Rand's Ford Hall Forum Lectures

[Guyau]

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Audio recordings of Ayn Rand's Ford Hall Lectures, nearly all, are available for free listening at the ARI website here.

Thanks to Adam Reed for the heads-up.

[Brant Gaede]

I hope the Q n A's are included. That's 95% of the value considering if they haven't already been available. Most or all the actual talks have been published.

--Brant

edit: the first I checked had the Q & A

I went to the FHF every year to see and hear her starting in 1968 continuing through 1974--the last was given at the new location and I merely drove to Boston and listened on the car radio--boy was I pissed when the radio stopped the broadcast without the Q&A--all the other times I went inside and I have no idea at all what the new audiotorum was like (I suspect it was bigger)

I remember Rand took the bus from NYC to Boston at least once and perhaps many times--I remember because I talked to someone who had accompanied her the year there was a threatened bus strike which might have stranded her in Boston: Rand proposed that maybe they could hitchhike back if she showed some leg--like Caudette Colbert in It Happened One Night she had great looking legs (I've read)

[Guyau]

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I'm enjoying dipping into the 1972 talk "A Nation's Unity." Like you I almost never click on oral presentations, as I can get information so much faster reading (and there is so much urgent for me to read). But I'm getting a kick out of this. This technology with which you can select where in the span you want to listen, and it goes there immediately, is very nice.

PS

Having now sampled some of the Q&A's from different years (in the '70's), I'm struck with the redundancy. Wasting time of most of the audience, I should think. Some of that repetition is malicious, I'd bet. If you were someone like me in those years, who was active in the Libertarian Party, you knew damn well for years back what Rand thought about what you were doing, and asking about it year after year was not likely a genuine request for information. The information was available wherever two or three were gathered together stuffing envelopes.

[Backlighting]

Many thanks Stephen for posting the link.

At the age of 24 I was fortunate to be in the audience for the 1970 talk, The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Listening again brought back memories.

I plan on listening to all of those & will always remember AR, in answer to a question that night by an audience member, if she could explain a particular concept written in Atlas Shrugged. Her response was...."If you don't understand my writing you certainly won't understand my speaking"

Now who dare say AR didn't have a sense of humor?

-J

[objectiveMan]

I started by listening the first one. It was very powerful.

I am blown away by the fact that it is from 1961, and she talks about how collectivism, mysticism and altruism have taken over America. Also how there is almost no difference between Republicans and Democrats, and they just represent different flavors of totalitarianism. And then I think about how much more free America was in 1961, compared to today. It is just mindblowing. Assuming this "progress" continues unchallenged, imagine where we are another 50 years from now. By then, the America of 2015 must look like a bastion of individual freedom and economic liberty.

[Selene]

I started by listening the first one. It was very powerful.

I am blown away by the fact that it is from 1961, and she talks about how collectivism, mysticism and altruism have taken over America. Also how there is almost no difference between Republicans and Democrats, and they just represent different flavors of totalitarianism. And then I think about how much more free America was in 1961, compared to today. It is just mindblowing. Assuming this "progress" continues unchallenged, imagine where we are another 50 years from now. By then, the America of 2015 must look like a bastion of individual freedom and economic liberty.

Plekka:

Now you can understand how her "voice," heavy with a Russian smoker's gravelly tones, rang out to those of us who knew what was wrong and had no philosophical harbor to drop anchor in.

Her concepts of rational egoism and the sanction of the victim revolutionized many.

A...

[objectiveMan]

Plekka:

Now you can understand how her "voice," heavy with a Russian smoker's gravelly tones, rang out to those of us who knew what was wrong and had no philosophical harbor to drop anchor in.

Her concepts of rational egoism and the sanction of the victim revolutionized many.

A...

Yes, I can imagine it was very interesting. Her voice takes a while to get used to. I plan on listening through all of these little gems.

[Brant Gaede]

"...the destroyer of the modern world, Immanuel Kant." (1974 one hour in [Q&A])

--Brant

her view on Kant is essentially religious and an essential part of the Objectivist catechism (to prove her proposition would require years of research through multiple disciplines as disparate as climate, geography, psychology, sociology, war, economics, culture, education, natural and artificial philosophy, etc.