In scientific and technological journals, it is customary to include in the first special issue on a mature invention or discovery a traditionally informal, first-person memoir of how the invention or discovery came about. Because Ronald E. Merrill died of myeloma in 1998, Reed has written an inevitably second-hand account of his discovery of Nietzsche's influence on the young Ayn Rand, and of the subsequent intellectual history of this discovery.
In Ayn Rand's philosophical perspective, and in the working epistemology of science, claims, about which there is no knowledge originating in the evidence of the senses, are considered— in the words of physicist Wolfgang Pauli—" not even false." Theistic arguments presented in Tie Journal of Ayn Rand Studies by Parrish and Toner are in this category. Various claims to which Parrish and Toner refer are shown to come from misuse of intution, middle-school fallacies about probability, and attempts to deduce the existence of a god from temporary (and for the most part already closed) gaps in scientific knowledge.
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