Word: ayn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...admit it. Last semester, you were tempted by the posters for the series of Ayn Rand lectures sponsored by the Objectivist Club...
What are these "novel" ideas that objectivists defend at all costs? Reason, egoism and laissez-faire capitalism. Objectivists seem to think these concepts are new finds. And what's more, that their demi-goddess, Ayn Rand, stumbled upon them first. Of course, the concept of laissez-faire capitalism has been around for more than a few decades--at least that's what professors in the economics department keep telling me. But, hell, what do they know? And reason and egoism? Well, let's see. Can you say "Plato, Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre...
...many adherents as it does because Rand's fiction (We the Living, Anthem, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) continues to influence high-school and college students, most of whom I suspect have had only a superficial exposure to philosophy. This privileges them to conclude rather wrongly that Ayn Rand is an original and deep thinker. Second, her books are accessible to the lay-reader while Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger are not. Third, objectivism is sexy because it has appropriated the term "selfishness" to mean everything heroic...
...autonomous thinking and reasoning that Objectivists claim to rely on goes, why is it that all an Objectivist can do to make an argument is say "Ayn Rand said such and such?" Where is the free thought? No where, it seems. It's all about whatever Rand wrote in her sacrosanct texts. They claim to have eschewed gods (which is fine) but have really put another in their place--Rand. Where is the reason behind the unwavering support for whatever Rand wrote? Nowhere, for it does not exist...
...next lecture in the series, "Ayn Rand's Theory of Free Will," will be delivered by Dr. Harry Biswanger on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. in the Sackler Museum Lecture Hall...