I liked this, but I didn't get when he started listing off all the things Plato said democracy does to the soul. I understand why democracy, in the sense of letting the majority vote on respecting the rights of the minority, is wrong. I did not see the connection between this and children misbehaving and everyone becoming decadent. It seems to me we have to respect one another's rights even if it made children misbehave and people decadent. It's good if respecting people's rights has other positive effects, but it seems unimportant next to what he had been talking about in the first part.

Again, we agree, but we seem be talking past each other. You have to ask yourself why Augustine's works even survived. Who bothered to copy them and keep them and why? It is more than the fact that one guy Augustine of Hippo chose to blank out on uncomfortable ideas about reality. I look to their plumbing, the consequences of alcohol during pregnancy, and much more that is difficult to identify and integrate. In The Fountainhead Rand nodded to the idea of a Zeitgeist the spirit of the times.

One thing people do well is follow leaders. What we do not do well is measure leaders against an objective standard. The best paradigm I know for intellectual trends is "kindergarten soccer": everyone chases the ball. The objective facts are that some balls and some goals pay better dividends. So, when Italian cities of the late Middle Ages held algebra contests in the public square, that somehow reinforced the rediscovery of Roman and Greek works that were always around, stored in monasteries and left unread until two men, Plutarch and Dante, sought them out. But, again, as with Augustine, it was not just that they did that. Other people needed to care about it for it to be brought forward, extended, and expanded.

In The Nature of the Gods, one of Cicero's guests says, "We know that the gods exist because people have reported seeing them, and the senses are valid." As Euclid said to Ptolemy, there is no royal road to knowledge. This ain't easy.

I, for one, appreciate your making the time to come here and write. I can only suggest that your clear expositions of fact are actually resonating with many of the 20,000 silent readers who also benefit from your work.

As my daughter said about Bernie Sanders, I disagree with his socialist ideas, but he seems to be the only one who's thinking. Blarman has a pretty inclusive and integrated personal philosophy. He has a central core of beliefs and he brings to them discoveries from his continued explorations in many areas. Most people here just reinforce their political prejudices by listening to Fox News. When I nodded to his knowledge of history, I meant the discrete facts of times and places. He's pretty good at that. Von Miss said about socialists and capitalists that we usually agree on the facts, that at a certain time and place a particular commodity had a given price. What we disagree on is what the facts mean. I have read through some of your interminable tet-a-tets with Blarman. Who else are you going to fight a few rounds with? You hit a Trumpeter between the concepts and they just call you a progressive snowflake and walk off.

We live in a time of changes. Time moved slower way back when.

It is one of the consequences of freedom and liberty that derived from the rebirth of reason. We call them the Dark Ages; and Objectivists dislike the Middle Ages on the same basis. But there were inventions and discoveries. It is just that they were few and far between because the culture of the times did not celebrate life on Earth.

Fighting a revolutionary war over the pursuit of happiness was highly important. It is why we went from the steam age to the space age in one lifetime, from electricity to electronics, telephone to television.

Some conservatives here align with the progressives who oppose what they call "neoliberalism" and "globalism." Those broad trends are very much a consequence of the ideas of Ayn Rand. Millions of copies of her books influenced very many people who are not Objectivists, but who did understand and accept many salient points.

I feel that Bill Gates read Atlas Shrugged and accepted maybe 30% of it. Eric Schmidt read it and rejected all of it. Elon Musk? Hard to say... T. J. Rodgers maybe 100%... Mark Cuban maybe 50-50...

By comparison and in respect to this topic and the topical lecture, the Hellenistic social context was possible because of the ferment, the open discussion based on reason. It had a lot of problems, but it was a time of changes.

We have discussed the Antikythera Device here. It is amazing what they were on the verge of.

Unfortunately, Rome ascended by brute force with nothing in its head. The Roman "intellectual ferment" was over the importation and adoption of different oriental mystery cults like Christ and Mithras.

Glad you are reading it. Here is the first half of Leonard Peikoff's comprehensive introduction to the history of philosophy lectures which tell you what they actually said and argued, and how they influenced their followers. This first half begins with the Pre-Socratic Greeks and covers Plato, Aristotle, other schools along the way, the neo-Platonists, the rise of Christianity, Augustine, Acquinas, and then onto modern philosophy (through Hume). There are also many background references by or on different philosophers or schools of philosophy, as well as general histories.

An abridged version of the lectures with supplementary material is on the web at https://campus.aynrand.org/campus-cou...

The complete lectures in original form on mp3 are well worth the $25 cost at
https://estore.aynrand.org/p/95/found...

