3 ms·
The truth or falsehood of the content is independent of Binswanger's income source and can be verified apart from that fact. This is the meaning of Ad Hominem f
by dmfdmf 8y ago
The truth or falsehood of the content is independent of Binswanger's income source and can be verified apart from that fact. This is the meaning of Ad Hominem fallacy, to get people to dismiss an argument not because it is false but because of some supposed flaw or fact about the person making the argument. Moreover, this is the exact method by which the Communists dismissed the objections to communism, accusing anyone who defended property rights as "bourgeois" and biased because they owned property. They established multiple brutal dictatorships last century that led to the death of millions and are still active today.
I truly hope you follow through with your intent, ignore the smears and misrepresentations, and read Rand firsthand and judge for yourself. As the first book I recommend Philosophy Who Needs It followed by The Virtue of Selfishness and leave the politics for later. Rand argued that politics follows from ethics and that is where the debate needs to shift if you want to understand the dire state of the world.
- Semirhage 8y agoYou opened with this: The vast majority of people who have opinions on Ayn Rand or her philosophy of Objectivism haven't read a word of what she wrote and are repeating what they heard or have read it and failed to comprehend her ideas. That is ad hominem against a straw man, so I’m applying grains of salt heavily to your commitment to logical and rhetorical integrity.
- dmfdmf 8y agoMy logical and rhetorical integrity is intact, you don't really know what ad hominem means. It means to raise some irrelevant fact about the person making the argument as a reason to dismiss what the person is claiming. E.g. don't listen to Binswanger because he is rich. The vast majority of people who attack or dismiss or smear Ayn Rand have not (or superficially) read what she wrote but this is a fact that IS relevant to whether their opinion on Ayn Rand has any merit so its not ad hom.
- Semirhage 8y agoReassertion of your unsupported claim about who has and hasn’t read something still isn’t an argument, it’s stil a straw man. Do you have any substance to offer?
- dmfdmf 8y agoBefore we move on to your new Straw Man accusation, let's close out your old accusation that my argument is Ad Hom. Do you concede that point, if not why?
- Semirhage 8y agoThere’s nothing new here. That is ad hominem against a straw man, so I’m applying grains of salt heavily to your commitment to logical and rhetorical integrity. Is the first thing I said. Meanwhile I stand by it, but it seemed prudent to break it down point by point until you had nowhere left to go. “All of these people I must invented haven’t even read the books!” Is still just what I said it was.
- dmfdmf 8y agoThe implication of your position (i.e., that my argument is Ad Hom) is that the validity or merit of someone's opinion of Ayn Rand's work is independent of whether they have read her work or not is absurd on the face of it. It implies that people can have valid or valuable opinions on subjects of which they are completely ignorant. These implications are independent of whether my claim is true or false (which, I agree, is a disputable point or at least one that must be validated). > Meanwhile I stand by it... You can stand all you want but your position is not defensible in logic. I will repeat what I previously stated: You do not know what Ad Hom means. I know this for a fact because you fail to see an obvious implication of your position. We can address the validity of my claim but only if you see that my argument is not Ad Hom. If not then there is not much else to discuss.
- Semirhage 8y ago