This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Philosophers of Capitalism provides an interdisciplinary approach, attempting to discover the feasibility of an integration of Austrian Economics and Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. Edward W. Younkins supplies essays presenting the essential ideas of Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand, as well as scholarly essays discussing the theorists and the interaction of their theories.

Ayn Rand and Friedrich A. Hayek were two of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century in the effort to turn the current of opinion away from collectivism and toward what could be called classical liberalism or libertarianism. The purpose of this pedagogical article is to explain, describe, and compare the essential ideas of these great advocates of liberty in language that permits generally educated readers to understand, recognize, and appreciate their significance. It that sense, it hopes to (...) make the the ideas of Rand and Hayek accessible to a wide range of readers through the use of clear explanations. To aid in this endeavor, the article concludes with the presentation and discussion of a table that summarizes and compares their ideas on a variety of problems in and dimensions of philosophy and social science. The target audience of this essay includes educated laypeople and college students, many of whom may decide to read and study the original works of these prominent theorists of a free society after being exposed to their essential ideas. (shrink)

Ayn Rand wrote and lectured on economic concepts and topics. This volume addresses the economic and business aspects of her writings. The authors of this anthology are from a variety of fields and all of them are enthusiastic supporters of her ideas.

Philosophers of Capitalism provides an interdisciplinary approach, attempting to discover the feasibility of an integration of Austrian Economics and Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. Edward W. Younkins supplies essays presenting the essential ideas of Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand, as well as scholarly essays discussing the theorists and the interaction of their theories.

This book emphasizes the compatibility of Aristotelianism, Austrian economics, and Ayn Rand's Objectivism, arguing that particular ideas from these areas can be integrated as a potential paradigm of human flourishing and happiness in a free society. It constructs an understanding from various disciplines into a clear, consistent, and systematic whole.

This article presents a skeleton of a potential paradigm of human flourishing and happiness in a free society. It is an exploratory attempt to construct an understanding from various disciplines and to integrate them into a clear, consistent, coherent, and systematic whole. Holding that there are essential interconnections among objective ideas, the article specifically emphasizes the compatibility of Aristotelianism, Austrian Economics, Positive Psychology, and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism arguing that particular ideas from these areas can be integrated into a paradigm (...) of human flourishing and happiness based on the nature of man and the world. Such a paradigm will help people to understand the world and to survive and flourish in it. It is hoped that the paradigm will grow and evolve as scholars engage, question, critique, interpret, and extend its ideas. Our goal is to have a paradigm that accords with reality and there is always more to learn from reality. (shrink)

This article makes an argument for Atlas Shrugged as a highly unified and integrated novel. All of the sections of the paper explain how integration and unity are embodied in Atlas Shrugged. Part one discusses the philosophical and literary structure of Rand’s masterpiece. The next section is concerned with issues of political economy. Section three then examines Rand’s techniques of characterization and character development as demonstrated in Atlas Shrugged. The following part analyzes the philosophical speeches. The final major (...) part considers Atlas Shrugged as a means for social change. The conclusion then discusses Atlas Shrugged as the manifestation of a fully-integrated philosophical novel. (shrink)

Atlas Shrugged is a novel about business and the people who create businesses. This article describes Ayn Rand’s treatment of business and entrepreneurs in the novel. It begins with an explanation of how Atlas Shrugged demonstrates that wealth and profit are creations of the human mind. The next section compares the worldviews of the novel’s business heroes and villains. This is followed by an in-depth analysis of the novel’s main business protagonists—Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden. The next part provides (...) summaries of other business characters. The last section examines how the novel is used in college-level business courses. (shrink)

Eamonn Butler’s Ayn Rand: An Introduction is a short, well-organized, and easy-to-read guide to Ayn Rand’s key ideas. This primer focuses on the essentials, avoids academic details, and is structured around the major elements of her philosophy of Objectivism. Butler’s book is a fine, brief introduction to Rand’s thought.

