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BACKGROUND

It's true that Objectivists face a steep battle in getting a hearing in the academy, and that it's a radical view whose main claims are at odds with many of the prevailing assumptions of contemporary philosophy, in every branch. But I think Coates exaggerates the deficiencies of contemporary non-Objectivist philosophy, and misunderstands the point of my appealing to my own career as evidence.

On the latter issue, it's true that I focused on my own experience, but my experience is broader than a knowledge of Notre Dame. I was an undergrad at Princeton; I've taught at The College of NJ; and I know grad students and faculty in departments around the country and the world. I also have a professional and personal stake in keeping up with what's being said at conferences and in journals, in knowing the history of various debates in the field, and in monitoring the books that are coming out.

People in the field have to know information of that sort in just the way (and for just the reason) that businesspeople in highly regulated fields have to know the ins-and-outs of the regulatory environment. This sort of detail can't possibly matter as much to someone whose life doesn't depend on knowing it. And so, much of the critique of the academy by non-academics has been either of a broadbrush nature--or a focusing on the flashy and the aberrant. I don't mean to deny that there's some truth in it, but there's a lot of truth NOT in it, too.

That brings me to my second point. Are Wittgenstein, Foucault, Kuhn, and Rorty "skeptics"? Of metaphysical knowledge, yes. But they have plenty of critics in the field, and there is more to contemporary philosophy than that sort of skepticism. More to the point, I think there are important lines of affinity (notwithstanding large differences) between Objectivism and the following established views in contemporary analytic philosophy:

--perceptual realism of the sort espoused by James Gibson and his aficionados (e.g., Susan Haack)

--causal realism, of the sort espoused by "necessitarians" like Harre and Madden, and Nancy Cartwright

--work on the epistemology of causal explanation, e.g. Peter Lipton

--work in philosophy of biology, e.g., on teleological explanation

--the "direct reference" theories of Kripke-Putnam-Donellan in phil of language

--the agent-causal theory of free will as defended e.g. by Timothy O'Connor (Indiana University)

--various forms of neo-Aristotelian virtue theory (too many names to mention)

--certain aspects of perfectionist political theories (Raz, Sher) and political libertarianism (though I think this affinity is often exaggerated at the expense of others)

That's just off the top of my head, for topics and fields I know about, and minus all the historical work that might be done. On all of those topics, there is fruitful work to be done that would involve a great deal of disagreement, but also productive agreement, and most important productive *exchange*, intellectual "trade" in Rand's sense.

Ayn Rand was fond of introducing topics in a very compressed way, and then saying "This is a topic on which volumes might be written." My own view is that those volumes will not be written outside of the academy, or at least by people without a great deal of academic training.

The reason is simple. Objectivism is not primarily a brand of politics, or a "movement." It is a *philosophy*. To understand it fully, you have to understand philosophy. There is no way to get the requisite training outside of the academy. For an idea of "requisite", read or re-read what she says in her essay "Philosophical Detection." My point is: you cannot succeed at the methodology she describes there unless you practice it every day, for hours a day, the way an athlete or a musician practices his or her craft. Putting aside the independently wealthy, you can't do that unless someone pays you. That's where academia comes in.

On the Ayn Rand Society, check out their page at http://www.aynrandsociety.org.

-- Irfan Khawaja, Doctoral candidate, Notre Dame (posted 5/14, 12:15 p.m., E.D.T.)

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