Rural versus urban is the least of it. St. Augustine was the Christian philosopher, not any kind of pagan, who comprehensively turned a religion into a religious philosophy addressing all the major questions of philosophy from the Christian perspective. Like Plato, he was a "brilliant" thinker in doing that even though both were wrong on every major issue.

It's not usually better than that. His religious apologetics are full of fantasized history, including recently calling St. Augustine a "pagan", attributing the Dark Ages of the Christian era to paganism, attributing getting out of the Dark Ages to "True Christians", and attributing the Enlightenment to printing the Bible. These assertions are simply bizarre.

The content of the Hillsdale lecture was false and misleading in basic ways on history and philosophy that have been described here several times, not because of who said it or the rest of your invented motives. Stop misrepresenting people in personal attacks.

The philosophical references in the lecture were to Plato, not Greek philosophy in general. It misrepresented several features of Plato and misrepresented Plato as the basis for all subsequent philosophy. I did not arbitrarily choose to associate Hillsdale and Plato with religion, they did it themselves. Platonism is all though Christianity and Hillsdale announces itself as in the Platonic-Christian tradition.

I like listening to this discussion but have nothing intelligent to add.

I like the fact that with historical perspective, someone born in the 19th century and who died in the 50s could be almost my contemporary. We're two people who lived around the "same time period" when transatlantic telegraph and Internet were changing the world. It's like in Arthur C Clarke's 3001 someone is frozen a revived 1000 years later. People say "you lived around the time of space flight and Ben Franklin, the world of about 1000 years ago."

Sorry to interrupt.

Augustine was nearly contemporary (354-430) with Constantine (272-337). He did not live with "centuries of Constantinian Christianity." You are usually better with history than that.

We are going to splitting the hairs of a pinhead here, but "pagans" were rural people who kept to the old gods, while the Christians ruled the cities like Rome and Alexandria and Antioch.

Pagans went to temples to repeat rituals. City people like Augustine went to schools of philosophy -- until they were closed. It was why Augustine wrote about "the city of God" versus the city of man, the "city on a hill" and so on. He thought in those terms. It was the world he knew.

And for all of Augustine's very many errors, in there was still that spark of intelligence, of inquiry, of reasoning, arguing to win the point with logic -- however bad or misguided. Pagans had no need of that. Thinking is not fundamental to pagan religion.

We can find the tendrils of individualist ethics within history. Even among the ancient Greeks, Aristippus of Cyrene was closer than Aristotle on some thoughts that could be classified as proto-egoism.

The real burst, however, as you know, came at the Renaissance. The quest for personal glory shattered the ethos of the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, you had a "calling" a "vocation" that God assigned you. In the Renaissance, those who could pursued "l'uomo universale" being the universal man who could paint, play a musical instrument, fight with a sword, etc. Even today, we call a polymath a "Renaissance Man."

In the late 1500s, the word "atheism" was tossed about (by Bacon or Gilbert, I forget which) not in our strict meaning, but more to mean "free thinking" not tied to dogma; not sure what "God" is but being pretty sure no one else knew, either.

Like their individualism, it was not grounded properly or consistently, but it was correct. And to the point here, it was not Platonism.

As I pointed out, it was historically inaccurate. Socrates did not invent what we call the "Socratic method." The lecturer displayed no special understanding of Athenian democracy. He slid over the vote, saying that "the 500 condemned Socrates." Actually, the vote was closer than that. Socrates did not offend everyone with his questioning. If he had, Plato's school would have been impossible.

Blarman: "You're playing semantics to try to justify yourself. If you choose to follow a philosophy created by someone else, you serve it - duty or not."

Contrary to Blarman's gratuitous personal speculation, I do not and do not need to "play semantics" to "justify myself". We are discussing what is wrong with the Hillsdale lecture and how it represents the non-objective pronouncements of traditional conservativism. Blarman's emotional hostility personalizes everything.

Understanding and acting on moral principles based on the requirements of a rational being to live for his own life is not "serving a philosophy" or anything else. This is a fundamental distinction, not "semantics". Principles one learns from others, when not original, must be understood in one's own mind, where they become part of one's own knowledge. Intellectual independence does not mean never learning from someone else. Acting on what one knows to be true is not "serving" someone else or his ideas.

Following a moral philosophy does not, as Blarman insists, make one a "servant of that philosophy", and we are not "a follower or servant of Objectivism". That is a contradiction in terms, which is apparent from the meaning of the concepts, not "semantics". It is Blarman who has insisted several time that he wants to "follow a master"; he apparently can't conceive of any other way or what intellectual independence means.