This article provides a summary of economic issues found in Atlas Shrugged. It discusses the role of individual initiative, creativity, and productivity in economic progress as illustrated in this novel. It also shows the novel's depiction of the benefits of trade—and the destruction of exchange relationships and production that results from government intervention in the economy. Rand included a great many valuable insights about money in the novel's famous “money speech.” In addition, the book analyzes Galt's Gulch as a (...) free market economy. The novel is, in part, a treatise on economics providing a literary treatment of proper economic principles. (shrink)

The author of this article maintains that Ayn Rand’s version of virtue ethics can provide a powerful basis for operating a successful business organization. An argument is made that Ayn Rand’s Objectivist virtues can serve as an underpinning for a firm’s long-term sustainable success as well as for the flourishing and happiness of its employees. In order to attain a company’s goals, values, and purpose, these virtues must be integrated with the firm’s vision, culture, and climate. The Objectivist (...) virtues are said to provide an integrated framework for employees’ decisions and actions. Leaders must link these virtues to the survival and success of both the firm and its employees. Toward the end of the paper a diagram is presented to aid the reader in visualizing the linkages among the ideas presented therein. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to discuss the several ways in which Atlas Shrugged is related to social change. It explains both how characters such as entrepreneurs and strikers introduce change in the novel as well as how Atlas Shrugged itself can be employed as a tool for bringing about change in the real world. The potential effects of the novel on readers are examined, as are the efforts of social movements that have embraced and incorporated the ideas found (...) therein into their own philosophy. (shrink)

This expository essay relies on the views of scholars writing about Atlas Shrugged to make a case that it is a highly integrated work of imaginative literature. The article focuses on the ways in which integration is manifested in Atlas Shrugged. Part 1 examines the philosophical structure of the novel. Part 2 addresses literary structure. This is followed by a discussion of Rand's techniques of characterization. An analysis of the speeches and the theme of mind-body integration concludes the discussion.

Chris Matthew Sciabarra surveys discussions of Ayn Rand in the literature on Progressive rock music. He examines critically Edward Macan's Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture, Paul Stump's The Music s All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock, Carol Selby Price and Robert M. Price's Mystic Rhythms: The Philosophical Vision of Rush, Bill Martin's Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rock, 1968-1978 (1998), and Durrell S. Bowman's essay on the rock band Rush (...) in Kevin Holm-Hudson's Progressive Rock Reconsidered. He argues that the authors show varying degrees of understanding of Rand's brand of "redemptive politics.". (shrink)

This is a book grounded in the real ethical challenges of modern business practice, with a world-religious perspective so necessary in an era of globalization.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an open access, dynamic reference work designed to organize professional philosophers so that they can write, edit, and maintain a reference work in philosophy that is responsive to new research. From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they (...) are made public. (shrink)

National Book Award Finalist. How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet? Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe? Where are we going, and perhaps, the most difficult question of all, "Why?" In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings supremely different from all other species. (...) Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called "the rainbow colors" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Wilson takes his readers on a journey, in the process bridging science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence—from our earliest inception to a provocative look at what the future of mankind portends. Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch," which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere," here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way. Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an overreliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different from the spider's web. Whether attempting to explicate "The Riddle of the Human Species," "Free Will," or "Religion"; warning of "The Collapse of Biodiversity"; or even creating a plausible "Portrait of E.T.," Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe. The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-, then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham. (shrink)

Science provides us with representations of atoms, elementary particles, polymers, populations, genetic trees, economies, rational decisions, aeroplanes, earthquakes, forest fires, irrigation systems, and the world’s climate. It's through these representations that we learn about the world. This entry explores various different accounts of scientific representation, with a particular focus on how scientific models represent their target systems. As philosophers of science are increasingly acknowledging the importance, if not the primacy, of scientific models as representational units of science, it's important to (...) stress that how they represent plays a fundamental role in how we are to answer other questions in the philosophy of science (e.g. the scientific realism debate). This entry begins by disentangling ‘the’ problem of scientific representation, before critically evaluating the current options available in the literature. (shrink)

Mathematical pluralism can take one of three forms: (1) every consistent mathematical theory consists of truths about its own domain of individuals and relations; (2) every mathematical theory, consistent or inconsistent, consists of truths about its own (possibly uninteresting) domain of individuals and relations; and (3) the principal philosophies of mathematics are each based upon an insight or truth about the nature of mathematics that can be validated. (1) includes the multiverse approach to set theory. (2) helps us to understand (...) the significance of the distinguished non‐logical individual and relation terms of even inconsistent theories. (3) is a metaphilosophical form of mathematical pluralism and hasn't been discussed in the literature. In what follows, I show how the analysis of theoretical mathematics in object theory exhibits all three forms of mathematical pluralism. (shrink)

The so-called ergodic hierarchy (EH) is a central part of ergodic theory. It is a hierarchy of properties that dynamical systems can possess. Its five levels are egrodicity, weak mixing, strong mixing, Kolomogorov, and Bernoulli. Although EH is a mathematical theory, its concepts have been widely used in the foundations of statistical physics, accounts of randomness, and discussions about the nature of chaos. We introduce EH and discuss its applications in these fields.