Adrian

This seems to me a very obvious suggestion. So much so that I'm a little embarrassed to put it forward. But then I see nobody else has done so yet. So maybe it's not as obvious as I'd thought. Kipling's If? http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm Best regards Adrian

(Belatedly) this was Diogenes the Cynic of Sinope - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope .

Cooper does indeed come across as rather markedly self-controlled and undemonstrative (except when he wants to be). But isn't that in keeping with Roark's character?

Sorry - my original post was an enquiry about this revocation - I now see the matter has been explained elsewhere on OL.

Hi Ed Thank you for your detailed discussion of the Perigo issue. Could I perhaps ask you to comment on another point? One contributor to this forum has reported having a potential session at the Summer Seminar turned down partly because he was not a "professional philosopher". Another (distinguished) contributor to OL has pointed out that, on conventional definitions, Rand wassn't a "professional philosopher" either. I for one would like to know more about TAS's thinking and policy on this issue. Best regards Adrian

If you like Gary Cooper's movies, I'd recommend one called "The Fountainhead". It's an adaptation of a novel by some Russian woman. Best regards Adrian

Brant, I think Britain and the US apply, though not knowing enough about how Britain codifies their judicial branch I couldn't say for certain. Jim Respectfully, as a Brit, I don't think we do qualify. Firstly, we are still technically a monarchy, and are individually "subjects" of the monarch, not "citizens" of anything. Secondly, despite intermittent debates, our "constitution" remains, as we like to say, largely "unwritten" (I believe a Frenchman said less kindly of the British Constitution "Elle n'existe pas".) It would be very hard for the courts to strike down any legislative act as unconstitutional. The closest they could get would be if it wasn't properly executed, or if it conflicted with certain European things like the Charter of Human Rights. I'm not expressing an opinion about whether any of this is a good thing, you understand - just saying that, if you're looking for a constitutional republic, I think you'd have a hard time counting Britain as one! Best regards Adrian

Mike Thank you! If you choose to tell us in due course what you make of any of the suggested works, I for one will be interested to hear your thoughts. Best regards Adrian

Hi Mike This is, you'll appreciate, a rather wide brief, a bit like asking if anyone knows any authors who have written about (say) music or philosophy or physics. Having said that, Robert Townsend's "Up The Organization" (written a while ago and recently re-issued) is an exceptionally fine book. See http://www.amazon.com/Up-Organization-Corp...7457&sr=8-1. Best regards Adrian

Hi Chris A very late reply. Apologies. I think you can find the original recording (released for some reason by Brigham Young University) at http://www.screenarchives.com/title_detail.cfm?ID=4119. There's a later. more modern, re-recording of suites from this and other Steiner movie scores at http://www.amazon.com/Now-Voyager-Classic-...3030&sr=1-1. Hope that helps. Best regards Adrian

Hi Seeker Thank you, that's kind of you. I'm very pleased that you found my post interesting. Chaplin's "Great Dictator" (moving off-topic a little) is a humorous treatment of a very unhumorous topic (the Nazis). I believe Chaplin later said that he couldn't have made it if he had really understood what was going on. Still. to my mind, the film is very sharp and really hits home. I'll be most interested to hear what you make of it. (We may need a new thread for that.) All good wishes Adrian

This is indeed a good go at visualizing the speech and adding some modern references to it. It's interesting to compare it with the "trailer" that MSK posted some time ago - . Both seem to be the work of clever people working with available, limited, resources.One caveat about such exercises though. Galt's speech occurs towards the end of AS - perhaps 75-80% of the way in? Rand prefaced the speech with a whole lot of narrative and action which brought out and illustrated themes which the speech then summarises and brings together. Readers of this site are almost certainly familiar with that material. Perhaps we need to be a bit careful about unleashing the speech onto unprepared new readers who have not been through the earlier material. I guess it might then seem rather abstract and make less sense - a bit like playing the big tune from the finale of a symphony without going through the earlier movements first. A similar issue might arise with Roark's final courtroom speech in TF, also available on YouTube - - a pretty good performance if you ask me (some disagree), but will it make real sense to someone who doesn't know what went before?So perhaps the idea of a "trailer" - a teaser, a taster, something which may be intriguing if not fully comprehensible first time round - is a good one. Best regards Adrian

