Next Topic: The Objectivist Ethics (in one week: 5/9)

[Greg Perkins]

Greetings!  In a mild change of pace, I am not inviting you to a meeting tonight.  :^)  Rather, I want to invite you to a meeting that is one week from tonight, giving you a good chance to look over the essay and recall all the great questions you have (or have seen raised) about it -- because this is an important one.

So: I want to invite you to the Objectivism Seminar's discussion NEXT Monday evening (May 9th) at 8:00pm Mountain.  We'll be discussing Ayn Rand's seminal essay, 'The Objectivist Ethics" from her volume The Virtue of Selfishness -- an essay which you can find free online in both text and audio formats.  

This is a very dense and challenging piece.  Whole books such as Tara Smith's Viable Values and Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics are dedicated to tracing Rand's thinking and fleshing out its application -- and of course there are whole chapters of Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand dedicated to this material as well.  (Happily, the Seminar has previously gone through some of these books, so we can see how our understanding has solidified. :^)  There are also analyses and debates with non-Objectivist professional philosophers such as Michael Huemer who have tried to grapple with Rand's ethics and this essay in particular, and found it lacking -- and it can be useful for us to consider at least briefly where and why even professionals can fail to understand what Rand was saying.

So I am hoping that we can satisfy both our need to have a well-grounded, basic understanding of what the essay is laying out and why, and to also give folks a chance to enjoy (or at least endure ;^) a little exploration of some more technical angles prompted by the professionals.  Please join in and help make it happen!

Thanks,

Greg Perkins

(As always, if you miss a discussion, you can easily catch up using the Archives page of our website.)