Reidy

If she and the deceased are the children's parents, they need her for support on this painful occasion. If they are children of the second wife, she can still help to comfort them and their mother.

If they have children she should go; refusing to attend their father's funeral would be an incomprehensible and inexcusable cruelty to them. If he has a family (wife, siblings, parents, later children) and she knows them, she should go as a favor to them. Otherwise, if she didn't like him and doesn't miss him, she has no reason to show up. The point to remember is that he's dead; nothing she does will affect him. if one's attendance is optional (anybody other than intimates: immediate family and closest friends), the principal consideration is what want wants to do for those intimates. This illustrates Rand's point about sacrificial and non-sacrificial generosity. Her showing up would (to judge from the facts you present) be non-sacrificial good will. If she has no respect for him or for anyone around him, or if getting there would be intolerably expansive, then she would be making a sacrifice.

Getting back to the original question (never saw this thread til today). Does anybody here know Russian? In the romance languages, "of" is the standard way to express a possessive. If Rand grew up in a language that works this way, she would have used this locution through force of habit. As for the current topic, "let's don't" and "don't lets" both strike me as awkward at best, illiterate at worst. Maybe they were current when she was writing sixty or seventy years ago. At one point in the story the railroads form a cartel "'the better to enforce'" laws and government policies. As I recall, the novel puts it in scarequotes, suggesting that Rand herself thought it was a lowbrow usage.

Whatever these intellectuals' reasons for coming to the US might have been and whatever they might have done once they arrived, their examples don't help the case for regulated immigration. They were skilled professionals with refugee protections, just the kind of people who've always been welcome and have always been the beneficiaries of special exceptions.

You apparently accept Rand's definition of fascism as a high degree of government control over the economy, short of overt socialism. Not everyone buys into this. Goldberg, in Liberal Fascism, defines it as a political habit of favoring emotion over reason and action over deliberation. Some fascists are overt socialists on this account (Hitler) while others (Mussolini and Peron) are not. Why do you prefer Rand's account?

Without having made a study of the question, I find this difficult to credit. Most European immigrants of the era came from Ireland, Italy and eastern Europe rather than from the cultural centers, and they didn't have much formal schooling. The cultural elite, after all, had a pretty good life back home and thus no reason to emigrate. Those who left the old country did so precisely because they didn't like the status quo there, and they wouldn't have wanted to bring it with them even if they could have. Imagine a boatload of Sicilian peasants fleeing starvation and Russian Jews fleeing the Cossacks, lugging their Hegel and Comte with them and heading from Ellis Island into professorships, and you begin to get the picture. (The ones who came from Mexico or the far east are even less likely to have brought European high culture with them.) Some latter-day Objectivists have said, credibly, that bad ideas came from Europe, but, like dream_weaver, I'm not aware of Rand's having said this. John Dewey was supposedly one of the importers. Totalitarian regimes have tried for decades to keep out unwelcome ideas and to advantage their their "native intellectuals" and have failed. I don't see why anyone here in OL-land would even consider it.

Forty-plus years ago, at the time of the Equity Funding scam and the Lockheed bailout, Reason observed that the biggest scams and the biggest business failures happen in the most regulated industries. Shkreli came up in investment banking and moved into pharmaceuticals - a perfect case in point.

Historical point: The Psychology of Self-Esteem came out in 1969, after the break, although most of the material had by then run in The Objectivist or in Branden's NBI lectures. Biological point: dogs and babies have emotions without having had thoughts. What do you mean when you say that thought precedes emotion? Certain complex, acquired emotions do, but not all emotions.

While we're on the topic of what Rand said or not, I would point out that "self-ownership" appears nowhere in the Objectivist literature. If Al-Jabr wants to say that the notion is part of Rand's theory, then he will have to demonstrate it from what she and the people around her said. Otherwise the claim is an unwarranted conflation of Rand with (?) Rothbard.

So the USSR had a film school before the US did. No wonder movies are so bad.

Briefly, the argument is: Life is the highest value; if we are to enjoy it we must pursue it by deliberately exercising our rational judgement and acting on that judgement. To do this we must be free. This is enough for me. You apparently aren't satisfied with it. What do you say it lacks?

Welcome to OO. Your blog is ambitious in the breadth of topics it takes up, and it makes for good reading. I'd like to see some sourcing for, e.g., your claims about Hearst and DuPont and about the relation between minumum wages and poverty.

Did the US have any moviemaking schools in 1926?

The story that she came to the US to study moviemaking, if true, is an interesting new datum. None of the biographers mentions it. The family ought to know.

ARI posts job openings as they arise: https://ari.aynrand.org/~/media/pdf/careers.ashx?la=en

You're right.

