Tibor Machan

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Tibor Machan
Argument from species normality
, egoism and rights, egoism and generosity
Objectivist movement
Photo of Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand
Philosophy
Organizations
Theorists

Ayn Rand Institute

Other

Literature
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
For the New Intellectual
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
The New Left
Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
Philosophy: Who Needs It
The Romantic Manifesto
The Virtue of Selfishness
Objectivist periodicals
The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies
The Fountainhead
Atlas Shrugged
Related topics

Tibor Richard Machan (

Argyros School of Business & Economics at Chapman University in Orange, California
until 31 December 2014.

He was a research fellow at the

Ludwig von Mises Institute.[1] Machan was a syndicated and freelance columnist; author of more than one hundred scholarly papers and more than forty books, among them Why is Everyone Else Wrong? (Springer, 2008). He was, until spring 2015, senior contributing editor at The Daily Bell. He was senior fellow at the Heartland Institute
in Arlington Heights, Illinois.

Machan rejected any division of libertarianism into

minarchist.[2]

Life

Machan was born in Budapest.[3] Machan's father hired a smuggler to get him out of Hungary when he was 14 years of age and he came to the United States three years later, in 1956.[4] By 1965, Machan graduated from Claremont McKenna College (then Claremont Men's College).[5] He took his Masters of Arts in philosophy at New York University from 1965 to 1966, and his Ph.D. in philosophy at University of California, Santa Barbara, 1966–1971.[6] He taught as an assistant professor of philosophy at California State University, Bakersfield from 1970 to 1972.[7] In 1970, with

Robert W. Poole, Jr. and Manuel Klausner, he purchased Reason
magazine, which has since become the leading libertarian periodical in America. Machan edited Reason for two years and was the editor of Reason Papers, an annual journal of interdisciplinary normative studies, for 25 years.

He was a visiting professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1992–1993 and taught at universities in California, New York, Switzerland, and Alabama. He lectured in Europe, South Africa, New Zealand, Budapest, Hungary, Prague, Czech Republic, Azerbaijan, Republic of Georgia, Armenia, and Latin America on business ethics and political philosophy.

He sat on the advisory boards for several foundations and think tanks, and served on the founding Board of the Jacob J. Javits Graduate Fellowship Program of the U. S. Department of Education. Machan was selected as the 2003 President of the American Society for Value Inquiry, and delivered the presidential address on 29 December 2002, in Philadelphia, at the Eastern Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association, titled "Aristotle & Business." He was on the board of the Association for Private Enterprise Education for several terms.

Machan was an adviser to

Freedom Communications, Inc. on libertarian issues[8]
from 1996 to 2014.

Machan wrote a memoir, The Man Without a Hobby: Adventures of a Gregarious Egoist (Hamilton Books, 2004; 2nd edition 2012). On 24 March 2016, he died at the age of 77.[9]

Academic work

This article is part of a series on
Libertarianism
in the United States
Schools
Principles
History
Economics
People
Issues
Culture
Organizations
Works
Related topics

Machan's work usually focused on ethics and

private property (one cannot trade what one does not own or hasn't been authorized to trade by the owner) in the works, The Business of Commerce, Examining an Honorable Profession, and A Primer on Business Ethics, both with James Chesher
, and The Morality of Business, A Profession of Human Wealth Care (Springer, 2007).

His full ethical position was developed in his book Classical Individualism: The Supreme Importance of Each Human Being (Routledge, 1998), and it is applied in, among other books, Generosity: Virtue in Civil Society (Cato Institute, 1998).

Machan also wrote in the field of epistemology. His main focus was to challenge the conception of human knowledge whereby to know that P amounts to having reached a final, perfect, timeless, and finished understanding of P. Instead, Machan developed Ayn Rand's contextual conception of human knowledge (from Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology), but also draws on the insights of J. L. Austin, from his paper "Other Minds", and Gilbert Harman, from his book Thought, in works such as Objectivity (Ashgate, 2004). Machan worked on the problem of free will and defended a secular, naturalist (but not materialist) notion of human initiative in his books The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner (1974; 2007) and Initiative: Human Agency and Society (2000).

Machan argued against animal rights in his widely reprinted paper "Do Animals Have Rights?" (1991)[10] and in his book Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature's Favorite (2004), but he also wrote on the ethics of animal treatment in the same work. He was also a skeptic as to whether governments are able to help with global warming and whether human beings have made significant contributions to climate change. On 1 May 2011, Machan was featured in a three-hour interview on C-Span 2's In Depth program as its selection of an author from the Western United States of America.

Machan has argued in a 2008 article that unilateral American intervention has done more harm than good.[11]

Personal life

Machan lived in

Silverado Canyon, California. He was previously married to Marty Zupan.[9][12] He had three children and four grandchildren.[3]

Bibliography

See also

References

  1. ^ Libertarianism.org (Cato Institute) Tibor Machan
  2. ISBN 978-0754660668
    . Against these [early individualists and anarchist libertarians] have stood, recently, Ayn Rand, and most of her students, such as David Kelley and myself, as well as other libertarians, such as John Hospers, Douglas B. Rasmussen, and Douglas J. Den Uyl, all of whom have denied the alleged anarchist implications of libertarianism.
  3. ^ a b Tibor R. Machan (1 August 1988). "Born 3/18/1939 in Budapest, came to USA 1956, served in USAF and got degrees in philosophy; have three children and three grandchildren". Twitter. Retrieved 14 March 2015.
  4. YouTube
  5. ^ Tibor R. Machan (1 August 1988). "A Passionate Defense Of Libertarianism". The Heritage Foundation. Retrieved 14 March 2015.
  6. ^ "Tibor R. Machan: Curriculum Vitae". Anthony Flood. Retrieved 14 March 2015.
  7. ^ See his CV, at: http://www.anthonyflood.com/machancv.htm, accessed 7 October 2020.
  8. Orange County Register
    . 19 December 2005. Retrieved 26 May 2015.
  9. ^ a b Gillespie, Nick (25 March 2016). "Tibor Machan, a Founding Editor of Reason, RIP". Reason.com. Retrieved 25 March 2016.
  10. JSTOR 40435778
    .
  11. ^ Tibor Machan (19 August 2008). "Lessons in Freedom: Domestic & Foreign Policy". Weblong Bahamas. Retrieved 1 October 2019.
  12. Brian Doherty, '40 Years of Free Minds and Free Markets: An oral history of reason', in Reason, December 2008 [1]

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Tibor Machan.
Wikiquote has quotations related to Tibor Machan.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tibor_Machan&oldid=1208960573"