Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Rand, Ayn

  • Clive James on John Anderson; Anderson and Rand

    There is little philosophical 'meat' here, but it is useful for contextualizing the man and his thought. I stumbled upon this while searching without success for something comparing John Anderson with Ayn Rand.  They are fruitfully comparable in various respects.  Both were cantankerous and dogmatic and not open to having their ideas criticized or further…

  • Flannery O’Connor on Ayn Rand

    Flannery O'Connor died 50 years ago today.  About Ayn Rand she has this to say: I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw…

  • Dispute About Kant Erupts in Gunfire

    Story here.  The Russian boys were lined up for beer; perhaps one of them couldn't wait his 'transcendental' turn and the other, forsaking duty for inclination, shot him categorically albeit phenomenally.  Or maybe the shooter was attempting to demonstrate that the transcendentally ideal can also be empirically real.  Or perhaps the shooter was a Randian hothead and the…

  • Allan Gotthelf on Ayn Rand on the Existence of God

    In January and February of 2009 I wrote a number of posts critical of Ayn Rand.  The Objectivists, as they call themselves, showed up in force to defend their master.  I want to revisit one of the topics today to see if what I said then still holds up.  The occasion for this exercise is…

  • Ayn Rand on the “Abysmal Bastard” C. S. Lewis

    Here, via Reppert, who cleverly speaks of Rand's  "Jack-hammering": Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-meta­physical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.” (I suspect Lewis would have particularly relished the last of these.) My posts…

  • Whittaker Chambers on Beethoven

    Whittaker Chambers (Witness, p. 19) on the Third Movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: . . . that music was the moment at which Beethoven finally passed beyond the suffering of his life on earth and reached for the hand of God, as God reaches for the hand of Adam in Michaelangelo's vison of the creation.…

  • Whittaker Chambers’ 1957 Review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

    Big Sister is Watching. 

  • My Position on Free Will

    This from a Norwegian reader: I have been enjoying your blog for a couple of years now, and I have to say that I like how your mind works. There are a lot of issues I am thinking about currently regarding philosophy and that didn't change after reading Angus Menuge's book Agents Under Fire. If…

  • David Gordon to Teach Course on Ayn Rand

    I received an e-mail message this morning from David Gordon of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.  He tells me that he will be teaching an online course entitled Ayn Rand and Objectivism.  He also informs me that the Rand crowd, having got wind of the fact, have begun attacking him.  They focus on Gordon's 1994…

  • Ayn Rand on “Existence Exists”

    Whether one calls it a renaissance or a recrudescence, Rand is on a roll.  The Randian resurgence doesn't please David Bentley Hart whose First Things attack piece contains the following: And, really, what can one say about Objectivism? It isn’t so much a philosophy as what someone who has never actually encountered philosophy imagines a philosophy…

  • Levi Asher Writes Book on Ayn Rand

    Levi Asher of Literary Kicks e-mails:   Your blog is just about my favorite philosophy blog on the web — not because I often agree with your political opinions (I don't) but because you write with clarity, humor and just the right amount of personal touch.  Salut!  I also write about philosophy on my blog…

  • Ayn Rand on Bobby Fischer

    It is hard to believe that Bobby Fischer has been dead for over three years now.  The king of the 64 squares died at age 64 on 17 January 2008.  Fischer's sad story well illustrates the perils of monomania. Ayn Rand did not realize how right she was in her 1974 "An Open Letter to…

  • Ayn Rand on Abortion

    The following quotations from Rand can be found here, together with references. An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn). Abortion is a moral right—which should…

  • Rand Resurgent

    Cathy Young's A Rand Revival offers a balanced appraisal.  Excerpts: Politically, Rand wanted to provide liberal capitalism with a moral foundation, challenging the notion that communism was a noble but unrealistic ideal while the free market was a necessary evil best suited to humanity's flawed nature. [. . .] But Rand's work also has a…

  • Is Smoking a Moral Obligation?

    Readers of this weblog know that I am no friend of those benighted purveyors of misplaced moral enthusiasm, the 'tobacco wackos.' But the best way to oppose fanaticism is not by an equal and opposite fanaticism, but by moderation and good sense, qualities usually absent in cults. In The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult,…