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New acquisitions and new features are announced on the front page as they happen. To make room for these announcements, "older" new releases will be moved to the top of this page. You can also browse the Enlightenment library by author name, essay title, topic, or email list, or scan the collection of dissertations & theses. Use the search engine to find documents that contain particular terms or names. Please let us know if you have any trouble getting around. We're always interested in new submissions.

http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/essays/text/carolynray.html

Please help if you can. I need recommendations.

Enlightenment still needs a new server. Here's the problem. My current server (ibd.net) has apparently sold more accounts than the server can accommodate, which is why it is not functioning adequately anymore. Because of the timelines for the upcoming conferences, I need to move NOW, or people won't be able to read the papers for the January conference (still sitting on my harddrive) and I won't be able to complete the programming for the conference anyway. That's only one of many projects that is now being held up by server problems. Just scroll down to see what else Enlightenment isn't getting done.

Given our operating budget, it has to be cheap. It cannot, however, be free, as I need to have a contractual claim for services. Shopping is mind-boggling and extremely time-consuming (yes, I know about HostSearch; it's less efficient than it looks, when you have specific requirements and not a lot of money to burn). So I am asking for your help.

To make Enlightenment go, I must have the following things:

• mail
• telnet and ftp access (SSH is fine)
• perl compiler
• cgi and custom scripting permission
• subdomains (supersaturated comes with three, one of which is Enlightenment)
• permission to use web logs
• SPACE (I now have 25MB, and I am close to the limit; 100MB is desirable for the short term, but for really short term I could live with 50MB)
• dependable unlimited access
• minimal but prompt and dependable administrative support
• permission to use the site for commercial purposes (i.e., to sell things to support Enlightenment and to advertise my other ventures (Earth and Peace))

If you can recommend a web host that provides ALL of the above, please email me: carolyn_OF_supersaturated.com. If you don't know what the above requirements mean, thanks anyway but I'd rather not be sent random shots-in-the-dark.

Thank you!

Don't Panic! The urls will not change. But I may not be able to publish anything new, including the online conference papers, for at least a few days. If we suddenly disappear, just remember: In the beginning, it is always dark....

Michelle Fram-Cohen, M.A., considers the Scott/Amundsen race to the South Pole and the subsequent portrayals of each man, in "Review of Roland Huntford's The Last Place On Earth". Fram-Cohen finds that Huntford's analysis, and the diaries and histories of the two men, provide some insight into the phenemenon of the sacrificial martyr as hero.

In his first comment, "Fictional Entities", responding to Tom Radcliffe's response to Carolyn Ray's dissertation, Ward argues that Ray is wrong to think that fictional entities do not exist, and that Radcliffe is wrong about what kinds of things they are.

In his second comment, "Spatiotemporal Continuity" Ward argues that Ray should reconsider her contention that spatiotemporal continuity is a metaphysically necessary condition of identity.

Mellway further comments on the Ray/Radcliffe paper on entites in "Metaphysical and Intentional Entities: Exegesis of 'Edges, Entities and Existence: An Epistemological Excursion'". He argues that the original paper leaves an essential distinction of Rand's out of the analysis.

Walter Foddis, B.A., B.Com, elaborates on the use and effectiveness of the method of sentence completion in counseling as an aid to building the client's self-acceptance and self-responsibility in a course essay, "Sentence Completion in Counseling: Enhancing Self-Esteem". This is Foddis's first Enlightenment publication, submitted as part of his Enlightenment Meeting application.

While any essay may be submitted for the Essay Contest (winners of which will receive a year's subscription to Objectivity, high school students are invited especially to submit short essays explaining the problems with fallacious arguments, made by Objectivists and Libertarians, that they find on the internet. WeTheLiving's OWL and Atlantis lists are excellent sources. There is no deadline for this contest; submissions will be compared at each publication time (currently overdue because Carolyn is a terrible print publisher).

Beginning in November, Analytic plans to discuss Aristotelian vs. contemporary logic. Proposed texts include Henry Veatch's Intentional Logic. WE REQUIRE ASSISTANCE! The book is out of print, and unavailable at all the out-of-print bookstores I can find so far. The list has approximately 60 subscribers at this moment. Therefore, we need photocopies or, better yet, a scanned electronic copy that we can distribute to list members. Please help us! We crave knowledge! We promise to go forth and do Rational Things as payment for your care and interest! If you can do anything to assist, please write to Carolyn, carolyn_OF_supersaturated.com Analytic's archives are public. Sign on.

