Your life is filled with numbers, balance sheets, cold efficiency and rational organization. You have to make sense — to your employees, to your customers, and to yourself. My mind is helpless. The advocates of a supernatural realm never try to prove its existence by reason. By their standard, anyone devoted to reason and logic is a low mentality, fit only to be ruled by those with superior mystic insight. This argument originated with Plato in the ancient world, and it is still going strong today.
How do you know it? And, what should you do? The Founding Fathers had answers to these questions. What is there? For the Founding Fathers, God was a mere bystander, who had set the world in motion but no longer interfered. How did they know? What should you do? The result of these answers — i.
How do they know? Such is the philosophic choice you have to make. Such are the issues on which you will ultimately succeed or fail. If the anti-business philosophy with its three central ideas continues to dominate this country and to spread, then businessmen as such will become extinct, as they were in the Middle Ages and in Soviet Russia.
They will be replaced by church authorities or government commissars. Your only hope for survival is to fight this philosophy by embracing a rational, worldly, selfish alternative. Philosophy and morality, however, do not work by compromise.
Just as a healthy body cannot compromise with poison, so too a good man cannot compromise with evil ideas. In such a set up, an evil philosophy, like poison, always wins. The good can win only by being consistent. If it is not, then the evil is given the means to win every time. For example, if a burglar breaks into your house and demands your silverware, you have two possible courses of action.
You might take a militant attitude: shoot him or at least call the police. That is certainly uncompromising. Whereupon you relax, pleased with your seemingly successful compromise, until he returns next week demanding the rest of your silverware — and your money, your car and your wife. Because you have agreed that his arbitrary, unjust demand gives him a right to some of your property, the only negotiable question thereafter is: how much? Sooner or later he will take everything.
You compromised; he won. You may be surprised at how much a good philosophical fight will accomplish for your public image, and also for your pocketbook.
More important than standing for these policies, however, is doing so righteously, not guiltily and timidly. If you understand the philosophic issues involved, you will have a chance to speak up in such a way that you can be heard.
This kind of fight is not easy, but it can be fought and won. Years ago, a well-known political writer, Isabel Paterson, was talking to a businessman outraged by some government action.
She urged him to speak up for his principles. Updates From ARI. Reproduction of content and images in whole or in part is prohibited. All rights reserved. ARI is a c 3 nonprofit organization.
Hi, Guest! Newsletter Sign Up Sign In. This brings us to the question of why businessmen need philosophy. The businessman, to quote Ayn Rand, is the great liberator who, in the short span of a century and a half, has released men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence, has released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the pre-capitalist centuries — and in which most of it still lives, in non-capitalist countries.
Leonard Peikoff has spent more than sixty years studying, teaching and applying the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Peikoff heir to her estate.
Born in Winnipeg, Canada, in but now a U. Peikoff studied philosophy at New York University and taught at several colleges and universities between and For decades he lectured on Objectivism to worldwide audiences through live appearances and audio transcription of his courses. Read Full Bio. Related Materials.
Why philosophy is a practical necessity for every hard-headed businessman. The injustice of a moral code that condemns and victimizes industrialists for their productive virtues. Philosophy: Who Needs It Duration. What is philosophy — and how is it relevant to my life? View Start. Rand Summarizes Her Philosophy Duration. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Includes bibliographical references This collection of essays by Ayn Rand and other Objectivist intellectuals presents a philosophical defense of capitalism.
There are no reviews yet. Be the first one to write a review. Swimming against the current of virtually every major system of modern thought, Rand has consistently maintained the inexorability of philosophical reason for every aspect of human life, public as well as private. Her spirited defense of capitalism as well as her critique of altruism and collectivism are solidly grounded in the objective realism of Aristotle.
In Rand, one finds a coherent philosophical system with the central role occupied by metaphysics followed by epistemology, ethics and political philosophy. Accordingly to Rand, human beings as rational animals must inevitably confront questions concerning the nature of what is real, the purpose of human life and the character of knowledge, and hence, a broad philosophical framework which addresses these questions is unavoidable.
Ralston have assembled an impressive collection of essays that specifically addresses the issue of the philosophical grounding of business. Philosophy, Binswanger argues is indispensable for business because it is indispensable for human beings who strive to actualize their highest potential which is reason. Just as the C. Failure to explicitly engage the large issues of philosophy is to decide them by default, thus philosophical choices are unavoidable.
Binswanger does not shrink from the implications of this view. The necessity of illuminating human actions in terms of the broad frameworks which only philosophy can provide implies that epistemological, ethical and ontological frameworks are not only always operative, but guide, direct and even determine the character of our actions.
Thus, it is ideas that shape the destiny of both individuals and of nations. If this postmodernist view of the diminished role of philosophy is to prevail with integrity, it must come to terms with some of the very compelling counterexamples cited by Binswanger. The semi-feudal society of Russia went Communist.
The rich capitalist societies of Britain and Sweden turned socialist. America in then poorer than Russia was in turned capitalist. Each of these cases can in defiance of economic realities be traced to the influence of powerful philosophical concepts e. No one has ever seriously doubted that philosophical concepts themselves have presuppositions, even material and economic ones.
This is no less true of mathematics and science than of philosophy. If, however, the integrity of concepts themselves are to be reduced to something else—either material, economic, linguistic or psychical—then the burden of proof is upon those who make such claims to demonstrate how and why this is the case.
Having argued for the importance of philosophy for rational beings in general, the editors set about to address the issue of why philosophy is particularly germane to the enterprise of business. Rand is generally known as an apologist for capitalism. But what precisely is the connection between philosophy in general and particularly ethics and capitalism? Why is it critical that businesspeople be informed about philosophy? George Zarkadakis. The Retreat From Class.
Ellen Meiksins Wood. Adorno, Foucault and the Critique of the West. Deborah Cook. Democratizing Our Data. Reasoning About Knowledge. Halpern and Yoram Moses. Debating Empire. Work Without the Worker. Humanism and Terror. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Rebirth of History. Alain Badiou. Between Reason and Experience. Andrew Feenberg. The Porcelain Workshop. Antonio Negri. Trotsky as Alternative.
Ernest Mandel. The Inner History of Devices.
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