind is to try to know it, to get at how things really are.
In epistemology she was, I said before, kind of valorizing reason as opposed to what she saw as
mystical and subjectivist trends,
which include, as with the Enlightenment figures, both outright religious mysticism and personal subjectivism.
Showing 541–560 of 1,054 · page 28 of 53
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