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It's time for my lazy web site, which gets all the attention without doing a lick of work, to start earning a living. Currently, all costs associated with hosting the web site are paid out of my pocket, which means that the web site is not being given the chance to build character and self-esteem by being self-supporting. So I'm teaming up with Amazon, who has agreed to give my spoiled little child a part-time job. Please consider clicking through to Amazon via links on this site when you are planning to buy any of the books or movies mentioned here. Links are forthcoming. Now all I have to do is teach the site to program itself so that Tom and I don't have to code any more; to that end, we are working on a theory of propositions, which will help us with a natural language parser, which we'll combine with our theory of entities to develop knowledge representation capabilities to build an artificial intelligence, which will most likely acquire free will and become an even lazier teenager. Oh well. How does this work?

• We're redesigning the site, again, to make it easier for you to use and for us to maintain. The frames were just a temporary measure. All of the Enlightenment custom programming is done by Dr. Carolyn Ray and Dr. Tom Radcliffe. We're not opposed to assistance, but in view of our budget , you'll have to do it for love.

• Analytic, the discussion list run by Bryan Register, is now discussing Godel's Slingshot. Archives of the previous discussion of the Ray/Radcliffe paper on entities are public, and new subscribers are welcome to participate or watch. Sign on.

• Objectivity, believe it or not, is still in production. It's coming. Making a print journal is a lot a lot nastier than putting one on the web. Editor and publisher, Dr. Carolyn Ray thanks you for your patience.

• Why a translator? Enlightenment now translates itself, more or less, into French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Students, especially in graduate programs, have to fulfill language requirements. The translator provides palatable reading material. The site also gets a great deal of traffic from other countries, and we'd like non-English-speakers to feel welcome. And it's fun for the rest of us: you've asked Jesus for a new way to look at our work; now ask Systran. Check the bottom of the sidebar (that's the thing on the left of your browser), choose your language, and Translate.

• "The Proper Function of Government" consists of two newspaper columns written by Khawaja during his stint as a columnist for the Notre Dame Observer (spring 1997). Both columns are applications of the Lockean conception of the proper function of government--the first to questions of municipal finance in St. Joseph County, Indiana, the second to the status of the Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, Israel.

• "Smoking, Irrationality, and Coercion" consists of three polemical letters on the ethics and politics of smoking. One, addressed to the libertarian writer Jacob Sullum, argues that smoking is irrational. The other two, written in the context of Princeton NJ's recent attempt to ban smoking in "public places," argues that smokers should have the right to smoke on clearly-marked private property, including such "public" places as restaurants and bars.

Online Conference, January 2001

Essay Contest

Thanks to the generosity of Objectivity enthusiasts, we will have several student subscriptions to give away to young readers! The purpose of this subsidy is to take into account the fact that students can sometimes be on an impossibly tight budget and must forego luxuries like journal subscriptions. It is dearly hoped by all of us at Enlightenment that this small inducement will help to corrupt more tender minds with our subversive philosophy. Moreover, we hope that it will encourage the more retiring writers to help us build our little library of original Objective thought. Details, including guidelines and topics, will be posted here in a few days.

Neil Haddow, M.A., was awarded the degree of Master of Arts in Philosophy in 2000 by the University of Waterloo (Canada). His thesis, Essentialism, Reference, and Logical Possibility, a preliminary chapter of which was made available here last week, has arrived in its final form. Haddow tackles logical possibility, essential necessity, and thought experiments. Readers may find it interesting to contrast Haddow's approach to these issues with Ray's. Haddow's doctoral degree is in progress at Waterloo.

• "Dialectical Change and Rationalistic Dogmatism" on Marx's theories of the materialist conception of history and of alienation.
• "Know Thyself" on Peter Abelard's ethics in his Scito Te Ipsum.
• a medieval philosophy exam covering Boethius on happiness, Anselm's lost island argument, and Abelard's solution to the problem of universals.

Tom Radcliffe reviews an ancient history in "Review of Thucydides: History of the Pelopenesian War".

Kurt Keefner reviews an intellectual biography of our 16th president in "Review of Allen Guelzo's Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President". This is Kurt's first contribution to Enlightenment.

Lewis Little's "Theory of Elementary Waves" has apparently gained some following in the Objectivist community. In "Problems with the Theory of Elementary Waves", Tom Radcliffe discusses a number of technical problems with the paper, and shows that if the theory was true then no large-scale optical interference phenomenon such as gravitational lensing would occur. As such phenomena do occur, he concludes that as well as being obscure and sometimes contradictory, the theory of elementary waves is false. Dr. Radcliffe holds a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics from Queen's University at Kingston (Ontario, Canada, 1991); he has worked in particle physics, and currently develops imaging software for computer-assisted orthopedic surgery.

