Via Leiter, an interesting Academe Online article about BB&T’s gifts-with-strings-attached:
At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, for example, three years passed before faculty members learned that a million-dollar gift agreement establishing a new course contained language requiring both that Rand’s lengthy paean to laissez-faire capitalism, Atlas Shrugged, be assigned reading and that professors who teach that course “have a positive interest in and be well versed in Objectivism.”
I went to an Ayn Rand Society meeting at an APA once, mostly out of morbid curiosity, and I remember wondering if some of the big-name contributors (people whose philosophical work is pretty well-known) were paid to be on the panel. (The paper that prompted this had the rough form “Here’s my view of concepts. Of course, Rand also had a view of concepts, but I’m not completely sure I understand it, so let’s move on to my stuff.”) Very weird, not as weird as the society for field-being, but definitely out there.
Also, a post from Leiter on the recently-discussed Mark Taylor. He’s agin’em!
4 comments
July 23, 2010 at 6:52 pm
Matt
What the hell is “field being” anyway, and why does it have a society? As far as I can tell from looking at their list of papers, it’s something like Chinese philosophy rammed through Heidegger or something like that, but I’m not really sure.
July 23, 2010 at 7:11 pm
NM
I tried to find out, but the session didn’t help. I admit alcohol might have played a role in this.
July 24, 2010 at 3:46 am
kid bitzer
so is there any short account to be had of how, in the objectivists’ view, one gets from the axiom of identity to libertarianism?
if it is simply of the form
1) a = a
2) ….
3) profit!
then we may have to reconstrue the underpants gnomes’ list as a derivation, rather than as a business-plan.
July 25, 2010 at 11:41 am
Barry Freed
Hey! I once gave a talk (on Sufism) at one of the Field-Being conferences (back in ’00 or ’01 IIRC).