Volume 18, No. 1 – July 2018 (Issue #35)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEVELOPING AN INSTRUMENT TO MEASURE OBJECTIVISM, pp. 1-27
ERIC B. DENT, JOHN A. PARNELL, and SHAWN M. CARRAHER
This article describes the development and validation of a scale specifically designed to measure one’s propensity for Objectivism. The scale developed in this article assesses metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. A three-stage process of scale development results in a multidimensional scale that largely supports Rand’s original conception of the construct in the United States and Lithuania. Several challenges are identified, including problems with select items referencing specific political preferences and addressing notions of a higher being. Prospects for future research are identified, including tests for associations between Objectivism and individual factors such as leadership style, organizational commitment, and job performance.
MUSING THE MASTER’S TOOLS TO DISMANTLE THE MASTER’S HOUSE: THE FOUNTAINHEAD READS DOCTOR FAUSTUS, pp. 28-42
Largely by the use of allegory, Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead repurposes and reinterprets the religious morality of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to espouse an Objectivist, rather than theist, view of salvation and damnation. The Faustian narrative no longer belongs to Faustus alone, but is read against itself in order to theorize that giving up one’s ego and independence, rather than giving up one’s membership to the societal collective, is the straightest road to perdition.
EMIGRES ON THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION: THE SUICIDE OF RUSSIA IN THE NOVELS OF AYN RAND AND MARK ALDANOV, pp. 42-54
ANASTASIYA VASILIEVNA GRIGOROVSKAYA
The events of the Russian Revolution, which took place one hundred years ago in October 1917, are reflected in Ayn Rand’s first novel We the Living. This article shows Rand’s relationship to the Russian Diaspora — though her name is not usually associated with Russian emigre authors. This article compares Rand’s work with the novels of another Russian emigre writer — Mark Aldanov (Escape, Suicide) — which shows a common comprehension of the October Revolution in the works of both writers, with similar art images, interpretations of the reasons for the revolution, and an understanding of its harmful consequences for Russia.
ON LIFE AND VALUE WITHIN OBJECTIVIST ETHICS, pp. 55-83
The article considers the meanings of “life” within Objectivist ethics. It distinguishes between life lived moment to moment (a flow concept) and life-as-a-whole (a stock concept). It examines life’s finality as related to life being the ultimate value. It questions whether one “lives to consume” or “consumes to live” from a desert island perspective. It discusses what one’s whole life entails within the context of decision-making. It looks at decisions between competing values. Finally, it discusses the distinction between ethical and ethically neutral actions and suggests ways in which inquiries regarding these may be approached.
EGOISM AND OTHERS, pp. 84-97
Ayn Rand was a strong and influential advocate of self-interest, of ethical egoism. What does her version of egoism mean in practical terms pertaining to interactions with other people generally other than not violating their rights and not committing fraud? This article explores that question with special attention to trust and cooperation. Ayn Rand said little about trust and cooperation in her ethics, but these are important aspects of living a productive life.
NOT ENOUGH PRIMARY CATEGORIES IN PEIKOFF’S DIM? SALUTARY ECLECTICISM AND AN ACID TEST, pp. 98-104
The author reprises his review of The DIM Hypothesis by arguing for an expansion and revision of Leonard Peikoff’s model to include not three, but four primary positions regarding integration (aka “DIM modes”): Integration, Disintegration, Abstract Misintegration, and Concrete Misintegration — and to include not just two mixtures of those primary positions, but twelve. He offers it as a work in progress and a remedy to the over-restrictiveness and resulting misrepresentations of various philosophers by Peikoff’s version of the model.
REVIEWS
AYN RAND’S COMPANIONS, pp. 105-17
This essay reviews a recent book in the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series: A Companion to Ayn Rand, edited by Gregory Salmieri and the late Allan Gotthelf. The author expresses his discontent with the volume’s exclusion of many contributors who are not affiliated with the Ayn Rand Institute. He is displeased, as well, by the lack of any essays of a critical nature, which is a hallmark of other Companion-type works. His review focuses on six (out of eighteen) key essays in this volume: (1) Gregory Salmieri on both values and epistemology; (2) John David Lewis and Salmieri’s discussion of Rand’s political and cultural commentary; (3) Allan Gotthelf on the morality of life; (4) Harry Binswanger on aesthetics; (5) Jason Rheins on the Objectivist metaphysics; and (6) James Lennox on Rand’s view of the history of philosophy.
WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW?, pp. 118-63
How We Know is intended as a summary (and a modest extension) of Objectivist epistemology. Binswanger’s treatment of a wide range of epistemological issues is examined. Because his theory of propositions is inadequate and his philosophy of mind is an extreme form of dualism, Binswanger has added little to previous efforts by “official” Objectivists. As a work of epistemology in the broad sense, Binswanger’s effort is fatally impaired. It is undone by his bifurcation between consciousness and the physics of the brain, which, if accepted, would largely deprive psychology and even computer science of their subject matter.
