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Philosopher Robert Mayhew discusses the inability of a New York Times drama critic to appreciate Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead: “The sound perception of an ant does not include thunder.”
Following the recent Ivo Van Hove international production of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Gilman Opera House, a panel discussion appeared on Facebook Live. The panelists were Gregory Salmieri, philosophy fellow at the Anthem Foundation; Shoshana Milgram, associate professor of English at Virginia Tech; and Ann Ciccolella, artistic director at Austin Shakespeare.
“It always intrigued me that the great romantic writers are impassioned moralists who seek to change the world,” said Andrew Bernstein, the next author in our series celebrating the 60th publication anniversary of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. “Yet in their novels, these authors can only rarely imagine a way for their heroes to succeed.”
In this short course, philosopher Robert Mayhew presents Ayn Rand’s conception of humor and shows its connection to basic issues in Objectivism such as metaphysical value-judgments, the metaphysical versus the man-made, and the benevolent universe premise.
Last week, the Cato Institute hosted a theatrical reading of selected scenes from Ayn Rand’s We the Living/The Unconquered. In the panel discussion that followed, ARI’s Onkar Ghate commented on several topics, including Ayn Rand’s development as a writer, the difference between teaching philosophy and dramatizing it in a novel, and the value of a plot that’s driven by conflicts between good people.
“Editing a live presentation for print publication is like translating from one language to another,” said Marlene Trollope, editor of Discovering Great Plays: As Literature and As Philosophy by Leonard Peikoff. “And, as the saying goes, ‘Something may be lost in translation.’ My challenge was to keep that loss to a minimum.”
In this final installation of the Ayn Rand Institute’s podcast series Inside “A Companion to Ayn Rand,” Don Watkins interviews Harry Binswanger, a member of ARI’s board of directors and author of How We Know: Epistemology on an Objectivist Foundation, on the chapter he contributed, “The Objectivist Esthetics: Art and the Needs of a Conceptual Consciousness.”
Is Ayn Rand a serious artist concretizing a timeless message or a writer of ideological sermons disguised as novels? Over at Objectivism: Who Needs It, my colleague Onkar Ghate explains why categorizing her as a “didactic fiction” writer is completely wrong.
In addition to the variety of talks and panels on philosophy, policy and self-improvement that will be offered at Objectivist Summer Conference 2016, we’ve added a comprehensive course on esthetics which will help you learn how to find value in art.
