Purpose • Steering Committee • Past Programs

2007-2008 Programs •  Membership 

Ayn Rand and Objectivism: An Overview • Ayn Rand Bibliography

Purpose

Meetings are held annually, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the APA Eastern Division, and may on occasion be held in conjunction with the meetings of other Divisions. Membership in the Society is open to all members of the APA (regardless of division):  regular membership to regular members of the APA, student membership to student associate members.

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Allan Gotthelf, Chairman			Lester H. Hunt
	Allan Gotthelf is Visiting Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he holds the University's Fellowship for the Study of Objectivism.  (Serves ex-officio)			Lester H. Hunt is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. (Serves through 2009)
Robert Mayhew			Fred D. Miller, Jr.
	Robert Mayhew is Professor of Philosophy at Seton Hall University. (Serves through 2007)			Fred D. Miller, Jr. is Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University, and Executive Director of the University's Social Philosophy and Policy Center. (Serves through 2009)
Douglas B. Rasmussen			Tara Smith
	Douglas Rasmussen is Professor of Philosophy at St. John's University (NYC). (Serves through 2008)			Tara Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, and holder of the University's Fellowship for the Study of Objectivism. (Serves through 2008)
Immediate Past Members

James G. Lennox			Darryl Wright
	James G. Lennox is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. (Served 2003-2006)			Darryl Wright is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Harvey Mudd College, and Adjunct Professor at The Claremont Graduate School. (Served 2003-2006)

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Past Programs

1988	Perceptual Appearance:  Realism vs. Representationalism
	Speaker: Commentator:	David Kelley (Verbank, NY) Jaegwon Kim (Brown University)
1989	The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts
	Speaker: Commentator:	Harry Binswanger (Ayn Rand Institute) William Bechtel (Georgia State University)
1990	Ayn Rand on Value and Obligation
	Speakers:	Douglas Rasmussen (St. John's University) Allan Gotthelf (Trenton State College)
1992	Ayn Rand and Kant's Metaphysics
	Speaker: Commentator:	George Walsh (Salisbury State University) Fred D. Miller, Jr. (Bowling Green State University)
1993	The Fountainhead:  Fifty Years Later
	Speakers:	Richard Kamber (Trenton State College) Andrew Bernstein (Pace University) Neera Kapur Badhwar (University of Oklahoma)
1994	Multiculturalism and the Assault on Objectivity
	Speakers:	Gary Hull (Claremont Grad. Sch. of Business) Susan Haack (University of Miami)
1995	Recasting Business Ethics:  The Moral Foundations of Business
	Speaker: Commentator:	Stephen Hicks (Rockford College) Jan Narveson (University of Waterloo)
1996	Egoism and Virtue
	Speaker: Commentator:	Lester H. Hunt (University of Wisconsin--Madison) Tara Smith (University of Texas at Austin)
1997	Reason and Freedom in Ayn Rand's Politics
	Speaker: Commentator:	Darryl Wright (Harvey Mudd College) Douglas Den Uyl (Bellarmine College)
1998	A Philosophical Approach to Humor: Aristotle and Ayn Rand
	Speaker: Commentator:	Robert Mayhew (Seton Hall University) Richard Janko (University of London)
1999	Teaching Ayn Rand in Introductory Courses
	Speakers:	Free Will:  Allan Gotthelf (The College of New Jersey) Ethical Egoism:  Tibor Machan (Chapman University)
2000	Book Discussion  - Tara Smith's Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality
	Speakers: Responses:	Irfan Khawaja (University of Notre Dame) David Schmidtz (University of Arizona) Julia Driver (Dartmouth College) Tara Smith (University of Texas at Austin)
2001	Reason, Emotion, and the Importance of Philosophy
	Speaker: Commentator:	Wayne A. Davis (Georgetown University) Darryl Wright (Harvey Mudd College)
2003	Ayn Rand on Concepts, Essences, and Scientific Progress
	Speakers: Commentator: Chairman:	Allan Gotthelf (University of Pittsburgh) James G. Lennox (University of Pittsburgh) Paul E. Griffiths (University of Pittsburgh)   Harry Binswanger (Ayn Rand Institute)
2004	Concepts and Universals: Ayn Rand and Thomas Aquinas
	Speaker: Commentator:	Douglas B. Rasmussen (St. John's University) Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado)
2005	Ayn Rand as Aristotelian
	Speakers: Chairman:	James G. Lennox (University of Pittsburgh) Allan Gotthelf (University of Pittsburgh) Fred D. Miller, Jr. (Bowling Green State University) Robert Mayhew (Seton Hall University) John M. Cooper (Princeton University)
2006	Author meets Critics: Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
	Speakers: Response: Chairman:	Helen Cullyer (Center for Hellenic Studies and University of Pittsburgh) Lester H. Hunt (University of Wisconsin--Madison) Christine Swanton (University of Auckland) Tara Smith (University of Texas at Austin) Allan Gotthelf (University of Pittsburgh)

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2007 - 2008 Programs

(Note: The ARS meeting is open to everyone registered at the convention, whether an ARS member or not; and registration is open both to members and to non-members of the APA.  Registration fees, advance registration form, and the entire program for the December 2007 convention will be posted at the APA Eastern Division website.  Similar information for the March 2008 Pacific Division convention will be posted at the Pacific Division website.)

