Invitation to the Ayn Rand Society meeting in San Francisco, April 3

On April 3rd the Ayn Rand Society will be hosting an event open to the public at the Westin-St Francis in San Francisco. Here is the information forwarded by ARI. 

The Ayn Rand Society will meet once again with the American Philosophical Association (APA) Pacific Division, this year in San Francisco, at the Westin-St. Francis Hotel, Saturday evening, April 3rd. The meeting will be open to individuals who are neither members of the APA nor members of ARS. (The registration fee for individual events, payable at the APA Registration Desk, is $10. There is no other cost.)

The format of this ARS meeting is "Author-meet-Critics". This is a rubric used by the APA programmers for events at which a number of philosophers comment on a recent book and the author responds. ("Critic" is used in the way that it is in "movie critic": a critic’s review can certainly be favorable.)

Our meeting, however, will be Authors-meet-Critics, since the book in question is Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (ed. R. Mayhew), and several of its essays will be discussed. In particular, three philosophers will comment on five of the philosophical essays in the volume by three authors, and the three authors will give responses, followed by Q & A.

The five papers under discussion, and their three authors, are:
1. Gregory Salmieri, "Atlas Shrugged on the Role of the Mind in Man's Existence"
2. Onkar Ghate, "The Role of Galt's Speech in Atlas Shrugged"
3. Allan Gotthelf, "Galt's Speech in Five Sentences (and Forty Questions)"
4. Allan Gotthelf, "A Note on Dagny's 'Final Choice'"
5. Gregory Salmieri, "Discovering Atlantis: Atlas Shrugged's Demonstration of a New Moral Philosophy”
The "critics" (or commentators) are:
Prof. Christine Swanton (University of Auckland, NZ), discussing paper #1.
Dr. William Glod (Institute for Humane Studies), discussing papers #2 and #3.
Prof. Lester Hunt (University of Wisconsin–Madison), discussing paper #4 and the portion of paper #5 devoted to Dagny.
The program will be chaired by Prof. Fred Miller, Bowling Green State University, and the book will be introduced by its editor, Robert Mayhew.

Further information is available on the Society's website, www.aynrandsociety.org (which is well worth consulting on its own). ARS members and contributors receive advance copies of the three papers, and will be sent copies of the responses (and Prof. Mayhew’s introduction) after to the meeting. If you would like to become a contributor to the Society, go to the “Membership (and other Affiliation)" page its website. But, as I say, individuals not affiliated with the Society are welcome at the San Francisco meeting. 

Report from BAP Event March 7

The Golden Gate Objectivists had a good showing at the Bay Area Patriot event in Marin on March 7th. About 30 groups had tables - we were featured right next to the speaker podium, where we were very visible to the about 500 people who attended the event. We handed out over 150 Ayn Rand Samplers, all 100 of our 'Man's Right' and 'America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business' pamphlets, as well as a big stack of essays advocating free-market health care reform. We also had over 20 people sign up to join our GGO mailing list: welcome to all of you, and we hope to see you again at one of our next events.

While most of the candidate speakers at the event were mixed or rather bad, we did connect with at least one potentially interesting candidate: John Dennis, who is running in the Republican Primary as a potential challenger for Nancy Pelosi, spoke quite emphatically on the importance of defending individual rights. In conversations after his talk, a few Golden Gate Objectivists found him to be surprisingly principled: he advocates phasing out entitlements, a free-market direction for health care reform, and an ultimate abolishment of the Fed. He also is well-read in Ayn Rand - admiring her not just for her politics of capitalism, but stating that he found her impressive for 'her fundamental identification that in the end, politics comes down to a person's views in epistemology and metaphysics.' Definitely a politician worth investigating: if someone with these views can have a good run against Nancy Pelosi, maybe we can have some real change soon!

Thank you also to Sally Zelikovski, who put this very professionally organized event together!