Overture

The primary purpose of this blog is to record noteworthy ideas I have or hear before they fall into the memory hole.

So let's start with my place in the intellectual landscape.

First, I am an Objectivist. Objectivism is the philosophy developed by Ayn Rand, which asserts, to paraphrase her, that reality exists independently of anyone's beliefs or wishes, that reason is man's means of knowing reality, that "rational selfishness" is a redundancy, and that "political entrepreneur" is an oxymoron. The core of Rand's system is not political or even moral, but epistemological, and is best characterized by a kind of orientation that, when confronted with an ambiguous abstraction or principle, always wants to ask "What facts gave rise to that?" -- rather than starting from a commandment, social convention, or emotional reaction, perceived as itself irreducible. The foregoing will not help you much if you don't know anything about Objectivism, but I enjoyed writing it anyway.

Objectivism provides the philosophic substrate on top of which various other, more specialized systems reside in my mind. The next couple posts will probably get into some of those.