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Membership (and Other Affiliation)

Membership in The Ayn Rand Society is open only to members of the American Philosophical Association:  regular membership to regular members of the APA, student membership to student associate members.  (For information on APA membership, click on "Becoming a Member" under the heading "Membership" at the APA website.)

Dues for regular members are $20 a year, dues for student members are $10 a year.   All paid-up members receive copies of the paper(s) on the Society's program in advance of the meeting. New members will receive in addition a copy of the papers from the previous two years.  Membership is by academic year.  Couple memberships are available; for details write to the Society.

Non-members of the APA who share our aims may affiliate with the Society as a "Contributor". Although not members of the Society, Contributors receive papers and other mailings, including memos, meeting announcements and invitations, along with members. Contributions of all amounts are welcome (including from members and from those who do not wish Contributor status). The minimum contribution for Contributor status is $30 a year.

To enroll, please print and fill out the Application Form and mail it, along with a check payable to The Ayn Rand Society, to the following address:

Professor Allan Gotthelf
The Ayn Rand Society
c/o Department of History and Philosophy of Science
1017 Cathedral of Learning
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260

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Ayn Rand and Objectivism: An Overview

Note from the Steering Committee:  What follows is a revised version of the entry on Ayn Rand recently published in the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers (Thoemmes Continuum, 2005; references are now to the ARS site bibliography, which follows). The entry was authored by Gregory Salmieri and Allan Gotthelf, both of whom are affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh and are members of the Society. (Gotthelf chairs this committee.)  The entry was chosen as a particularly suitable introduction of academically trained readers (and others) to Ayn Rand’s life and philosophy of Objectivism.  Reproduction in this form is with the permission of Thoemmes Continuum and the entry’s authors.

Ayn Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on 2 February 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia, to middle-class, cultured, largely non-observant Jewish parents. At age 16 she entered Petrograd University, graduating three years later, in 1924; history was her major subject and philosophy her special interest. She subsequently studied for a year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts. In early 1926 she emigrated to the United States, and eventually took up residence in Hollywood, where she changed her name to Ayn Rand. She worked initially as a screen writer for the Cecil B. DeMille studios. Her first play, Night of January 16th, was produced on Broadway in 1935, and the first of her four novels, We the Living, was published in 1936. Anthem followed in 1938, The Fountainhead in 1943, and Atlas Shrugged, her magnum opus, in 1957.

In 1951, Rand moved permanently to New York City. After the publication of Atlas Shrugged, she turned to nonfiction, elaborating on the philosophy expounded in the novels and applying it to current cultural and political issues. She lectured widely at universities and colleges and to private groups throughout the U.S., and wrote numerous essays, many published in periodicals she edited or co-edited: The Objectivist Newsletter (1962–65), The Objectivist (1966–71), and The Ayn Rand Letter (1971–76). The philosophical speeches from her novels, and her philosophic essays and lectures, became the basis for a series of seven book-length collections, starting in 1961. Rand died on 6 March 1982 in New York City.

Original manuscripts of Rand’s novels are in the Library of Congress. Most of her surviving papers and documents are held in the Ayn Rand Archives, a department of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California. Rand’s books have sold over twenty million copies; readers often speak of her novels as having changed their lives. A growing number of academic philosophers are taking an interest in her work.

In an afterword to Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand said: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”  We start from this essentialized statement, then work back to the fundamentals of her entire philosophic system, then forward to an integrated overview of the whole.

Rand’s concept of man as a heroic being – her vision of human beings as able to achieve great things, and of the universe as open to their efforts -- is a hallmark of  her thought, and certainly a significant part of her widespread appeal. Happiness she holds to be the emotional state that results from the achievement of objective values. Such values and the means to them can only be identified by reason, and Rand holds that they cannot be achieved without such virtues as independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride.

Rand’s virtue-focused rational egoism differs from traditional eudaimonism in that Rand regards ethics as an exact science. Rather than deriving her virtues from a vaguely defined human function, she takes “Man’s Life” – i.e. that which is required for the survival of a rational animal across its lifespan – as her standard of value. This accounts for the nobility she ascribes to production – “the application of reason to the problem of survival” (1966, p. 9). For Rand, reason is man’s means of survival, and even the most theoretical and spiritual functions – science, philosophy, art, love, and reverence for the human potential, among others – are for the sake of life-sustaining action. This, for her, does not demean the spiritual by “bringing it down” to the level of the material; rather, it elevates the material and grounds the spiritual.

