Axiomaticerizer

Thanks. I think I have a pretty decent grasp of the ideas to not make the mistake of a top-down rationalistic Randroid kind of approach. A few results come up on my school's scholarly article search as well as journal articles and the like. But the vast majority are political in nature, which is the most superficial and least interesting aspect of Oism. There really is a dearth of quality academic Objectivist material, and that includes critical material that treats Oism honestly.

Thanks. I just checked out this book a couple days ago at my school library (can't believe they have it). It's been one of my few references so far but I have only been able to read a short amount so far.

TLDR Summary: Any advice for translating Objectivist views to communicate to academic non-Objectivist scholars? So I'm in an undergrad philosophy class where I have a rare chance to actually write a paper about Objectivism. It turns out that when I start discussing my paper ideas with my professor she's just quite baffled. Not hostile or dismissive, just it's clear she isn't connecting what I'm trying to communicate. Attempting to explain things using the standard Objectivist terms I'm used to (identity, intrinsic, skeptic, the crow, unit, etc.) just led to more questions that would only require explaining the entire background justification for Oism. This encounter was surprising for me. I expected a non-Objectivist philosopher to be at least unfamiliar or somewhat confused, but what I didn't expect was the sense of being completely alien and unintelligible. Partly this is because, on its face, Objectivism seems to be a rather straight-forward philosophy. There aren't really that many specialized terms, and its often accused of being too "simple". However, I hadn't realized that in eschewing the often cumbersome "academic speak" type of language in Rand's writing, I had to struggle to begin trying to translate what I meant into something more scholarly friendly. The upside to Rand's usage of everyday language is that just about anybody, even non-philosophers, can read and start to understand her ideas. But the downside is that it is mostly isolated from standard terminology used to discuss proper academic philosophy. Just to provide you all with an example. I was trying to communicate what would most-closely be considered Rand's view of metaphysics and the closest approximation seemed to be direct-realism. Of course I know that Rand wouldn't consider Oism as a form of Realism proper, and and it might suggest unwanted historical baggage related to religion. So I would love to hear any advice or see some helpful links (maybe to old forum posts) that could help with this. Also I did see this Blackwell Companion book on Rand on Amazon, but it's not out until 2016. It could be a great help for this type of problem. http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405186844.html