“I’m often asked why someone with a penchant for philosophy and an academic life joins the Marine Corps. Why, some ask, does a scribe lower the pen to pick up the sword?” So begins this stirring and thought-provoking Independence Day address by Lt. Col. Scott McDonald, USMC, to attendees at Objectivist Summer Conference 2015 in Charlotte, North Carolina.
ARI invites law students to join the Legal Fellowship program. The fellowship is a unique program, in which law students do in-depth policy research on topics at the intersection of law and philosophy. Our legal fellows work with ARI’s director of Legal Studies Steve Simpson, an experienced constitutional lawyer who for many years worked at the Institute for Justice. Today we’d like to introduce you to one of the 2017 legal fellows: Cristian Reyes, a recent graduate of Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles.
In 1997, Lisa Kostova, a high school student in Bulgaria, submitted an essay on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Thanks to the prize she won, she was able to travel to the United States to further her education and establish a promising career. Lisa recently wrote to ARI to tell us her story.
Most thinkers throughout history have held a negative or, at best, neutral view of productive work. If not scorned outright, production has usually been viewed as having no moral significance. But Ayn Rand had a unique view of the human potential, central to which is the importance she accords to the act of production. Productive achievement, in her philosophy, is man’s “noblest activity.” This talk explores what Objectivism means by the virtue of productiveness and discusses aspects of our culture’s positive and negative attitudes toward producers and productive activity.
“Interest in Ayn Rand’s ideas is growing rapidly throughout Europe, and we are currently receiving more invitations to events than we can fulfill,” says Annie Vinther Sanz, general manager of ARI Europe. “This autumn’s twenty-six events will cover nine countries, and we expect more than three thousand attendees. The Objectivist movement in Europe is becoming a force to be reckoned with.”
In this interview, originally published in the Jewish newspaper Új Kelet, Elan Journo comments extensively on the relevance of Ayn Rand’s ideas; the false alternative between faith-based certainty and moral relativism; the value of freedom, and other topics.
