AnyBook4Less.com	Find the Best Price on the Web Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Home  |  Store List  |  FAQ  |  Contact Us  |
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money Keyword AuthorISBN

Title: The Stance of Atlas: An Examination of The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Peter Erickson ISBN: 0-9654183-0-8 Publisher: Herakles Pub Pub. Date: 01 June, 1997 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $19.95

Your Country USA Canada United Kingdom Australia Austria Belgium France Germany Italy Netherlands Switzerland Currency AutoUSD CAD GBP EUR AUD CHF Delivery Only cheapest delivery All delivery options Include Used Books Are you a club member of: Barnes and Noble Books A Million Chapters.Indigo.ca

Average Customer Rating: 2.67 (3 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: Critical mistakes make for dull book
Comment: Although Erickson makes some good points along the way, the book on the whole is a disappointment. Erickson committed three cardinal mistakes in writing it. To begin with, he unwisely adopts a dialogue form of presentation. The trouble with this is that philosophical dialogues constitute the most difficult form of philosophical writing. In order to for a dialogue to be effective, the characters participating in it must be presented as real human beings, not just cardboard puppets ventriloquistically manipulated by the author. Erickson is clearly out of his depth in the whole business. His characters have no personality at all. They do not fight for their ideas, like real human beings would, but calmly accept all the arguments presented by the character Philosophus, who represents Erickson himself. Erickson would have been better off writing the work in the traditional style of the essay. Philosophical dialogues should only be written by those equipped with the necessary literary and dramatic genius to bring them off. A second mistake involves Erickson's decision to focus primarily on abstruse technical questions. Too much of his book is preoccupied with an analysis of vague philosophical terms. Terms like absolute, apprehension, contextual, free will, identity, necessity, reason, unit, and value are tossed around as if they meant something definite. Most of Erickson's critique reduces itself merely to a purely verbal analysis of the meanings of these vague terms, out of which obscure technical problems are deduced and endlessly quibbled over. Erickson would have been better off focusing the lion's share of his attention on the factual shortcomings of some of Rand's more controversial philosophical contentions. It is on the empirical side that Objectivism is most vulnerable.Toward the end of the book, we find one of Erickson's puppet-characters declaring: "I think we now have a sufficient understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of ObjectivismŠ" This implies that Erickson believes his discussion of Rand's philosophy is comprehensive. Here he commits his third mistake: for his book is not comprehensive. It ommits a discussion of two of Rand's most important and characteristic doctrines: her theory of human nature and her theory of history. You would think a doctrine as critical to the Objectivist ideology as this one would warrent a word or two from Erickson's cast of puppets, but they are strangely silent on the whole issue. What could possibly be the reason for this? I suspect the major reason is that Erickson more or less sympathizes with Rand's view of history and thus sees no reason to animadvert against it. He prefers to quibble over such inconsequential issues as time and space and the problems raised by discussing perception in terms of vague philosophical concepts. It is primarily for the above stated reasons that I cannot give Erickson's book a rating higher than two stars. While he does, as I stated above, make a few good points along the way, the book on the whole is overly-technical, prolix, destitute of empirical rigor and, worst of all, dull.

Rating: 4
Summary: Excellent book.
Comment: This book is excellent for readers who agreed with many of Rand's views but were upset by her atheism. It removes a basic contradiction: If belief in God causes the "evil" in Atlas shrugged, why does the Catholic faith argue against the same evil. Simple, Rand was wrong.

The book attacks Objectivism, but does not argue against Rand's true genius -- her ability to get inside the head of New Age man and describe and explain this evil being.

The book does answer the question on universals. The observations on memory are brilliant.

Examples of the new philosophy of Factivism include: "Name a nonexistant fact" answer the Past.

The only reason for the four stars is that the book is hard to read. I have read it four times and have mastered only about 50%. Definitely geared to philosophy buffs. Another similar book is "Raselas" (spelling)

Rating: 2
Summary: Fair but foolish, Erickson fails as debater and philosopher.
Comment: Erickson's critique of Objectivism is highly defective. While he brings a sincerity to his discussion which other of Rand's commentators have not possessed, his arguments are generally poor and his reports of Rand's claims confused. The book is also badly planned and edited and suffers grievously under the dead weight of its dialogue form. Erickson's misapprehensions reach their deepest when he discusses technical issues in the Objectivist epistemology. Rand and her followers introduce the notion 'perceptual form' to indicate the *means* by which something is *directly* observed by a knowing subject. Erickson fails to grasp the difference between Objectivism's unique variant of direct realism and the flawed but popular theory of perception wherein the knowing subject apprehends, not something external to herself, but internal *representations* of the external. Because of this confusion, Erickson treats Objectivism as reifying form into the object of perception itself, and in attacking this idea argues against a theory which Objectivism opposes. His error is based on a misunderstanding of what it is to perceive something in-a-form. He believes that Rand wishes to argue that we perceive things in a *different* form; different, presumably, from the one which they possess on their own. But since form is the means by which we perceive a thing, there is no form which a thing is in other than the one in which it is perceived. Erickson performs a similar reification of the notion 'unit', which is again simply the external object of awareness under a certain perspective. After about the middle of the book, Erickson's prose becomes very garbled and the quality of argument - already dubious - suffers. He moves into various technical issues in the sciences and economics which are inappropriate to a book on philosophy. He argues against the Einsteinian view of the relativistic nature of space and time on purely *a priori* grounds, hardly the way to approach empirical questions. Even so, his arguments are not successful. The book's cover advertises a solution to the problem of universals, but I must confess I could not find it. He introduces God into his speculations with no more attempt at proof than the claim that "Atheism is getting to be out-of-date" (p. 219) The philosophy which he attempts to present under the name "Factivity" lacks an analysis of, among other things, facts. The book has two virtues. The first is its general fair-mindedness. Erickson is willing to adopt ideas from Rand and seems to have no psychological axe to grind; he even intervenes on her behalf early in the book, making decent arguments for her position which she never herself made. The second is his comparison between Rand and the Marxist tradition, especially Lenin. While Erickson is not the first to make this comparison, he provides new and intriguing references and points of similarity.