[AmeshAdalja]

I recently finished The Power and the Glory: The Key Ideas and Crusading Lives of Eight Debaters of Reason vs. Faith by the late Objectivist Burgess Laughlin. I found the book to be an engrossing, easy-to-read work with a unique perspective.

The book details the lives and works of 8 philosophers who had an influence on the reason vs. faith debate. Some are well known to the general reader (Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, Kant, and Ayn Rand).  But some–such as Celsus, Origen, and Porphyry–may not be.

Laughlin’s purpose was not just to summarize the views of each thinker but to describe how their ideas developed and influenced the debate. From these examples, he extracts principles regarding the mechanisms of how ideas disseminate. 

I found the chapter on Kant to be very illuminating, especially its biographical components such as the influence of Johann Georg Hamann on a pre-Critique Kant.

I highly recommend the book. 

[RohinGupta]

Thanks Amesh for the recommendation. I had the good fortune of working closely with Burgess in his last 3 years. Burgess was kind enough to publish my comments related to KANT CHAPTER in the book website here.

http://www.reasonversusmysticism.com/powerandglory.html

We did a study-group from Locke chapter in the forum http://www.studygroupsforobjectivists.com

Here is the most illuminating question in the study-group that Burgess help me answer.

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Ques. Compare Ayn Rand’s creation of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, in one edition in her lifetime, to John Locke’s creation of Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in four editions in his lifetime. Clue: Compare “Concluding Historical Postscript,” on p. 307 of ITOE, 2nd edition, to Locke’s genesis and development of his ideas on “human understanding” as reported in Ch. 6 of The Power and the Glory.

Ans: p. 307 of ITOE, 2nd edition
“
Prof B: You said you might discuss how you arrived at your theory of measurement-omission. 
AR: I was discussing issue of concepts with a Jesuit, who philosophically was a Thomist. He was upholding to the Aristotelian position that concepts refer to an essence in concretes. And he specifically referred to “manness” in man and “roseness” in roses. I was arguing with him that there is no such thing and these names refer merely to an organization of concretes, that is our way of organizing concretes. 
We never really finished the argument. But after this conversation, I was dissatisfied with my own answer. Because I felt, “Yes, I have indicated where concepts come from, but I haven’t indicated what is the process by which we organize concretes into different groups – because I certainly don’t agree with modern nominalists who claim that its an arbitrary convention or an arbitrary grouping.
And then I asked myself, “What is it that my mind does when I use concepts? To what do I refer, and how do I learn new concepts”. And within half an hour, I had the answer.
“

Certainly there was difference in intelligence between Locke and Ayn Rand. But that cannot explain solving similar type of problem in 33 years and 30 minutes.
The text on Locke makes it clear that his acceptance of metaphysics of two worlds was a major handicap. Every time he tried to solve the problem on “Human Understanding”, he was stuck with what we can and cannot know through sense perception. And therefore to complete his essays on “Human Understanding” with contradictory characteristics like scientific method and flawed metaphysics of religion, majority of his time was spent in trying to reconcile the contradictions.

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Also, I just completed the study-group from Ayn Rand chapter in the book. The study-group activities are summarized in a HBL thread here – https://hbletter.com/forums/topic/study-group-on-ayn-rand/?doing_wp_cron=1440225181.6570160388946533203125#p4046

The complete study group can be viewed here – http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=28351

[JulianHassan]

This is useful to know. I always wanted to read The Aristotle Adventure by Burgess Laughlin, but then I got spooked off by his older books. He wrote a book on ways to make money on the black market in the 1970s or 1980s, which made me worried he could be a rationalist or an anarchist. Even the book reviewed here made me think he could be an anarchist… “Power” in a force sense. I suppose I might be wrong, and he might have been an Objectivist.

[Author]

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