Objectivism and Ayn Rand [Philosophy] (49)

48 Name: q : 2007-06-22 05:35 ID:6TVQqA5L

thread looks dead, but i finally got around to starting looking through objectivism, and was almost instantly bothered by something:

at some point, she concludes that free will is self-evident and puts it in her pile of axioms, and insists that an argument for determinism necessarily assumes free will, and so is self-defeating. my problem with this is that i don't see how free will is self-evident, and i don't see where a determinist argument against free will assumes it. she also refuted determinists in general by saying, if determinism were true, youd have no choice over whether you were right or wrong, blah blah something something, so you can't even be considered reliable. so, at this point, i stared at my ceiling for a good 40 minutes or so trying to see what i might have missed to no avail.

i'm also not sure about her derivation of causality as a corollary of identity/existence. essentially she says that things can only be what they are, to be otherwise is a contradiction, and i agree with that much, so i permit that as an assumption/axiom. she then posits that the actions an object does are determined by the object, and i agree in the sense that an object can not do an action that is not within its structure to do under the present circumstances. but if an object exists as it does necessarily, and it necessarily acts in a certain way, this seems to me to show that actions happen necessarily. now applied to human volition, it seems to me that, since choice is an action, it is necessitated. but this would contradict the supposed self-evident free will.

now uh, i realize that was incredibly long, so

tl;dr: why shouldnt free will be self evident. why doesn't free will contradict the causality she derives from identity. how does she figure any argument has to assume free will?

and on the topic of a priori knowledge. i take it to mean necessary truths derived from definitions. i'm a math major who has done up to some graduate level work, i don't know if you'd qualify me as a mathematician though. so while an assumption wouldn't be necessarily true, and an axiom is essentially an arbitrary assumption, an implication from that assumption would be. i usually think of things that are entirely definitional.

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