He is not alone. The religious conservative lecturer at Hillsdale assumes the traditional duty ethics of a life of service to something outside and above oneself as the "good". In promoting that premise as inherent in philosophy itself he excludes from the concept of morality anything other than some form of "service". That is typical of traditionalist conservativism and religion (and more). It is antagonistic to the Aristotelian egoist tradition and to Objectivism in particular. It excludes their very possibility from the realm of ethics. Their false premises of what morality must be as "service" prohibits them from thinking any other way. (This is a good context in which to review Ayn Rand's "Causality versus Duty" in her anthology Philosophy: Who Needs It?, in conjunction with the basic ideas in "The Objectivist Ethics" in her The Virtue of Selfishness.)

The fallacy is also consistent with and part of the Hillsdale lecturer's broader confusion that all philosophy is a "footnote to Plato", in which he obliterates all philosophy in the Aristotelian tradition of living for one's own happiness, in this world as the only world, known by reason -- in contrast to the other-wordly mysticism and the self-abnegation and service of the Platonic-Christian tradition. He does not recognize that philosophy since the Greeks has been a duel between Aristotle and Plato, not a footnote to Plato.

Then flag the conversation for the admins and let them respond. I have. Any reasonable person watching that lecture is going to conclude that it was a lecture on how the Ancient Greeks contributed to philosophy and Western thought. That you choose to associate it with religion is a product of your fixation and moral prejudices.

To pretend that anyone from a religious background can not teach a lecture about the Ancient Greeks or philosophy stems from your own ivory tower complex - not rational thought. Rational thought takes ANY opinion and chooses to look for what is correct and what is not correct. Prejudice only looks at the origin of the person's background for something disagreeable to complain about.

You're playing semantics to try to justify yourself. If you choose to follow a philosophy created by someone else, you serve it - duty or not.

I promoted a lecture that was on the ancient Greeks. That you choose to gain nothing from it is up to you. If the forum admins want to censor me for posting it, let them say so themselves. I don't answer to you. If you choose to think that this post was about religion, that also is your cross to bear - pun intended. Any rational person knows better.

I did not "bring up Christianity". Hillsdale is based on it. That is what Blarman is openly promoting. He reacted to a serious discussion of the problems in the Hillsdale lecture promoting Platonism with the usual religious backlash. Religion is not the standard here and religious apologetics are not "correcting" anything.

The Hillsdale lecture promotes Plato as the essence of all philosophy, with everything else a "footnote" to Plato. That is outrageously false. They are blanking out the entire this-world Aristotelian tradition of reason and individualism in contrast to their Platonic, Christian tradition. That is one reason why the lecture is so bad and misleading. It is not an "in depth analysis".

St. Augustine was a leading Christian, not a "pagan". The influence of neo-Platonic mysticism (including on Augustine) in turning the primitive mystery cults into church doctrine as religious philosophy is well known. Rambling about Christmas trees and Coca Cola is irrelevant.

The revival of reason, not printing the Bible, put an end to the Christian era and resulted in the Enlightenment. Printing was a mechanism for disseminating information, not the content, and didn't tell people what they had to think.

Religion is a primitive form of philosophy. The history of philosophy is much more than religion, philosophy is not a footnote to Plato, and the Enlightenment and the founding of this country were not based on religion.

The reasons why the sermonizing lecture is false and misleading have been explained. This isn't a matter of subjective preference.

The leading intellectuals defining the American politics and culture were not followers of any Biblical character, which entire sense of life is alien to the Enlightenment. The revisionist history of the religionists (including their cargo cult science of out of context counting references) trying to rationalize the founding of this country in any way on the Bible is false and would have been impossible. It wasn't just the politics, the entire ethics, sense of life, and way of thinking was alien.

But altruism and religion are two different matters. The Enlightenment emphasis on reason and individualism did not have a rational ethical theory defending the then widely accepted principle of the right to one's own life, liberty, property and pursuit of one's own happiness in accordance with one's own chosen goals on earth. But it also did not embrace an altruist ethics of a duty to live to serve others, which came much later and was not yet there to break bonds to.

The Enlightenment rejected the mystical self abnegation and other-worldliness of the Christian era, despite the remnants of ignorance and wild-eyed preachers with their fire and brimstone, but even the Christians were 'egoistic' in the sense of having a goal to save their own souls in a supernatural realm. 'Loving others as oneself' on this earth was a distant second, and even that did not completely reject the self as in the later altruism.

