The oft repeated quote, all philosophy after aristotle is just a footnote is bad poetry in my opinion. There are plenty of schools and thoughts of philosophy which are far reaching in their breadth, originality and effectivness. At best we can attribute the foundations of Western philosophy to Aristotle. The only tracing you can do is the historical development. Certainly he did not come up with barely any of the modern concepts. What about phenomenology? That was started at the beginning of the last century. There are plenty of other modes of though, Berkley’s idealism, Descartes skeptism, which Aristotle certainly didn’t have anything to do with. In fact much of the troubles in that era of resisting these theories were because many European Universities exclusivly taught Aristotlean philosopy and so didn’t want any new theories showing that their previous work had been pointless.
How can you apply objective reality to philosophy? That doesn’t make any sense to me. As objective reality is a philosophical term, you’re effectivly applying philosophy to philosophy.
There have been plenty of objections to laissez-faire capitalism, Marx being one of the immediate ones that springs to mind and it certainly isn’t practiced in the modern world. We have plenty of laws and such making both American, UK and European economic systems a type of Social Capitalism rather than laissez-faire. The concept of laissez-faire capitalism leads to morally repugnant ideas of not having a social security system, not protecting consumers against lies and deciets by companies, not protecting our environment from unscrupulous producers, monopolies being perfectly legal, exploitation of people’s economic situation being legal, I could find many more examples if you so wish. Some of these objections do disappear depending on what type of laissez-faire capitalism rand advocates, but certainly not all of them.
The whole idea of a Rand’s morality is absurd as we all practice altruism all the time within our family groups, under Rand, there would be no such thing as an adulterer, there would be no compulsion to bring up children, you don;'t want it, abandon it on the street (and remember, no social security and no altruism from other people means we walk on by as it lies, cries and dies).
And you wanna know why it makes me sad? Cause calling a system of selfishness isn’t a moral theory at all, it’s an excuse to duck responsibility and let suffering continue just because it’s not convinient forpeople to face upto their moral obligations.
Finally, I would argue that there is some effect of genetics on thought at it is partially genetics that determines our cognitive capacities and soour ability to comprehend ideas. We are not intellectual equals, much as we are not physical equals, whatever our governments try and pretend. The “nurture/nature” debate has pretty much burnt out concluding that it is part of both systems that determine our intellectual capacities. So it must affect thought in some way. It also will affect thoughts when yor body starts releasing mind altering drugs into your system, I’m sure most have us have felt the shift in mental patterns before/after sex, our libido will be determined by genetics, so the extent of that randiness will affect the extent of the effect of sexual desire on our thought processes. So though I will admit that genetics won’t make us think “Black man bad”, it will predispose us to agreewith a beautiful woman to do a task we wouldn’t do if asked by an ugly one. Hence the effect of genetics.
