Tuesday, January 29, 2008

New Link: Robert Bass Objectivism Commetary

Commenter Mac on the ARCHN site provides a link to Robert Bass Objectivism commentary. It used to be linked on these two lists of Objectivism criticisms, but those links are now dead. Here's the working link.

Bass is a philosophy professor, so his criticism is all academic and dry. Too long and boring for me, but some of you might like it.

Richard Lawrence of Noble Soul wrote a rebuttal. He also hosts the Objectivism Reference Center which is home to a collection of Objectivism criticism links.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Meg,

Sorry this comment is coming a month late, since I knew nothing of your blog before doing a Google search on Bass and Objectivism just now (I don't have the link to his commentary on this particular computer).

Thank you for publicizing Bass's criticism a bit more, first of all. The only other thing I wanted to mention is that Bass responded to the criticism of his An Inconsistent Triad essay that you linked to in this blog post, although I don't currently have the link.

Regarding said critique of Bass's essay, one thing Bass states, and which needs to be made clear to anyone basing their opinion of Bass's arguments on the inadequacy of An Inconsistent Triad, is that said essay was never meant to be a refutation of Objectivism in the first place. Hence, a refutation of his critique proves nothing.

I've interacted with a couple Objectivists on a blog owned by one of them. I posted a link to Bass's main Objectivist commentary page, and the visiting Objectivist posted part of the response to the previously-mentioned essay (and nothing more). I responded with the explanation I gave in the above paragraph (though not as efficiently), but was never granted a reply. Not much intellectual honesty there, especially considering the fact that he made it look like that [possibly] refuted argument of Bass's was the philosopher's only argument against Objectivism.

Apologies for this long-winded post.

Anonymous said...

Ah, I found Bass's rebuttal to the criticism of his essay--the link is near the bottom of his essay's page.

Meg's Marginalia said...

Hi Mac,
Thanks for commenting, I did see this comment. What is the link to the blog?

Anonymous said...

The blog is "evanescent". Here's the link to the relevant post:

http://ellis14.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/the-nihilism-of-subjectivism/

I posted under the name "Mark".
One thing I didn't know at that point was that Bass's critic responded some in his footnotes to Bass's rebuttal. But that has nothing to do with Bass's actual arguments against the philosophy, so I was left hanging in the comments.