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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Dated,
By Steve Jackson "stevejackson100atyahoocom" (New England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: With Charity Toward None: An Analysis of Ayn Rand's Philosophy (Paperback)
In 1971, professor of philosophy William O'Neill published the first book-length critique of Ayn Rand's philosophy, known as Objectivism. (Albert Ellis's 1968, IS OBJECTIVISM A RELIGION?, was a discussion of Rand and psychology, from what I recall.) This book isn't bad, but it has been superseded as a critique of Objectivism by Robbins's work (ANSWER TO AYN RAND, which has been updated as WITHOUT A PRAYER) and Scott Ryan's recently released OBJECTIVISM AND THE CORRUPTION OF RATIONALITY.O'Neill's discussion of Rand's thought is informative and more or less accurate. On the other hand, he doesn't make enough of an effort to integrate Rand's thought into a coherent whole (granted, this isn't easy to do). So I don't think that someone new to Ayn Rand would understand why Rand has influenced so many people. Yet O'Neill does do a good job at bringing to light of some of the contradictions in Rand's work. For example, Rand preached that compromise was evil; yet she supported candidates for president who were anything but Objectivists. However, some of the alleged contradictions Prof. O'Neill finds would disappear if he had used a bit more "charity" in interpreting Rand. If you want to read a sympathetic integration of Rand's thought, I recommend Chris Sciabarra's AYN RAND: THE RUSSIAN RADICAL.
9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Methinks the Lady Doth Protest Too much,
By V (Michigan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: With Charity Toward None: An Analysis of Ayn Rand's Philosophy (Paperback)
I apologize at the outset for the length of this review: the issues raised in William F. O'Neills' WITH CHARITY TOWARD NONE are of sufficient complexity that they must be engaged in a modicum of detail if the book is to be evaluated.The list of O'Neill's publications suggests that his primary field was education. Owing to the influence of John Dewy (1859 - 1952), 20th Century educational theory in America has been seasoned with philosophical Pragmatism. O'Neill's criticism of Objectivist epistemology (pp. 103 - 122) gives evidence that he's in step with this trend. What he offers, then, is a philosophical critique of Objectivism from the perspective of a philosophical pragmatist. The book is a mixed bag. Part One (pp. 1 - 79) provides a fair-to-middling summary of Rand's main philosophical positions. This section is useful, because it's rich in bibliographic citations and references to key passages from Rand's philosophical oeuvre. Part Two, the critical analysis of Objectivism, is less appreciable, enlightening here, frustrating there. O'Neill points out (pp. 84 & 88) how, despite her fulminations against Plato and Immanuel Kant, Rand's positions and theirs are kissing-cousins at several key points. He also offers interesting pragmatic rebuttals of Rand's and Nathaniel Branden's views about perception, concept formation, the relative importance of reason and emotion in the ontogeny of the intellect, etc. When it comes to purely logical matters, however, O'Neill's lack of training ill equips him to exposit Rand's more extreme blunders. His discussion of the Laws of Identity, Excluded Middle, and Noncontradiction (pp. 122 - 130), in particular, is appallingly muddleheaded. As a consequence, O'Neill sometimes has a hard time hitting the target critically. Additionally, O'Neill might have done a better job of pointing out how Rand's writings actually offer precious little in the way of genuine argumentation. Typically, she simply announces a position as allegedly following from such-and-such premises. Yet a step-by-step pattern of reasoning by which one may validly pass from premises to conclusion is rarely even intimated. Thus, while Rand's corpus abounds in declarations that this-that-or-the-other is necessitated by the Law of Identity, just how this happens to be so isn't plausibly spelled out in detail. Instead of ratiocination she delivers sermons on the omnipotence of rationality. Rand would have us believe, in fact, that her entire philosophy follows logically from the Law of Identity (A = A). That her philosophy does so follow is thunderously false. But because O'Neill is no more savvy than Rand herself when it comes to logical technicalities, his critique of Rand's deductive errors (pp. 122 - 142) is excruciatingly inept. Consider, for example, his bumbling objections to Rand's crack-brained notion that the Law of Identity has causal import. He states (p. 138), in back-to-back sentences: "Miss Rand, in holding that causality is entailed by identity fails to see two very significant facts [sic]. Firstly, identity itself is implicitly a statement of causality." Chew that quotation over a bit. Yep, you got it, all right. The guy's telling us that Rand is MISTAKEN in holding that identity entails causality because...IDENTITY ENTAILS CAUSALITY! O'Neill evidently isn't aware that, in this context at least, entailment and implication amount to the same thing. Neither Rand nor O'Neill commands even the barest rudiments of formal logic. Neither of them understands DEDUCTIVE VALIDITY, LOGICAL TRUTH, LOGICAL NECESSITY, ANALYTICITY, the relationships of LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE and LOGICAL EQUIVALENCE, the difference between TRANSPARENT and OPAQUE SEMANTIC CONTEXTS, etc., etc. Neither of them, for instance, understands why EVERY argument with exclusively necessary premises and a contingent conclusion is deductively invalid. By definition, an argument is DEDUCTIVELY VALID if, and, only if, the combination all-true-premises-plus-false-conclusion is impossible. Suppose, then, we have an argument with necessarily true premises P and contingent conclusion Q. Since Q is contingent, it's possible for Q to be false. Hence, there is some possible circumstance, say, C, in which Q is false. Thus, Q is false in C. But the premises P are all necessarily true. Thus, they're