The foundation of Rand’s philosophy is a thesis which has often been called “metaphysical realism,” and which she calls the primacy of existence. It states that “reality, the external world, exists independent of man’s consciousness...this means that A is A, that facts are facts, that things are what they are – and the task of man’s consciousness is to perceive reality not to create or invent it.” Rand argues that this metaphysics is axiomatic – that it is contained in all knowledge and so presupposed in any attempt to deny it.

Following Aristotle, Rand views the world as made up of individual entities, and understands causality as the relationship between an entity and the actions necessitated by its nature. Choice is a type of causality. It is the nature of reason, our distinctive form of consciousness, to be volitional; its operation is up to us.  

Rand draws a sharp distinction between that which is caused by human choice – “the man-made,” and that which is not – “the metaphysically given.” Metaphysically given facts cannot be judged and man-made phenomena must be. Epistemology and ethics are concerned with providing standards for the man-made in their respective realms, viz. knowledge and action.

Rand's epistemology rests on a distinction between the automatic, metaphysically given knowledge of sense-perception, and the volitional, man-made, products of reason. Perception is a form of awareness that results inexorably from a causal interaction of the perceiver with his environment. As such, it cannot be judged and serves as an epistemological given on which conceptual knowledge will be built. Epistemology for Rand is a normative discipline describing how to build conceptual knowledge on perceptual. The basic principle of her epistemology is that “the rules of cognition must be derived from the nature of existence and the nature, the identity, of [man’s] cognitive faculty.” (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 1990, p. 82)

Rand defines reason as “the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses” (VOS hb edn. 1965, p. 13). With our senses we perceive entities (including their attributes). Reason identifies these existents by interrelating them. For example, Newtonian physics interrelates the perceived motions of falling apples and wandering planets. To grasp such far-flung connections we need to deal with a vast quantity of information. However, Rand observes, we are only able to hold a limited number of discrete items in mind at once. This limitation creates a need for “unit economy,” which is fulfilled by concepts, the basic units of thought.

A concept, Rand holds, is a man-made integration of similar existents in the form of a single mental entity – a unitary awareness of indefinitely many existents of the same kind. The concept “man,” for example, enables us to think and learn about all men (past, present and future) at once; and to call someone a man is to bring the whole of our knowledge about men (medical, psychological, philosophical, etc.) to bear on him.

Rand presents her theory of concept formation in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (ITOE), published first as a multi-part series in The Objectivist in 1966–67, and then as a monograph in 1967. Properly formed concepts unit-economize by integrating similar existents. Rand analyses similarity as a matter of variation in degree or measurement along a quantitative axis. Two items are similar, relative to a third, when their differences in measurement are comparatively insignificant. We form concepts by isolating a group of similar existents (or “units”) by differentiating them from foils, and then integrating the units by omitting their particular measurements. In omitting these measurements we do not turn our attention away from their differences to some underlying sameness. Rather, we interrelate the units (and a potential infinity of other units) by projecting a range along the quantitative axis. The integration is retained by means of a word, and the units’ differentiation from all other existents is maintained by a definition in traditional genus-differentia form.

Our first concepts are formed by integrating perceived entities or their attributes. These concepts then form the basis for wider integrations and more precise differentiations, resulting in a complex conceptual hierarchy. In ITOE, Rand lays out the process of concept formation in detail, and explains how it applies to various sorts of concepts including concepts of entities, actions, attributes, materials, conscious phenomena and philosophical axioms. She describes the methods of proper definition and discusses when it is valid to form a new concept. A 1979 reprinting of ITOE includes an essay by Leonard Peikoff, written from the standpoint of Rand’s theory of concepts, that attacks the analytic-synthetic dichotomy. An expanded second edition, published in 1990, includes extensive excerpts from epistemology workshops Rand gave during 1969–71 for a group of philosophers and graduate students.

Rand argues that traditional theories of concepts either reify concepts (realism), or else make concepts arbitrary (conceptualism and nominalism). On her view, concepts are man-made, but they are made in order to apprehend reality, and so must be formed in the specific manner demanded by the nature of consciousness and of its objects. When so formed, concepts are neither intrinsic features of reality nor subjective creations of consciousness. They are objective “products of a cognitive method of classification whose processes must be performed by man, but whose content is dictated by reality.” (1990, p. 54)

The very integration of a concept’s units depends on knowledge of the contrasting foils. And the similarities on which abstract concepts are based can only be grasped on the basis of a chain of prior concepts (terminating with ones formed directly from perception). Because of these facts, concepts are only meaningful in the context of a vast hierarchical system. If we don’t define our concepts properly, there is a danger of “stealing” concepts – of using them in disregard for their place in the hierarchy, rendering them cognitively meaningless.

