Ayn Rand presented Objectivism as a philosophy of reason. But is it? That is the question Scott Ryan seeks to answer in this careful examination of the Objectivist epistemology and its alleged sufficiency as the philosophical foundation of a free and prosperous commonwealth. Sorting painstakingly through Rand’s writings on the subject, Mr. Ryan concludes that the epistemology of Objectivism is incoherent and debases both the concept and the practice of rationality.

Prompted by the thesis that an organism’s umwelt possesses not just a descriptive dimension, but a normative one as well, some have sought to annex semiotics with ethics. Yet the pronouncements made in this vein have consisted mainly in rehearsing accepted moral intuitions, and have failed to concretely further our knowledge of why or how a creature comes to order objects in its environment in accordance with axiological charges of value or disvalue. For want of a more explicit account, theorists (...) writing on the topic have relied almost exclusively on semiotic insights about perception originally designed as part of a sophisticated refutation of idealism. The end result, which has been a form of direct givenness, has thus been far from convincing. In an effort to bring substance to the right-headed suggestion that values are rooted in the biological and conform to species-specific requirements, we present a novel conception that strives to make explicit the elemental structure underlying umwelt normativity. Building and expanding on the seminal work of Ayn Rand in metaethics, we describe values as an intertwined lattice which takes a creature’s own embodied life as its ultimate standard; and endeavour to show how, from this, all subsequent valuations can in principle be determined. (shrink)

Ecological thought has made a deep and apparently lasting impact on virtually every tradition in political theory (cf. e.g. Dobson, 2007) with the exception of libertarianism. While left- and right...

ROBERT L. CAMPBELL finds Tibor Machan's book, Ayn Rand, to be a thoroughgoing introduction to every part of Rand 's system except the esthetics. Machan's presentation is knowledgeable and sympathetic but entirely non-sectarian, it offers several significant criticisms of Rand 's views. Campbell focuses on Machan's discussion of Rand 's philosophical axioms, her ethics, and her antipathy to Immanuel Kant. Certain questions that Machan asks prompt Campbell to inquire whether Rand 's avoidance of cosmology in metaphysics is an example to (...) be followed in epistemology. (shrink)