There were still bad premises in ethics regarding sacrifice to others and which undermined the subsequent course of this country, but it wasn't what counter-Enlightenment altruism later came to be and it wasn't religious self-abnegation following a master and denouncing this world.

Ferris on the inherent relation between science and freedom sounds interesting. (And so was the NYT background on Cohen.) A philosophy of reason as such is required for political freedom, and freedom is required for science and reason to flourish. They have to grow together. A scientific attitude and method as an advanced use of reason is required to establish principles of ethics, political philosophy and legal formulations of proper government, and people doing that must be free of entrenched statism and mysticism. That was counted on by the founders of the country, and cannot be today. Conservatives pushing platonism and religion such as at Hillsdale and characteristically more broadly are not helping.

You were the one who brought up Christianity. I simply correct your false assertions regarding it.

The Greek tradition was notable, developed independently, and prospered in large part because at one point the Greeks ruled the Mediterranean and the trade that came with their empire spread their language. Christ was a Jew, however, not a Greek. Unlike Paul, there is no record of Christ speaking Greek or travelling to Greece (Paul spoke at least Hebrew, Latin, Aramaic and Greek). Christianity was a fulfillment of Judaism - which predated Greek philosophy (and culture) by at least a millennium historically - even further if one believes the record of the Torah.

What is pagan btw? Pagan was a word mainly invented and used by Christians to denote anyone not of that faith - similar to the word heathen. By very definition, Christianity is excluded from being regarded as "pagan". When I used it, it was in its true sense: Constantine was a sun worshipper - not a Christian - who took pagan (non-Christian) elements from his own and other religious traditions and incorporated them into what then was propagated as "Christianity". The "Christmas Tree" is one such element. (Santa Claus et al is another but much more recent introduction, primarily popularized by Coca-Cola.)

St. Augustine was a monk who grew up in this environment of centuries of Constantinian "Christianity". I've read several of his works and applaud the man greatly for being willing to step up and denounce some of the major provisions of his own religion and original thought. As to whether or not he was spreading "bad thought", one can assert that about any philosopher one does not follow or attend to. It's a meaningless criticism.

What happened during the Dark Ages that led to the Enlightenment? The printing press. The Gutenberg press. And what was that press used for more than anything else? To print copies of the King James Edition of the Bible - also known as Gutenberg Bibles. You are welcome to dismiss this fact, but the influence it had was directly responsible for most of the upheaval and rejection of the traditional ruling clergy and the push for Protestantism and the mass migrations to the New World. It enabled the patronage of science without the auspices of clerical veto such as that experienced by Galileo.

You are welcome to denigrate "religion" or theism, but the plain truth is that atheistic secularism was not the driving force behind the Jews, the Greeks (including Aristotle), the Enlightenment, nor of the Founding of the United States of America. And anyone who is willing can look up and verify this for themselves. History of the world of philosophy is the history of religion.

Blarman: If one follows a moral philosophy, is he (or she) not a servant of that philosophy? Absolutely. Are you not a follower or servant of Objectivism? Yes."

Duty to serve and follow is the diametric opposite of a rational ethics based on the requirements of human life. Thinking in accordance with rational principles that one understands is not "serving". Recognizing that distinction is not "being offended". Promoting a lecture that begins with a demand to "serve the good" and proceeds to extol Platonic mysticism as the "best" philosophy is the opposite of the purpose of this forum. Blarman is an overt religious mystic who wants, as he has put it, to "follow a master". A forum for Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason and egoism is not the place to obnoxiously and repeatedly promote his off topic religious thinking. The false and misleading history and traditionalist religious Platonic mindset of Hillsdale is not the "best" of philosophy. "Fascination" with mysticism is not the standard here.

Blarman: "True Christianity did not derive anything from Plato or Socrates. See Paul's conversation with the Greeks on Mars Hill. The Greeks (and much of the Western World) only adopted "Christianity" after it had been co-opted and paganized by Constantine. Did it lead to the Dark Ages? Yup. And what brought us out of the Dark Ages? People rejecting the very paganism that had been ruling over them for a millennium."

The primitive mysticism of the Jesus and other mystery cults mixed with neo Platonism to form the Christian ideology was not "pagan". Augustine and other early church leaders were not "pagan". They were the religious thinkers spreading the bad ideology, not ruling politicians. The superstition, supernaturalism, mysticism, and demands for human sacrifice renouncing this earth were the Dark Ages; they did not lead the world out of it, which came from a revival of reason despite the mystics of "True Christianity". Blarman's repeated promotion of religious apologetics substituting for history on this forum is as obnoxious as a persistent Jehova's Witness who pesters people as his life "calling".