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
Roger E. Bissell, is a professional musician and a writer on philosophy and psychology, specializing in aesthetics, logic and epistemology, and personality type theory. He is a research associate with the Molinari Institute, and his work has appeared in a number of other publications, including Reason Papers, Objectivity, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vera Lex, and ART Ideas. His mock transcription of a lecture by the fictional composer Richard Halley was published in Edward W. Younkins’s 2007 compilation, Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”: A Philosophical and Literary Companion, and he supervised the transcription of Nathaniel Branden’s lectures for the 2009 publication of The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism, and of Barbara Branden’s lecture course, “Principles of Efficient Thinking”. Most recently, he published his first book, How the Martians Discovered Algebra: Explorations in Induction and the Philosophy of Mathematics, available from Amazon Kindle. He also frequently performs on recording sessions and jazz engagements, and his CDs feature his trombone playing, singing, musical arrangements, and original compositions.
Robert L. Campbell is a professor of psychology at Clemson University. He has been associated with The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies since its first issue. He is the translator of Jean Piaget’s Studies in Reflecting Abstraction (2001), and the author of Knowing Levels and Developmental Stages (with Mark Bickhard, 1986), “Goals, Values, and the Implicit” (JARS, 2002), and “The Peikovian Doctrine of the Arbitrary Assertion” (JARS, 2008).
Shawn M. Carraher received his Ph.D. in business administration from the University of Oklahoma. He has served as the Oxford Journal Distinguished Research Professor and director of the Small Business Institute and clinical professor at the University of Texas at Dallas as well as serving as the undergraduate research director. He has published over 100 journal articles, which have been cited 14,000 times. In November 2015, he was named one of the top 50 Global Business Educators at the Said Business School. He has directed research in over 130 countries.
Eric B. Dent is the Uncommon Friends Endowed Chair Professor of Ethics at Florida Gulf Coast University. He is committed to an interdisciplinary research agenda that has resulted in publications in behavioral science, complexity theory, systems science, education, consulting, history, communications, spirituality, organization development, and philosophy journals. He has won numerous awards and is a consultant to Fortune 500, government, and nonprofit organizations as well as an invited speaker to national audiences. He earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Emory University and an M.B.A. and Ph.D. in organizational behavior from George Washington University.
Allison Gerard is a current student at Tulane Law School, and received her bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2016.
ANASTASIYA VASILIEVNA GRIGOROVSKAYA
Anastasiya Vasilievna Grigorovskaya, candidate degree in philology, is an associate professor in the Department of Russian and Foreign Literature at Tyumen State University. She is a member of the Russian Society of American Culture Studies (Moscow) and European Association of American Studies (UK). Her candidate thesis is devoted to modern Russian anti-utopias. She is a coauthor of the monograph, The Russian Project of World Correction and Art Creativity of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Moscow, 2014). She is working on the first doctoral thesis about Ayn Rand in Russia. She was a participant of The Third Memorial Conference on Ayn Rand (Adam Smith Center, Saint Petersburg, 2017). Among her nine publications on Rand, in Russian, there are: “Masonic Code in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead” (Culture and Civilization no. 1A [2017]: 195-20) and “The First American Novel about Soviet Russia: ‘The Living’ and ‘The Dead’ in Ayn Rand’s novel We the Living” (Political Linguistics, no. 1 [2016]: 134-40). Her aim is to revive Ayn Rand’s reputation under today’s conditions of globalization and to promote future investigations of Rand’s Russian origins.
Merlin Jetton is an independent scholar. He graduated from the University of Illinois as a math major. He escaped academia in order to apply and expand his math skills in the real world of business. He is a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries and a Chartered Financial Analyst. He retired after a twenty-eight-year career as an actuary and financial engineer, having specialized in asset-liability management the last fifteen years or so. He has been interested in Objectivism for decades. He was a member of the Chicago School of Objectivism, also known as the New Intellectual Forum. He was a presenter there several times and is the author of several articles in the journal Objectivity and in this periodical. He now lives in Ohio.
John A. Parnell is the Belk Chair in Management in the School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. He is the author of over two hundred basic and applied research articles, published presentations, and cases in strategic management, ethics, crisis management, and related areas, as well as two current textbooks, Strategic Management: Theory and Practice, and Crisis Management: Leading in the New Strategy Landscape. He is the 2011 recipient of the Spirit of Inquiry award from the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy for his course titled “Ethics and Capitalism.” He has lectured in a number of countries, including China, Mexico, Peru, and Egypt.
Fred Seddon currently holds an adjunct professorship at Pennsylvania State University, Altoona. He was president of the West Virginia Philosophical Society from 1988 to 2010 and is an associate member of the Center for the Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He is an international scholar and the author of over 150 books, articles, book reviews, and speeches, including such works as Ayn Rand, Objectivists and the History of Philosophy, An Introduction to the Philosophical Works of F.S.C. Northrop, and Aristotle and Lukasiewicz on the Principle of Contradiction.
Kathleen Touchstone is a retired educator from Troy University and the author of the book Then Athena Said: Unilateral Transfers and the Transformation of Objectivist Ethics as well as a number of articles.