Rand’s ethics is founded on an argument that the concept “value” depends on the concept “life” and so is only meaningful in the context of an organism pursuing its life as its ultimate value. Animals automatically desire what they need to survive, but human desires are based on volitional thinking. So, each person must adopt his life as his ultimate value, and then choose to discover and enact the means necessary to achieve it. Someone who does not pursue life can have no values at all, and is irrelevant to ethics.

Because of the quantity of information involved, we cannot assess the survival impact of actions considered as isolated particulars. We need to proceed conceptually, discovering the broad categories of values man’s survival requires, and what virtues are necessary to achieve them. We need a code of values with “man’s life” as its standard.

Rand identifies three cardinal values: Reason, Purpose, and Self-esteem, with the corresponding virtues of Rationality, Productiveness, and Pride. Reason is our means of survival. Rationality is the acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge and guide to action. Rationality requires a person to do his own thinking (independence) and stay true to it in action (integrity). It requires honesty – the refusal to fake reality – because the unreal does not exist and can be of no value. It requires justice – the moral evaluation of others – because rational, productive people are good for us, while irrational parasites are worthless or dangerous.

Survival requires an all-encompassing purposefulness, with all of one’s other purposes integrated to a central productive purpose. Productiveness is the application of reason to the creation of the products and services necessary for survival. To define and achieve rational purposes, a person must be certain of his competence and worth – he must achieve self-esteem. This requires the virtue of pride – a commitment to living up to the highest rational standards. Thus Rand calls pride “moral ambitiousness.” It is, in effect, productiveness applied to one’s character: “as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul” (1957, p. 1020).

The knowledge one man discovers and the goods or services he produces can be of great benefit to another, and the character a man cultivates in himself can make him of profound spiritual value as a friend or romantic partner. Rational men, says Rand, approach one another as traders, offering values they have created in exchange for the values they seek, each appealing to the rationality and self-interest of the other.  (What one offers to a friend or romantic partner is one’s own character and one’s admiration or love for his.)  By contrast, parasites, who seek or seize the unearned, give the men from whom they might have benefited every reason to turn away from them or to turn against them. Parasitism is never in one’s interest. When men recognize this and formulate their goals accordingly, their interests do not conflict and all the benefits of social existence are possible.

The values that each individual seeks from social existence are valuable only as means to his own life, and these values exist only because someone else created them to further his life.  Society must therefore be organized so as to leave each man free to create and enjoy the values his life requires. This requires the identification of rights—“moral principle[s] defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.” (VOS hb edn.1965, p. 124).   The basic right is the right to life—i.e., the right “to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life.” The right to life entails rights to liberty (the freedom to act on the basis of one’s own reasoning) and  property (the freedom to exclusive use and disposal of the values one has produced).  The only means by which one man (or group of men) can deprive another of his life, liberty, or property is physical force; the initiation of such force must therefore be prohibited. The function of government is to protect rights by enforcing this prohibition. Any other governmental action would constitute an initiation of force, from which it follows that the only moral political system is laissez-faire capitalism.  Rand’s politics is thus inseparable from her ethics.

Rand criticizes prior ethicists for conceiving of values as either intrinsic (as in Plato, Moore, and religious traditions) or as subjective (hedonism, utilitarianism, Nietzsche, pragmatism, etc.). On her view values are objective. Values (like concepts) are formed by a consciousness in accordance with the facts of reality. To be a value something must be identified by an agent as furthering his life. The identification is man-made, as is the choice to live that gives it meaning. But the relationship between the value and the agent’s life is metaphysically given, as is the need to identify this relationship conceptually.

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Selected Bibliography of Ayn Rand's Writings

Novels

Atlas Shrugged (1957)
The Fountainhead (1943)
Anthem (1938, 1946)
We the Living (1936, 1959)

Books and Essays

Philosophy:  Who Needs It (1982)
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd edn. (1990)
The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (1964)
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)
Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1998)
The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature (1969)
For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1961)
The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (1988)

Selections

The Ayn Rand Lexicon, ed. H. Binswanger (1986)
The Ayn Rand Reader, ed. G. Hull and L. Peikoff (1999)

Journals, Letters, and Marginalia

Journals of Ayn Rand, ed. D. Harriman (1997)
Letters of Ayn Rand, ed. M.S. Berliner (1995)
Ayn Rand's Marginalia, ed. R. Mayhew (1995)

Lecture Course Transcripts  

The Art of Fiction:  A Guide for Writers and Readers, ed. Tore Boeckmann (2000)
The Art of Nonfiction:  A Guide for Writers and Readers, ed. Robert Mayhew (2001)

Exposition based on extensive discussions with,
      and a lecture course authorized by, Ayn Rand

Objectivism:  The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, L. Peikoff (1991)

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Questions or comments may be sent to ars@aynrandsociety.org.