Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism

Barack Obama's victory in the presidential election, combined with congressional gains for Democrats, will prompt a wave of soul-searching on the right. Among other things, we will be asking: What is the road back from the political wilderness? Where can we look for hope that the next four years will be a temporary lurch to the left from which America will soon recover? Fortunately, a long search is not really necessary. The past few weeks have provided—too late, alas—two clear answers, from two seemingly different sources. In the past week, Ayn Rand has been injected into the presidential race by Barack Obama, of all ... Read Full Story

Elan Journo from the Ayn Rand Center joined Robert Spencer from Jihad Watch in giving a presentation to students at NYU on Islamo-Fascism, Nov. 19. The event was titled: "The Jihad Still Threatens America." Both speakers experienced a pie throwing incident. A Pakistani Jihadist named Maulana Maududi hurled whip-cream pies in their direction. But as an eyewitness to Gawker pointed out, the pair went "unscathed." The Leftwing Anarchist site InfoShop News described Journo's Pro-Defense Libertarian views: Speaker Elan Journo actively promotes devastating attacks on Iran, claiming that "victory in World War II required flattening cities, firebombing factories, shops and homes, devastating vast tracts of ... Read Full Story

I normally don't read biographies but was so much fun that I finished this huge 600-pages long volume in 4 days. Heller's biography of Ayn Rand is extremely detailed (sometimes, excessively so), but it is overall well-written and fun to read. For the most part, Heller sticks to relating the facts and doesn't attempt to offer her own interpretation of anything. This is a very good decision for this author because on the few occasions that she does venture an opinion, she almost often commits some annoying gaffe. Attempting to analyze (unsuccessfully, I might add) Rand's personality, Heller comes up with the following weird ... Read Full Story

The Guardian has an article on the current Ayn Rand revival. There's an Ayn Rand revival in America these days. Sales of her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead have skyrocketed in the past year, along with the number of Rand-themed articles in mainstream publications. The central philosophical (and indeed, scientific) problem for individualist like Rayn is the fact that homo "sapiens" is a social animal. Individualism is an idealism in an age when all philosophers are non-idealists. The idea of a free individual is an abstraction. We are all constrained by physical needs (food, water, shelter &c) and also social needs. Within that ... Read Full Story

The last M/MLA conference where I spoke the day after getting married was good in all respects except one: the book-fair. Normally, I love book-fairs at conferences, but this one looked more like a parody of a regular fair. It was held in the same room where banquets were served to the participants. The abundance of food presented a disturbing contrast to the paucity of actual books available for purchase. It were as if the conference organizers were trying to suggest that food for our stomachs is way more important than food for our minds. The only book there that attracted my attention was ... Read Full Story