Chris Thank you for this interesting question. I wonder what's prompted you to ask it. Is there anything in the General's behaviour or statements which suggests to you that he was or wasn't there, or that if he was he was or wasn't paying attention? Best regards Adrian

Hi Wolf I thought you might be interested in this recent article by the conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton. It's about the need (in his view) to preserve and transmit some aspects of traditional culture, almost regardless of demand for them. I am not sure I wholly agree with him (I'm generally a bit sceptical about the idea of teaching people things they don't want to know, even if they're kids) but, as I say, I found it interesting. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol...icle2072331.ece Best regards Adrian

Hi Jeff May I play with this question a little? I do sort of see that there could be an issue here. One interpretation of the view that man is an end in himself might be that we could all make different choices, equally valid for each of us. Thus you might choose to be a captain of industry, and I might choose to be a contemplative hermit. Each of our choices would be our own and so equally valid. Our lives are our own. Another view (maybe connected with the objectivist virtue of "Productiveness", and the objectivist theory of aesthetics) might be that there are certain things that "objectively" (or in search of "man qua man") we all "ought" to be aiming at, and that individual choices not to aim at them would not be valid. (Does the contemplative and non-heroic and arguably non-productive hermit fit into the objectivist schema?) If we accept the requirement to earn one's own living and thus not to live on the efforts of others, is there then a further objectivist imperative to be (economically) "productive"? Or, if we each earn our own living, have we the right to do as we choose? This has puzzled me for some time. I'll be most grateful for thoughts. Best regards Adrian

Hi Michael Thank you very much for posting this! The music certainly isn't Max Steiner (for better or worse) and the echo effects are certainly used extensively. I didn't have a problem with either though. If they help to lend a modern feel to what might otherwise be thought an old book, that's fine by me. I guess the trailer illustrates a key point - that if anyone's going to film AS, and if they're going to include any version of Galt's speech (as surely they must), then they need to find appropriate visuals to support the words. That's quite a challenge, and I'm not sure this trailer has yet got it right. But it's a nice first try, and at least helps us understand the problem. Best regards Adrian

Im not precisely sure what your comment relates to. I admit that some of these distinctions are fine, certainly, but they are important distinctions to make. There are cases when fine distinctions in philosophy can produce mass death (eg. "the thing as it appears" versus "the appearance of the thing," the latter alternative producing the (skeptical interpretation of) Kantian philosophy, resulting in german idealism (and its political consequences via Fichte and Hegel) and postmodernism (and its political consequences, such as the West's refusal to celebrate its own virtue, resulting in moral cowardice in the face of religious totalitarianism)). Of course, these distinctions do not produce philosophical determinism or anything of that ilk (as Peikhoff seems to allege) but they are undeniably important. Of course, if you are asking about the place of good manners in morality, well a code of manners can be practiced out of regard for many codes of ethics. i.e. an altruist may consider good manners a demonstration of putting others before themselves, an egoist may find that practicing a certain code of manners makes the social environment more friendly to himself and his interests, a Kantian may practice good manners out of duty towards a basic principle of 'be polite to others,' etc. Could the idea of "good manners" perhaps be related/compared to the (neo-)Objectivist virtue of "benevolence" proposed by David Kelley? As I understand it this is a general predisposition towards finding the possibility of fruitful trading/co-operation with others. Best regards Adrian

Hi Chris I don't know what Rand did or didn't say about this. but purely from your text, I'm wondering whether you may perhaps have omitted a "not" in the first sentence. Best regards Adrian

