There are two upcoming events that are likely to be of interest to Ayn Rand Society members.
The first event—the one not put on by the ARS—is a panel at next week’s conference of the British Society for the History of Philosophy.
The Ayn Rand Society will be holding a session on “Aristotle and Rand on Axioms” at the upcoming APA Eastern Division meeting in Philadelphia on Friday, January 10 from 7:00 to 10:00pm. James Lennox (Professor Emeritus of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh and the co-secretary of the ARS) will be presenting his paper “Ayn Rand and Aristotle: Axioms and their Validation,” and Michail Peramatzis of Oxford University will be presenting a comment.
On Wednesday January 9th from 7:00 to 10:00pm, the Ayn Rand Society will have a session in New York City as part of the American Philosophical Society’s (APA) Eastern Division Meeting.
This year our topic is the virtue of integrity, and the panel is built around a new paper by Carrie-Ann Biondi (Marymount Manhattan College) on “Being Integrated: A Labor of Self-Love.”
The paper will be followed by comments by Christian Miller (Wake Forest University) and me.
I gather that there is a scandal in Denmark concerning some private parties took advantage of some provisions in the Danish tax codes that enabled them to somehow reap tax revenues and these parties cited Ayn Rand’s moral philosophy as justifying their actions. I recently had a brief correspondence with a Danish journalist writing about the case, and was quoted in his story about it. Since I don’t read Danish, I’m not in a position to comment on the story itself.
Stephen Hicks has a new piece in the Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers titled “Self-interest in Ayn Rand.” The Encyclopedia, which seems to be in its early days, is part of a project at Paterborn University called History of Women Philosophers and Scientists.
It is nice to see both that Rand is being included in projects on the history of philosophy, and that the editors of this project found someone knowledgeable about Rand to write the piece.
Skye Cleary (with whom I’ve had a few brief and pleasant interactions in her capacity as the editor of the APA’s blog) recently wrote a piece at Aeon encouraging philosophers who are disturbed by what they take to be the “pernicious” effects of Rand’s ideas to “treat the Ayn Rand phenomenon seriously,” because “ignoring it won’t make it go away.”
Vilifying Rand without reading the detail, or demonising her without taking the trouble to refute her, is clearly the wrong approach.
I couldn’t agree more.
The members of the ARS’s Steering Committee serve three year terms, and 2017 marked the end of Darryl Wright (Harvey Mudd) and Jason Rheins’ (Loyola, Chicago) terms on the Committee. To replace them, Robert Mayhew (Seton Hall)and Carrie-Ann Biondi (Marymount Manhatten) have joined the Committee.
Two weeks ago at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division Meeting, the Ayn Rand Society held an “Author Meets Critics” session on Tara Smith’s 2015 book Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System.
Dr. Smith’s critics were Timothy Sandefur (of the Goldwater Institute), Onkar Ghate (of the Ayn Rand Institute), and Mark Graber (of the University of Maryland’s School of Law).
Mr.
Creative commons-licensed image courtesy of Wikimedia.
I’ve been invited to take part in a discussion at Cato Unbound on Kant’s relation to classical liberalism. My post, which went up there today, is a response to a post by Mark D.
One function of this blog is to address comments made by academics and public intellectuals on Rand’s philosophy. Several weeks ago, research psychologist Denise Cummins wrote a piece on a PBS blog about what happens when people attempt to put Rand’s ideas into practice. Her aim there was not to engage with Rand’s ideas per se, but to discuss what happens when certain ideas are put into practice, and then to explain why these ideas lead to these results.