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Tibor Machan | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Tibor Richard Machan (1939-03-18)18 March 1939 |
| Died | 24 March 2016(2016-03-24) (aged 77) New York, New York, U.S. |
| Education | |
| Education | Claremont McKenna College (BA) New York University (MA) University of California, Santa Barbara (PhD) |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Objectivism,analytic philosophy,individualism,ethical egoism,virtue ethics,aretaic turn,eudaimonism |
| Main interests | Political philosophy,individual rights,egoism,meta-ethics |
| Notable ideas | Argument from species normality, egoism and rights, egoism and generosity |
| Objectivist movement |
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Tibor Richard Machan (/ˈtiːbɔːrməˈkæn/; 18 March 1939 – 24 March 2016) was aHungarian-Americanphilosopher. Aprofessor emeritus in the department ofphilosophy atAuburn University, Machan held theR. C. Hoiles Chair of Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at theArgyros School of Business & Economics atChapman University inOrange, California until 31 December 2014.
He was a research fellow at theHoover Institution atStanford University, a research fellow at theIndependent Institute, an adjunct scholar at theCato Institute, and an adjunct faculty member of theLudwig 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 themWhy is Everyone Else Wrong? (Springer, 2008). He was, until spring 2015, senior contributing editor atThe Daily Bell. He was senior fellow at theHeartland Institute in Arlington Heights, Illinois.
Machan rejected any division of libertarianism intoleft-wing andright-wing. He held that, by its nature, libertarianism is about political liberty for all individuals to do whatever is peaceful and non-aggressive. Machan was aminarchist.[2]
Machan was born inBudapest.[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 fromClaremont McKenna College (then Claremont Men's College).[5] He took his Masters of Arts in philosophy atNew York University from 1965 to 1966, and his Ph.D. in philosophy atUniversity of California, Santa Barbara, 1966–1971.[6] He taught as an assistant professor of philosophy atCalifornia State University, Bakersfield from 1970 to 1972.[7]In 1970, withRobert W. Poole, Jr. and Manuel Klausner, he purchasedReason magazine, which has since become the leading libertarian periodical in America. Machan editedReason for two years and was the editor ofReason Papers, an annual journal of interdisciplinary normative studies, for 25 years.
He was a visiting professor at theUnited 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 onbusiness ethics andpolitical 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 theU. 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 theAmerican Philosophical Association, titled "Aristotle & Business." He was on the board of the Association for Private Enterprise Education for several terms.
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.[8]
Machan's work usually focused on ethics andpolitical philosophy, specificallynatural rights theory, as in works such asIndividuals and Their Rights (Open Court, 1989) andLibertarianism Defended (Ashgate, 2006). He defended the arguments ofAyn Rand forethical egoism, and also wrote frequently onbusiness ethics, a field in which he deployed aneo-Aristotelian ethical stance whereby commercial and business conduct gain their moral standing by constituting extensions of the virtues of productivity and prudence. He argued that the field presupposes the institution of the right toprivate 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, andA Primer on Business Ethics, both with James Chesher, andThe Morality of Business, A Profession of Human Wealth Care (Springer, 2007).
Machan also wrote in the field ofepistemology. 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 developedAyn Rand's contextual conception of human knowledge (from Rand'sIntroduction to Objectivist Epistemology), but also draws on the insights ofJ. L. Austin, from his paper "Other Minds", andGilbert Harman, from his bookThought, in works such asObjectivity (Ashgate, 2004). Machan worked on the problem offree will and defended asecular,naturalist (but notmaterialist) notion of human initiative in his booksThe Pseudo-Science ofB. F. Skinner (1974; 2007) andInitiative: Human Agency and Society (2000).
Machan argued againstanimal rights in his widely reprinted paper "Do Animals Have Rights?" (1991)[9] and in his bookPutting Humans First: Why We Are Nature's Favorite (2004); 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.[10]
Machan lived inSilverado Canyon, California. He was previously married toMarty Zupan.[8][11] He had three children and four grandchildren.[3]
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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.