As I said - to each his own. One finds value where he looks and according to his values. I found this lecture to be insightful. You are welcome to disagree.

Blarman: "I got through about halfway through the book and put it down, finding it dry. To me, it is in the application - the test of the hypothesis - that ideas are proved and Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand focused on the epistemiology nearly to the exclusion of practical application."

Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand does not focus on "epistemiology" [sic]. The first half is about the metaphysics and epistemology because a basic understanding of existence and its relation to our conscious awareness of it, and how we know anything with our rational conceptual faculty, are the foundations of philosophy on which ethics and politics are based. Proper thinking is an "application" of rationality that mystics find so "dry". The second half of the book, which Blarman did not read because he "put it down", is about the principles of ethics and politics, not "epistemiology".

The "lectures" I referred to as where one "will find examples of the 'best philosophy lectures'" in contrast to the "Hillsdale conservative traditionalists following Plato" are Leonard Peikoff's lecture series on the history of philosophy, not his book on Ayn Rand's philosophy. In contrast to the inaccurate Hillsdale promotion for Plato's mysticism and tyrannical politics, the lectures cover the basic ideas of the major philosophers from the pre-Socratics to the 20th century analysts, showing how they addressed the major questions of philosophy and reacted to previous ideas, leading to the dominant ideas in the culture today.

From a historical perspective I found it fascinating - aside from the mispronunciation of the Greek words.

"It begins by announcing that the purpose of life is to "serve the Good", with the claim that studying philosophy will tell you what said "Good" is -- which the lecture never gets to. In the name of the purpose of philosophy we are expected to accept the false premise that the purpose of human life is to "serve" ..."

If one follows a moral philosophy, is he (or she) not a servant of that philosophy? Absolutely. Are you not a follower or servant of Objectivism? Yes. Do we not choose to follow that which we deem to be in our interest or "the Good"? Surely. Thus you follow Objectivism because you deem it to be "the Good". Everyone is going to have their individual take on the matter. If you spend all your time being offended because someone else doesn't start from your point of view, you're going to waste a lot of time being offended.

"The account of the Socratic method in Plato, misrepresented as critical thought, leaves out that the basic premise was that ideas do not come from examining reality, but rather by bringing out through leading questions an alleged innate knowledge from within you, prodded by your superior who will always know more than you through special insights. That is mystical from the outset."

Observation doesn't bring about thought, it merely gives something upon which the intellect can act - dots to be connected as it were. You can stare at a block of marble for hours - it doesn't mean that the statue of David is going to suddenly jump out at you. Observation is one step in the process. There is an internal process in the mind by which connections are made, synapses fire, and understanding is gained - that "light bulb" moment. To me, Plato's description is fairly accurate - especially knowing the actual Greek words he uses. Translation is a fickle thing, however.

We don't have to re-invent calculus, metallurgy, or any number of other topics because we can study what has been discovered by others. In very fact, it is far more efficient to study what others have done than attempt to re-invent it ourselves. Why do we herald the inventor at all if not because we value the utility to be gained for which we did not have to individually labor? Why do we instinctively criticize the efficiency losses from someone trying to "re-invent the wheel"? It is because we inherently/innately realize that such is a needless duplication of effort. What is interesting is that we often reach the conclusion before really working out why. To me, this common phenomenon gives substantial credence to Plato's characterizations.

Side note: True Christianity did not derive anything from Plato or Socrates. See Paul's conversation with the Greeks on Mars Hill. The Greeks (and much of the Western World) only adopted "Christianity" after it had been co-opted and paganized by Constantine. Did it lead to the Dark Ages? Yup. And what brought us out of the Dark Ages? People rejecting the very paganism that had been ruling over them for a millennium.

"Leonard Peikoff describes how the course of philosophy has been a "Duel between Plato and Aristotle", not a mere footnote to Plato, in the epilogue of his Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, and provides details in his Ominous Parallels and history of philosophy lectures that begin with the pre-Socratic Greeks. That is where you will find examples of the "best philosophy lectures", not in Hillsdale conservative traditionalists following Plato."

I got through about halfway through the book and put it down, finding it dry. To me, it is in the application - the test of the hypothesis - that ideas are proved and Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand focused on the epistemiology nearly to the exclusion of practical application. There were no doubt nuggets of wisdom, but I can't credit it with being in the "best philosophy lectures" section of my library. To each his (or her) own.