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Frank LI takes on Ayn Rand. To understand Libertarianism and American Conservatism, one needs to study Ayn Rand, which is what this post is about.… Ayn Rand was a successful novelist. But her works on philosophy should be irrelevant, because they are too extreme, thus more wrong than correct. Rand constructed a fantasy world in her novelist's mind, which is what novelist's do, but then she believed in it, confusing it with the real world. So do a lot of other people that can't distinguish fantasy from reality and are prone to magical thinking. econintersect.comWhat If Ayn Rand Was Wrong, Mostly? Frank Li | Chinese ex-pat, Founder and President of W.E.I. (West-East International), a Chicago-based import & export company, B.E. from Zhejiang University (China) in 1982, M.E. from
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Mike Norman considers the following as important: Ayn Rand
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Frank LI takes on Ayn Rand. To understand Libertarianism and American Conservatism, one needs to study Ayn Rand, which is what this post is about.… Ayn Rand was a successful novelist. But her works on philosophy should be irrelevant, because they are too extreme, thus more wrong than correct. Rand constructed a fantasy world in her novelist's mind, which is what novelist's do, but then she believed in it, confusing it with the real world. So do a lot of other people that can't distinguish fantasy from reality and are prone to magical thinking. econintersect.comWhat If Ayn Rand Was Wrong, Mostly? Frank Li | Chinese ex-pat, Founder and President of W.E.I. (West-East International), a Chicago-based import & export company, B.E. from Zhejiang University (China) in 1982, M.E. from
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Mike Norman considers the following as important: Ayn Rand
This could be interesting, too:
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Frank LI takes on Ayn Rand.
To understand Libertarianism and American Conservatism, one needs to study Ayn Rand, which is what this post is about.…
Ayn Rand was a successful novelist. But her works on philosophy should be irrelevant, because they are too extreme, thus more wrong than correct.
Rand constructed a fantasy world in her novelist's mind, which is what novelist's do, but then she believed in it, confusing it with the real world. So do a lot of other people that can't distinguish fantasy from reality and are prone to magical thinking.
What If Ayn Rand Was Wrong, Mostly?
Frank Li | Chinese ex-pat, Founder and President of W.E.I. (West-East International), a Chicago-based import & export company, B.E. from Zhejiang University (China) in 1982, M.E. from the University of Tokyo in 1985, and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 1988, all in Electrical Engineering
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As a professional philosopher myself, I can report that Ayn Rand is ignored by the profession, much of which is embarrassed by her identification as a philosopher rather than a popular novelist. She was not even a good writer and is not studied in literature classes either.
The following post is long and technical — a difficult read, I would suspect, for those not familiar with the history of philosophy to the present. The interesting thing about it though is it is summarizes Robert Nozick arguments eviscerating Rand's "philosophy." Robert Nozick is the actual philosopher closest to Rand's position and sometime incorrectly associated with her, so he can hardly be accused of academic prejudice.
This near-unanimous rejection has led to some remarkably uncharitable, and bizarre, attempts to explain away the lack of academic interest: in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Rand, its authors write that “her advocacy of a minimal state with the sole function of protecting negative individual rights is contrary to the welfare statism of most academics,” claiming outright that the overwhelming majority of professional philosophers and political theorists have been simply unable to fairly evaluate her work because of the biasing factor of their prior political commitments.
Somehow the same ‘welfare statism’ of academics has not prevented the close study of Robert Nozick’s landmark Anarchy, State and Utopia, a sophisticated libertarian text that mounts an original, and far more effective, argument against redistributive policies. Apart from John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, there is perhaps no more commonly-assigned book in undergraduate political philosophy classes.
The problem with Rand from the standpoint of professional philosophers is that she was either not acquainted with the field or incapable of understanding the argumentation that characterizes the history of Western intellectual tradition. In any case, she simply was not qualified for the task she undertook. I'll leave it to the literateurs to evaluate her work as literature.
The System that Wasn’t There: Ayn Rand’s Failed Philosophy (and why it matters) -Nicholas McGinnis