What the Brandens and others wrote remains, or reverts to being, their property. As Passion and My Years reported, Rand made noise in 1968 about challenging their contractual rights to their articles, since copyright was held in the name of The Objectivist, Inc. She later relented, and Nathaniel's writings on psychology went into The Psychology of Self-Esteem. If such copyrights were not released to the original writers, under U.S. law, those writers could file to reclaim them in the 26th anniversary year of the original copyright being registered by that company. (Copyrights assigned to such an entity had to be registered with the Library of Congress.) The laws have changed for works written in 1976 and later, but such legal rights to reclaim existed for those written earlier. A different aspect, one of contract, is involved for the essay collections in books. The selections were made by agreements between Rand (alone or with Nathaniel Branden) and the publishers. Those couldn't be changed without mutual consent. New American Library / Signet, et al., agreed to publish the whole package for, say, CUI, not one that excised Greenspan, Hessen, and the others, and paid accordingly. All bets are off, however, with a new publisher, such as Oliver Computing, which produced that CD-ROM, and clearly had to conform to the Orthodoxy's whims. (Caveat: Not a legal professional, myself, just one who's followed these issues intensively.) Presumably, then (just thinking aloud) it would at least in theory be possible to produce a CD-ROM, complementary to the ARI one, containing all the missing Branden/Greenspan/other contributions? Whether this would be commercially worth anyone's while is perhaps another question.

May I try to state what I think is the orthodox Objectivist position on this? (I'm not saying that I agree with it just because it's the orthodox position, though on this occasion, if I've got it right, I would agree with it.) 1) It is appropriate for there to be a government, but it should have strictly limited functions. These are to do with the preservation of individual rights to life and property. 2) Some (many, most, all?) governments may seek to do more than this. Such extensions to the powers of government are to be deplored. 3) Those of us who are subject to the powers of a government (ie most of us) may judge it pragmatically wise to accede to even its wider demands. 4) That doesn't mean those wider demands are right, nor that we accept their moral validity. Courtesy of the folks at http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/index.html, I've read a recent piece byTibor Machan at http://www.theatlasphere.com/columns/print...an-coercion.php, in which he notes that government authorities may "thank us for our co-operation" when in fact they are getting not voluntary co-operation but enforced compliance. (There are of course parallels in "Atlas Shrugged".) Isn't the "social contract" just one example of Rand's "sanction of the victim"? A contract is surely in principle something which an individual voluntarily enters into, deliberately, with full awareness of its terms, and with the alternative option of not entering into it. To say that "we" (and who's that?) have entered into some contract sometime in the past without any clear expression of assent nor any clear definition of its content is surely quite simply nonsense. Best regards Adrian

Um. Two propositions: 1) The use of stem cells can help some patients a great deal. 2) The collection of stem cells is an ethically acceptable/desirable process. I guess that, other things being equal, 1) tends to support 2). I don't think it conclusively proves it though. For example, if I had a vast fortune like that of Bill Gates (sadly I don't), then taking that fortune from me (by force if necessary) and giving it to lots of other people would probably make them happier. I wouldn't have thought an objectivist would see that as a valid argument in itself though. I would expect them to argue for my property rights in my fortune regardless of what benefits it might give to others if redistributed. So I guess we'd need to get into the issue of who owns the stem cells. I'm not expressing any particular point of view on that issue - just suggesting that it needs to be properly dealt with. Best regards Adrian

Hi Dodger A slightly late reply to your post - forgive me. I wonder if you've seen the film of "The Fountainhead"? The screenwriter was Rand, and I guess we can agree that she understood the material. I think the film is very successful, if now a little dated in style. (Not everyone agrees with me.) But Rand took considerable liberties with the detail of her own novel in order to produce a compelling screenplay. We get through a heck of a lot of the plot in very summary form in the first 15-20 minutes. Some of the sexual aspects are toned down a bit to suit the Hollywood conventions of the time. One aspect of the ending (the ultimate fate of Gail Wynand) is significantly altered. I still think it's a fine rendition of the same essential theme. But it is different, and it needs to be. A film or a play is not a book. Best regards Adrian

Martin I'm bound to say I rather agree with you about "Atlas" (even though I appear to be one of the few people who thought the "Fountainhead" movie was really rather good). Better not do it, perhaps, than do it badly. Best regards Adrian

I didn't know this text, and find it rather wonderful. Thank you. Best regards Adrian

I'm certainly not advocating a sequel, but it does seem reasonable to say that the question of how the world gets itself back together after the debacle at the end of AS remains, er, somewhat unresolved.