Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics
Tara Smith
New York, Cambridge, 2006
x + 318 pp., bibliography and index

A student from my spring semester gave me a book along with a note of appreciation. I thought maybe SOLOists would enjoy this, since she mentions a lady with whom we are all familiar.

Since in his article MUSIC OF THE GODS, Linz took the name of Hume in vain, and since I promised him to post a defense of Hume, here goes the following.

I came across this paragraph in the essay “SORGE and KARDIA” by John D. Caputo.

I have been president of the West Virginia Philosophical Society since 1988 and there have been many first during my tenure, but this one may be the most important.

The first time I ever saw Ayn Rand in person (Feb. 1968) Buckley’s name came up and I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. Rand was giving lecture 17 of the Basic Principles series.

For no special reason I happen to grab THE FOUNTAINHEAD and flipped aimlessly through the pages until I lighted on the scene where Roark goes to Mallroy's apartment to hire him to do the statue for th

"The difference in effects of two resembling objects must proceed from that particular, in which they differ."

David Hume, TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE, P. 174.

"Where several objects produce the same effect, it must be by means of some quality, which we discover to be common amongst them."

David Hume, TREATISE ON HUMAN NATURE, p 174.

For those interesting in seeing Plantinga take on Dawkins, go to and go to the "Dawkins Confusion."

On p.

On p. 174 of the current issue of JARS, Parrish writes as follows:

In the next couple of blogs I plan to look at some of Parrish’s charges (JARS Spring 2007) against Objectivist’s atheological arguments.

Recently I posted GOD IS BACK. FOR GOD'S SAKE, in which I related a recent challenge to Objectivism by two articles on natural theology from the latest issue of JARS.

Is God making a come-back as a topic for Objectivists?

Absolutely the worst bumper sticker that I saw out West on a recent vacation trip to Utah and Colorado was one I spied as we were going up to Mesa Verde: it read "Rats Have Rights Too." Perhaps it meant "Rats Have Rights instead of Humans." Ugh.

What’s your interest in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged?

"It is an amazing coincidence of history that Plato and Aristotle lived in the same century and that the latter was the pupil of the former. Not other century can boast of such an amount of genius; no other pupil had such a teacher, and no other teacher had such a pupil."

In the recently published THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 5TH edition, Stuart Rachels argues that Ethical Egoism is ultimately arbitrary. (85-88)

"Aristotle's PHYSICS is the hidden, and therefore never adequately studied, foundation book of Western philosophy." Martin Heidegger in "On the Essence and Concept of PHUSIS in Aristotle's PHYSICS B, 1"

At least at the Center for the Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

In a recent issue of THE NEW INDIVIDUALIST Roger Donway reviews Paul Boghossian’s book FEAR OF KNOWLEDGE: AGAINST RELATIVISM AND CONSTRUCTIVISM. In the middle of the review Donway gives the Galileo case as an example of a Boghossian rebuttal of the relativist’s case. I, however, read that case differently.

Buffalo has at least one architectural sin on its conscience. In 1950, it demolished Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Company Administration Building and in its place today is a parking lot. Ahhh.

Who said that? I would like to know who said “anything may be followed by anything.” Rand said that Randall said that Whitehead said the Hume said that “anything may be followed by anything.”

So I get an email from Michelle Kamii telling me about this essay that Jacques Barzun wrote defending the proposition that music tells a story; that it is representational.

In a recent skimming of Peikoff’s OPAR I came across the following paragraph. I will quote the whole paragraph.

“So much has been lost so fast. In not time at all, the West moved from “perpetual peace” [surely LP knows that PERPETUAL PEACE is the title of a work by Kant] to perpetual war; from the rapture of Victor Hugo to the tongue in the asshole of Molly Bloom; from progress taken for granted to Auschwitz taken for granted.” (458) [I don’t know anyone who takes Auschwitz for granted.]

At the end of OPAR, Peikoff appends an Epilogue entitled “THE DUEL BETWEEN PLATO AND ARISTOTLE.” If one expects an argument to prove such a duel, one would be mistaken. There is no argument to be found there. Yet before one faults Peikoff for what seems to be quite an oversight, one should re-read the opening paragraph of the Epilogue.

What follows is not a review of Stephen Hicks’ new video NIETZSCHE AND THE NAZIS but rather a recommendation to buy it.

Robert Mayhew, in his book THE FEMALE IN ARISTOTLE’S BIOLOGY gets off a couple of shots at Paul Feyerabend to which I would like to take exception. He tells us that Feyerabend considers “objectivity a myth:” and that “all philosophy and science is rationalizations and the product of ideology.” (14) Consider the following two sentences from Mayhew that seem to contradict each other:

Chris asked for this review and in reviewing it I thought, due to the discussion of a review of the film in the the Intellectual Activist, that it might be of interest to SOLOists. So here it is. It was originally published in the journal FILM AND PHILOSOPHY, vol. 4 1997.