My post in response to Denise Cummins’ critique of Rand at PBS appears to have put our new blog on many people’s radar screen. In the first few days after the post we experienced something like a 30-fold increase in the level of traffic to the site.
The increase in attention to the site has also brought a flood of comments.
The purpose of this blog has implications for how we intend to conduct our discourse. The Ayn Rand Society is attempting to facilitate increased and improved interaction between philosophers interested in Ayn Rand and the broader academic philosophical community.
When we launched this blog, I promised that one of its functions would be to combat misrepresentations of Ayn Rand’s ideas when they appeared in noteworthy places in the media. Our first opportunity to do this has come up just today.
Writing at PBS, respected research psychologist Denise Cummins expresses her fascination with the growing popularity of Rand’s ideas among young people. (Incidentally, I’ve probably met Dr. Cummins before, since I completed my Ph.D.
This is more of a literary post than a philosophical one, but I think it may interest some readers and it gives me an occasion to explain why we chose the cover image we did for this blog.
The image of sunlight filtering through green leaves figures in a number of significant passages from Rand’s novels.
I am very privileged to be teaching a course this semester called “Philosophical Themes in Ayn Rand.” I’ve been teaching philosophy in one capacity or another since 2002, but this is the first time I’ve ever proposed or taught a course focused on Ayn Rand’s ideas. The main text of the course is Atlas Shrugged, but I’ve also assigned a series of secondary readings from classical philosophers whose ideas can be compared or contrasted with Rand’s.