Adam Mossoff. Courtesy of George Mason University.
Adam Mossoff (Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason U.), who has served on the ARS’s Steering Committee, is the subject of a post by Josh Peterson at watchdog.org, a news site sponsored by the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity.
Pike’s Peak, Colorado Springs. Photo by the author.
It’s been a while since I last blogged about my class based on Atlas Shrugged. We are now nearly done with two thirds of the semester. This has probably been my most enjoyable teaching experience to date, and not just because I am sympathetic with the philosophy we are discussing. I’ve fallen in love with the idea of teaching philosophy through fiction.
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.
In his recent post on epistemic possibility, Ben Bayer attributed to Rand the view that “it is evidence that gives claims their cognitive content, such that without it, there is no claim to be assessed: such ‘arbitrary’ claims are neither true nor false.” This is an idea that often raises a lot of questions and putative counter-examples, some of which have come up in the comments on Ben’s post. If there’s interest I may address these questions in a future post, but my aim here is different.
The rejection of the label “libertarian” by Rand and subsequent Objectivists is often met with incredulity.