My memoriam for Tibor Machan, R.I.P., was published today at FEE.org: Remembering Tibor Machan, Libertarian Mentor and Friend: Reflections on a Giant.
A local copy is repixeled below.
Update: On the issue of owning just any “type of thing” that one can conceptually identify, see: Owning Thoughts and Labor; A Recurring Fallacy: “IP is a Purer Form of Property than Material Resources”. See also the related discussion in Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023): ch. 14, “Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society,” Part III.B, “Libertarian Creationism”; ch. 15, “Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward,” Part IV.C, “Lockean Creationism”; ch. 17, “Conversation with Schulman about Logorights and Media-Carried Property,” text at n.20.
Update: Jack Criss’s touching tribute is available here. And here is one by Pater Tenebraram.
Update: See also Rothbard’s comments in Rothbard, Man, Economy, and Liberty (1 March 1986), where Rothbard comments and responds to the speakers and papers presented at the “Man, Economy and Liberty” colloquium hosted by the Mises Institute; backup Youtube, which concerned Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard, Walter Block and Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., eds. (Mises Institute, 1988). In his remarks he refers to a paper by M.E. Grenander. This paper does not appear in the book, though it was apparently presented at the symposium, and Tibor Machan does have a contribution to the book, and Machan himself (see below) has relied on Sperry. 1 Rothbard says:
[20:45] I’m delighted to hear about Mr. Sperry and neurophysiology from M.E. Grenander’s paper. I never heard of him. I think this is great. I just want to point out there that the idea of the mind determines itself is a standard Thomist position. So without knowing biology, St. Thomas arrived at that, by whatever, inductive, deductive, whatever insight you want to make.
I am unable to find this paper but apparently she does discuss Sperry in M.E. Grenander, “The mind is its own place,” Methodology and Science 16(3) (1983): 181–192.
***
One of my long-time friends, libertarian philosopher Tibor Machan, passed away last month, on Thursday, March 24, 2016. He was 77. Many other libertarians have already posted their memories of Tibor, 2 Which is not surprising, given his significant, longtime, and tireless work for liberty and libertarian theory.
I became familiar with Tibor’s work while I was in college, especially Human Rights and Human Liberties (1975) and Individuals and Their Rights (1989), my two favorite of his works. I was also reading Reason at the time, the magazine Tibor co-founded. My friend Jack Criss, who also knew Tibor, commended him to me as well. I began to correspond with Tibor; he kindly responded to a great number of letters, later emails, over the years, often giving me useful reading suggestions and responding thoughtfully and gently to my philosophical and political questions and arguments. He published my first scholarly paper, “Estoppel: A New Justification for Individual Rights,” in the Fall 1992 issue of his journal Reason Papers. We remained and became closer friends over the next 24 years. [continue reading…]
- See The Free Market (June 1986), p. 2, listing papers in “Man, Economy, and Liberty: A Conference in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard,’ including M.E. Grenander, State University of New York at Albany: “Murray Rothbard and Methodological Individualism: Scientific Validation in Roger Sperry’s Mind/Brain Research”. [↩]
- E.g., these memories and obituaries by my friends Jeff Tucker; Chris Sciabarra; Sheldon Richman; Aeon Skoble; and David Kelley; see also those by Nick Gillespie at Reason, David Gordon, IES-Europe, David Henderson, Timothy Sandefur, Irfan Khawaja, and Nicolas Capaldi (from Tibor’s festschrift, more about which later). [↩]
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