Volume 18, No. 2 – December 2018 (Issue #36)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE FUTURE OF ART CRITICISM: OBJECTIVISM GOES TO THE MOVIES, pp. 165-228
By virtue of an extended consideration of problems and possibilities in the discipline of film studies toward the goal of constructing an Objectivist aesthetics of cinema, this article examines some of the most pressing issues facing contemporary art criticism. Opposing tenets of an Aristotelian aesthetic tradition against tenets of a Kantian aesthetic tradition, the author attempts to resolve a number of long-standing aporias in the Objectivist aesthetics and in the philosophy of art more broadly in the hopes of charting a fruitful path for the future of art criticism.
WHAT’S IN YOUR FILE FOLDER? PART 3: DIFFERENTIATION AND INTEGRATION IN LOGIC (AND ILLOGIC), pp. 229-307
In this third installment of his series on key, underappreciated ideas in Ayn Rand’s epistemology, the author discusses the nature of differentiation and integration as the functional essence of consciousness and applies that insight to various cognitive and noncognitive processes of awareness, with a special emphasis on logic and illogic. He offers an extended analysis of the fallacies of “Frozen Abstraction” and “False Alternative,” as well as critiques of a long-standing Objectivist conflation of falsity and contradiction and a relatively more recent Objectivist error, the fallacy of “genuine awareness.”
AYN RAND’S “INTEGRATED MAN” AND RUSSIAN NIETZSCHEANISM, pp. 308-34
ANASTASIYA VASILIEVNA GRIGOROVSKAYA
The purpose of the article is to identify the influence on Ayn Rand’s work of Friedrich Nietzsche in Silver Age Russia. The analysis focuses on Rand’s novels We the Living, The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and some of her nonfiction philosophical essays. Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is the work by Nietzsche that is central to the analysis.
MONEY, MORALITY, AND THE NEED FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP, pp. 335-40
In Atlas Shrugged, the observations of the character Francisco d’Anconia are used to illustrate the connection between Objectivism, morality, and economics. In response, the author demonstrates how today’s socioeconomic movements not only are inconsistent with d’Anconia’s view but will likely lead to further large-scale economic and moral crises, unless an economic system is established that will protect the individual’s right to worthwhile production, income, and ownership.
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
Kyle Barrowman received his Ph.D. from the School of Journalism, Media, and Culture at Cardiff University. In addition to his work on the philosophy of Ayn Rand and the possibilities of an Objectivist aesthetics of cinema, his research focuses on issues of philosophy and aesthetics throughout the history of film.
Roger E. Bissell, is a professional musician and a writer on philosophy and psychology, specializing in aesthetics, logic and epistemology, and personality type theory. He is a research associate with the Molinari Institute, and his work has appeared in a number of other publications, including Reason Papers, Objectivity, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vera Lex, and ART Ideas. His mock transcription of a lecture by the fictional composer Richard Halley was published in Edward W. Younkins’s 2007 compilation, Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”: A Philosophical and Literary Companion, and he supervised the transcription of Nathaniel Branden’s lectures for the 2009 publication of The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism, and of Barbara Branden’s lecture course, “Principles of Efficient Thinking”, published in 2017. Most recently, he published his first book, How the Martians Discovered Algebra: Explorations in Induction and the Philosophy of Mathematics, available from Amazon Kindle. He also frequently performs on recording sessions and jazz engagements, and his CDs feature his trombone playing, singing, musical arrangements, and original compositions.
ANASTASIYA VASILIEVNA GRIGOROVSKAYA
Anastasiya Vasilievna Grigorovskaya, candidate degree in philology, is an associate professor in the Department of Russian and Foreign Literature at Tyumen State University. She is a member of the Russian Society of American Culture Studies (Moscow) and European Association of American Studies (UK). Her candidate thesis is devoted to modern Russian anti-utopias. She is a coauthor of the monograph, The Russian Project of World Correction and Art Creativity of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Moscow, 2014). She is working on the first doctoral thesis about Ayn Rand in Russia. She was a participant of The Third Memorial Conference on Ayn Rand (Adam Smith Center, Saint Petersburg, 2017). Among her nine publications on Rand, in Russian, there are: “Masonic Code in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead” (Culture and Civilization no. 1A [2017]: 195-20) and “The First American Novel about Soviet Russia: ‘The Living’ and ‘The Dead’ in Ayn Rand’s novel We the Living” (Political Linguistics, no. 1 [2016]: 134-40). Her aim is to revive Ayn Rand’s reputation under today’s conditions of globalization and to promote future investigations of Rand’s Russian origins.
Sara Michelle Weinman was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where she fell in love with Montreal bagels and curd cheese. She moved to London, Ontario, Canada for university in 2010 and keeps at least three-dozen Montreal bagels in her freezer at any given time. She recently completed her master of science in foods and nutrition (MScFN) and is a practicing registered dietitian with a specific interest in the philosophical and ethical considerations surrounding food and economics. In her free time, she enjoys reading, sewing, and running agility courses with her dog.
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