all true in EVERY possible circumstance. Hence, they're all true in C. So in possible circumstance C, all the premises P are true but the conclusion Q is false. In that case, there IS a possible circumstance (viz., C) in which the argument has all true premises and a false conclusion. So, the combination all-true-premises-plus-false-conclusion is possible. Therefore, by the definition of deductive validity, the argument is deductively invalid. Q. E. D. Moral of the story: CONTINGENT CONCLUSIONS CANNOT VALIDLY BE DRAWN FROM NECESSARY PREMISES. This undercuts Rand's main line of argumentation. She insists that her gospels of rationality, ethical egoism, laissez faire capitalism, & co. are necessarily true inasmuch as they all follow strictly from the Law of Identity alone. But all of these doctrines are actually contingent: every one of them is conceivably false under some logically possible scenario. And since they're all contingent, none of them is validly deducible from exclusively necessary premises. Hence, NONE of them is validly deducible from the Law of Identity alone. Rand's entire philosophical system is therefore rotten at the core. Another subject about which O'Neill's exposition is less than optimal is the forbearance of Objectivist epistemology to acknowledge that doxastic contexts are semantically opaque, that whether an ascription of belief to someone is factually correct doesn't depend solely on the truth or falsity of the ascribed belief. It's doubtful whether O'Neill himself quite understands the issue. He nevertheless puts his finger on the crux of the matter in pp. 86 - 87: because "[a]ll men know that ultimate truth and value reside in X..., to deny the reality of X is to be (willfully) untruthful and evil." He draws the sting on p. 87: `"X is thus and so" because "X is thus and so." To deny it is to be a willful liar. Not to know it is to be less than a man.' Here we have a crucial Objectivist motif, but here O'Neill lets his readers down. Despite his exhaustive documentation elsewhere, he fails to support his attribution of the above reasoning with specific quotations or citations of key Objectivist texts. Consequently, it's not fully established that Objectivism really is committed to such a stance. One can applaud O'Neill's effort to pin the tail on the donkey while wishing that he weren't blindfolded. Objectivists, to the best of my knowledge, have never come right out with an explicit assertion that no doxastic context is opaque. It's just that their denial-of-reality schtick has no dialectical traction once the semantic opacity of "belief" contexts is acknowledged. To appreciate the eccentricity of Objectivist doctrine about belief, savor, if you will, the following passage from Rand's PHILOSOPHY: WHO NEEDS IT? (Signet Books, 1982), p. 14: `"It may be true for you, but it's not true for me." What is the meaning of the concept "truth"? Truth is the recognition of reality. (This is known as the correspondence theory of truth.) The same thing cannot be true and untrue at the same time and in the same respect. That catch phrase, therefore, means: a. that the Law of Identity is invalid; b. that there is no objectively perceivable reality, only some indeterminate flux which is nothing in particular, i.e., that there is no reality (in which case, there can be no such thing as truth); or c. that the two debaters perceive two different universes (in which case, no debate is possible). (The purpose of the catch phrase is the destruction of objectivity.)' "It may be true for you, but it's not true for me." Observe how Rand completely misses the catch phrase's natural interpretation: "YOU may think so, but I don't." This is embodied in (#): Where A is any person and P is any proposition, A BELIEVES that P if, and only if, P is TRUE FOR A. Rand's accounts of truth and reality commit her to construing (#) "objectively" ("The purpose of the catch phrase is the destruction of objectivity"). Truth is unique: there is only ONE truth. Truth is therefore the SAME for everyone. Thus, P is true for A if, and only if, P is TRUE--period! Hence, by (#), truth is a NECESSARY CONDITION of belief: A BELIEVES that P only if P is true. This flouts a fundamental difference between knowledge and belief. Truth is a necessary condition of the former but NOT of the latter: one can't KNOW to be true what's actually false, but one can BELIEVE to be true what's actually false. Taking truth to be a necessary condition of belief effectively conflates belief with knowledge. Result: one can't believe what's actually false. So if one believes something, it's true. Hence, ALL beliefs are true. Thus, there are only APPARENT--but no REAL--instances of false belief. Every apparent instance of false belief must be a case in which someone intentionally DENIES what he KNOWS to be true. Thus, Objectivism: there are no honest mistakes, only willful "denials of reality". To be mistaken is to be a liar. You'd better BELIEVE it! Epistemologically, Objectivism is the mirror image of Postmodernism. Both positions conflate truth and belief. They argue in opposite directions, however. Whereas Postmodernism maintains that truth is SUBjective because belief is, Objectivism maintains that belief is Objective because truth is. O'Neill's last two chapters (pp. 148 - 233) tackle Rand's theory of value. Here he undertakes... Read more ›
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Minor corrections,
By
This review is from: With Charity Toward None: An Analysis of Ayn Rand's Philosophy (Paperback)
William O'Neill's _With Charity Toward None_ was published in 1971; John Robbins's _Answer To Ayn Rand_ was published in 1974. This fine volume by O'Neill was indeed the first full-blown critique of Objectivism from an academic-philosophical point of view, but it wasn't alone for all _that_ "many" years. Nor was it the first "critical and broad review of Rand's work by someone who disagreed with her ideas to a great extent." That honor goes to Albert Ellis's _Is Objectivism A Religion?_, published in 1968 -- admittedly not a _philosophical_ critique, but a critical review all the same.
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