Neil Haddow gives us "Troubles with Moral Twin Earth", a chapter from his Master's thesis. Recent developments in analytic philosophy have reawakened interest in the possibility of a posteriori necessity, essences and realism. Haddow adresses the validity of using logically possible thought experiments as counterexamples to (seemingly) empirically grounded theories, and argues that the Kripke-Putnam theory of rigid designation and essences will help to strengthen empirical theories and discovered essences and, therefore, lessen the force of logically possible counterexamples. Haddow is currently working toward his doctorate. The entire MA thesis, Essentialism, Reference, and Logical Possibility, completed Winter, 2000, will be posted shortly.

Jamie Mellway offers another course paper, "Augustine's Theory of Language and Dialectic", which is a comparison of the dialectic discussed in De Dialectica and the dialectic used in De Magistro. Mellway expects to complete his B.A. in philosophy in 2000, and his B.S. in physics within the next twelvemonth.

The Locke Mailing List is a read-only list, distributing brief excerpts from the Essay, thus providing a guided, Objecti-friendly tour of this large and initially intimidating work. Sign on.

Analytic is discussing the Ray/Radcliffe paper, "Edges, Entities, and Existence". The public archives are available; new subscribers are responsible for reading them. Sign on

• "Sleepers, Awake!" If you missed it in TOC's Navigator, you can read it here: Carolyn Ray's review of Nathaniel Branden's The Art of Living Consciously praises the book while taking some shots at the dark side of Objectivist culture and psychology.

• Tom Radcliffe's original response to Carolyn Ray's dissertation, which by a series of oversights never made it to the web site before now, has just been added. "Inside the Edge" takes issue with Ray's treatment of fictional entities.

• Carolyn Ray has been hording a series of papers on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics from an independent study of the book at the Indiana University Department of Philosophy. Through textual analysis, one of those papers, "Egoism in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics", considers a peculiar debate among contemporary commentators over whether Aristotle was an egoist or an altruist. More like this will be available shortly.

• Tom Radcliffe has produced three new book reviews:
  • "The Love That Failed : Review of The Light That Failed by Rudyard Kipling" , which examines Kipling's amazingly bleak views of life, art and love in the context of his childhood experience.
  • "Burmese Days by George Orwell: A Fable of Social Metaphysics", which interprets Orwell's tragedy in terms of the hallucinatory metaphysical assumptions of the British Raj
  • "The Birth of Dualism: a review of The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels", which examines the role of Christianity in promoting philosophical dualism from a relati vely minor strain in the Classical world to the lead player in the post-Classical world view.

• Jamie Mellway offers a commentary, "Augustine's City of God Book XIX.3-18, 24-8". He also provides a quick toboggan ride through the medieval world of concepts, definitions, propositions, and cognition, in three short essays: "SL I.10-On the Difference between Connotative and Absolute Terms" is a commentary on Ockham's Summa (Totius) Logicae I.10 concerning the difference between connotative and absolute categorematic names. "Common Natures" is a brief commentary on Scotus' theory of common natures. "Intuitive and Abstract Cognition" is an explanation of the difference between intuitive and abstract cognition in Ockham with some comparisons to Scotus.

• "Edges, Entities, and Existence," fundamental new work in objectivist epistemology and metaphysics, is being undertaken by Carolyn Ray and Tom Radcliffe. This controversial work-in-progress was presented at The Objectivist Center's 2000 Advanced Seminar. The paper has been receiving alot of attention since its original delivery, and is spawning new work even as you read (some of which is forthcoming in our Online Conference in January). Locally, the La Jolla Ayn Rand Salon is hosting a special critical discussion of the paper in August, due to Ted O'Connor's enthusiastic summary of it during his report on this year's TOC seminars. (Epithets hurled by seminar participants included "Kantian", "Pragmatist", "Idealist" and "subjectivist." Decided for yourself and post your comments

• Irfan Khawaja's new paper, "Comments on Tara Smith's Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality", provides an introduction to Objectivist egoism for the philosophically-sophisticated . The paper is of special interest because of its response to the common mainstream objection that egoism must fail as a moral theory because it is conditional rather than categorical, and because of Khawaja's interpretation of the choice to live. Due to the nature of his audience, Khawaja uses Aristotle's conception of an axiom (rather than Rand's conception of an axiomatic concept) to show the binding force of egoism's principles, drawing an analogy between the choice to live and Aristotle's Principle of Non-Contradiction--a nice change for Objectivists, and one that may help to broaden their understanding of egoism. The paper is to be delivered at the Ayn Rand Society of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting this year.

• Michelle Fram-Cohen has completed our set of chapter-analyses on Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand with a critical review of Chapter 8, "Virtue". The orginal set of essays was developed in the course of a chapter-by-chapter discussion of OPAR on MDOP in 1993.