You might be on to something. I'm not acquainted with Spinoza, but he gets some brief mentions in the Objectivist literature. Rand somewhere (I can't find the passage) mentions him in passing as one of the great system-builders, along with Plato and Aristotle. Peikoff's OPAR mentions him twice: 248: Because of the influence of religion, the code of sacrifice has always dominated the field of morality, as far back as historical evidence goes. A handful of Western thinkers did reject this code. The two with the best and fullest ethical systems were Aristotle and Spinoza, each of whom sought in his own way to uphold the value of life, the virtue of rationality and the principle of egoism. But even these rare dissenters were influenced, both in method and content, by Platonic and by subjectivist elements 460:"All things excellent," said Spinoza, "are as difficult as they are rare." Since human values are not automatic, his statement is undeniable. In 1961, Esquire published a letter from Peikoff in response to Gore Vidal's piece on Rand, mentioning Aristotle and Spinoza as counter-examples to Vidal's assertion that nobody in the history of philosophy had ever presented an ethic of self-interest. He also said that Vidal displayed "an ignorance of the history of philosophy that would be shocking in a college sophomore." The assertion is good evidence for this. As a onetime philosophy student I would advise you to argue that their systems show similarities in important, principled respects and not to to try to prove that Rand knew Spinoza and was consciously imitating him. According to the biographers, she learned most of the history of philosophy from Peikoff after her theory was in place. Let us know what you find.

Adam Reed, sometime citizen of the O-web, claims that they have a lot in common: http://web.augsburg.edu/~crockett/210/210 lab set 4/reed_oop_epistemology.pdf

I suspect that the Nixon Library is the most authoritative of these sources. Unfortunately it's compatible with all of the rival claims here. Wikipedia backs up the Dark Tower story.

A little-known fact about this play is that Pat and Dick Nixon met in a community theater production in Whittier CA. She was Karen, and he was one of the lawyers - defense, I think.

The aforementioned anthology on concepts and their role in knowledge has a companion ethics volume: http://www.aynrandsociety.org/publications http://www.amazon.com/Metaethics-Egoism-Virtue-Normative-Philosophical/dp/0822944006/ref=la_B001HMQL6M_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1367121549&sr=1-2 More books in the series are on their way.

Tara Smith, Allan Gotthelf, Gregory Salmieri and James Lennox are some Objectivist academics with books in print. Smith works in ethics, and what I've seen of her writing is pretty explicitly Randian. The others are in Greek philosophy, and their writings in this field don't deal with Rand expressly.

You are fortunate that your teacher was bewildered rather than snide or hostile. Rand wasn't trained in academic philosophy as practitioners in the English-speaking world understand it, and she didn't write for an academic audience. Squaring her with that tradition is a bigger job than it may appear at first. You use "translation", and this is a very good metaphor. In beginning foreign-language courses we learn to do simple translations, a few sentences at a time, between English and the new language, but we have to know the new one pretty well to do a good translation of a serious literary work in either direction. A couple of other metaphors are learning to play a musical instrument or to dance. We start with simple technical exercises, accustoming ourselves to getting our feet or our fingers or feet in the right place at the right time, and we go on to soar only after that. Philosophy, too, requires straightforward technical skills. What's a clear statement? How do you tell a good argument from a bad one? Are two claims mutually consistent? If you get to be good at this, the answer to your original question - what does Objectivism look like in academic terminology? - will begin to suggest itself. In the meantime try putting Rand aside while you're at work. I used to write Randroid papers and exam essays that embarrass me decades later. When I got a better command of philosophical method I was able to work Objectivist ideas in the natural course of things. That said, if you want to see more examples of what Objectivist academics do, check out the site of the Ayn Rand Society of the APA, especially the Publications page. For even more, look up the individual authors at their school websites for more of their writings. Or join the Society and get copies of the presentations. The ARS/APA is one of few places where orthodox and apostate Objectivists ae on good terms with each other.

Are you really claiming that, before Rand, no philosopher had come up with ethical or political ideas consistent with his ideas in the upstream parts of philosophy? Rand herself thought that Kant had done so in ethics and Plato in politics. Peikoff wrote an entire book (The Ominous Parallels) arguing that the post-Kantian German idealists and romanticists did.

Rand, according to her biographers, opposed US entry into WW2. So did most Americans. She was one of many who believed that the best available outcome that Germany and the USSR should weaken each other to the point where domestic insurrection or minimum foreign intervention could have overthrown them. Maybe she was right. Some libertarians, including Roy Childs, have maintained support for this position long after the war was more recently. The worst available outcome was that one should defeat the other decisively and gain control of (almost) all the territory they had controlled jointly during the war, and that is exactly what happened. The obvious comeback is that the US was attacked by the Japanese and went to war purely as a defensive retaliation; going to war against Japan necessarily meant going to war against its ally Germany. I'm not a historian, but the US had been intervening in the far east at least since the takeover of the Philippines some fifty years earlier, and it had imposed an oil embargo, which is an act of war by standard accounts, before the attack, as well as conducting smaller, clandestine interventions in China since about 1937. The Pacific wasn't big enough, the reasoning goes, for two rival empires. If this is true it doesn't entail that the US should have passively, pacifistically accepted the Japanese attack, but rather that it didn't have to happen in the first place.