—“Every philosopher can point out influences of which he may call his teachers or derive his ideas from. Nietzsche for instance read Schopenhauer, Epicurus, Plato, and Heraclitus among his other influences. So let us hear yours. How many people have you read, and who do you derive your thoughts from? (Btw, wikipedia level understanding does not count. You can’t cite someone as an influence unless you have read his works)”—
Well, I answer this question a few times a year. And it might surprise you but I read science, economics and history and I think most philosophy by almost all philosophers is little more than simply semi-secular theology or empty verbalism for the purpose of middle-class criticism of the status quo. So in general, except for a few cases, I view philosophy largely as a poor investment as likely to do one harm as good just as philosophers have done as much or more harm as good. I would go so far as to say most philosophers are seeking to be creative liars.
My reading list is pretty extensive and published on my site. And I’ve read everything on it I think. Ramsey keeps all of the works in digital form in our library. And recently he has added new works to it that are relevant but that I have only skimmed.
There is something in the content of the neutral point of view we find in encyclopedias. And aside from those works, I found the Germanic Fairy Tales, Pinnocchio, Johnny Tremain, Ivanhoe, Harlan Ellison, Heinlein, Ben Bova, and all the postwar science fiction authors fairly influential – they were all libertarian.
I came to philosophy from artificial intelligence by way of Hayek and Popper – who were the first thinkers to suggest that we must study man using information not norms – just as we study physics now as information not forces.
But Aristotle created a framework for the study of knowledge, and that framework has persisted throughout the centuries: existence, epistemology/truth, ethics, politics, aesthetics. This structure provides a hierarchy that as from the universe to the self to the interpersonal to the political to the universal.
So when I wanted to create a language for the unloaded analysis and comparison of competing political strategies, and in particular to allow western aristocratic conservatives to rationally argue their strategy, I chose the structure of philosophy to do it because it’s the established language for discourse.
The big change for me was popper and Hayek, and when I heard Hoppe lecture I knew something wasnt quite right but that the answer was in there somewhere.
It took me years to get it right. By 2009 or so I had everything but one very hard problem. And solving that problem was the watershed: how to demand warranty of due diligence in matters of the commons.
So while I write what we call philosophy, Propertarianism solves the Wilsonian Synthesis and united science, philosophy, morality, and law.
What I am writing is natural law.
The Only Possible Epistemology, Ethics and Politics of Sovereignty.