O.K., Terry, I'll grant you that Aristotle keeps Rand away from a reductionistic materialism. Her development of Aristotle, on the other hand, ends up with something like Leibniz's view of concepts, that concepts refer to every characteristic contained in their objects.
This is hardly an improvement on Aristotle, who did realize that if there are "natural kinds," then there are both essential and accidental characteristics of those kinds; the meaning of concepts would be about the essential characteristics. For the Leibniz-style view of concepts to work, one would have to have (as Leibniz himself understood) the infinite knowledge of God as it would be impossible for man's finite understanding to encompass all the characteristics of objects.
Onto Rand's description of "concept formation": Qualities are "abstracted" from experience and formulated into concepts. She's shooting for a "conceptualist" theory of universals, avoiding the Aristotelian "realism" of substantial essences on the one hand and the subjectivism of "nominalism" on the other.
However, a conceptualist theory cannot be consistently maintained. Even if concepts may be conventional and arbitrary in many ways, they can only be connected to reality if they are based on some abstract features that are really in the objects. Back to Aristotle we go.
Rand's theory of concepts leads inexorably to a view of all truth as essentially analytic. And it heads straight into speculative dogmatism, since it must rely on a Rationalistic and Aristotelian sense of the self-evidence of first principles. Actually, one could characterize Objectivism as Rationalistic metaphysics. |
