| |
I met David Kelley in the winter of 1990 when he came to Chicago to talk about his new organization Institute for Objectivist Studies. I probably first heard of him in the fall of 1981, by his essay “The Primacy of Existence” (published in The Objectivist Forum, H. Binswanger and L. Peikoff, editors). That was taken from the first chapter of his book-in-progress The Evidence of the Senses, which was published in 1986. I had studied that work and his two essays on abstraction (published in academic journals) by the time we met in 1990. I had learned from his work and had realized his was a special mind, whose work I wanted to support.
In the fall of 1991, I had gone to Europe for the first time. I went with a friend to Florence. The very first evening there, on a walk after dinner, I twisted my leg avoiding a rush of people coming towards us, and the tibia snapped in two. In December David’s institute was featuring an evening presentation by Alan Blumenthal. I was in a cast for a long time, but I had advanced to a half-cast and could bend my knee in time to get on a plane for New York. There I was with my backpack, on my crutches, doing Christmas shopping. That evening Dr. Blumenthal gave his presentation “Inner Life.” Very, very important.
Although I was a financial supporter of Dr. Kelley’s institute, I was not able to attend any of his summer seminars until 1993 (assuming my episodic memory is not letting me down). That was in Rhode Island. Some of the excellent presentations were: “The Ethics of Flourishing: Aristotle vs. Rand” by Roderick Long; “Aristotle on Human Nature and The Good” by Jurgis Brakas; “Human Neuropsychology and the Problem of Consciousness” by Kenneth Livingston; “From Brain Net to Neural Net” by Larry Gould; “Teleology and the Foundation of Biological Value” by James Lennox (contra the account by Harry Binswanger); and “Relationships between Values” by David Kelley. Special memories outside of classes: the gentle, smiling, slow-moving George Walsh in my dorm (he had Parkinson’s, but his mind was still fully sharp); a stream by the campus, where I would go for solitude, and Prof. Long working his way down the rocks, likely to the same purpose; sitting on a rock by the Atlantic one afternoon over at Newport with a young man who had come to the conference from Paris, talking on and on with the waves; lastly, riding in a car with Jimmy Wales and Prof. Livingston, going to somewhere.
Another very memorable summer seminar was in 1995. That one was in Madison. There was a special reason for its being held on that campus. It was there, in 1961, that Ayn Rand had made her presentation “The Objectivist Ethics” as part of a symposium “Ethics in Our Time.” At the ’95 conference, David made a significant extension to Rand’s ethical theory: “Benevolence as an Objectivist Virtue.” I recall with pleasure other presentations from that conference, such as Joan Mitchell Blumenthal’s “The Ways and Meaning of Painting” (a print of her drawing “The Possessor” hangs in our living room) and James Lennox’s “Causality and Responsibility in the History of Ideas.” The highlight was David’s work arguing the profound fittingness of benevolence as a virtue in Rand’s egoistic ethics. At an evening formal dinner, Prof. Lennox addressed us and remarked on David Kelley’s great understanding of and ability to extend Rand’s philosophy. That is correct.
With the ascendancy of the political facet for public view of the organization, in the second half of 20, my financial support for it rightly ended. I had ended my financial support for the Ayn Rand Institute some years earlier (for a different reason). Both organizations do work I think good, and I wish them well on those endeavors. I buy products of both. I look forward to buying David’s book on the logical structure of Objectivism.
(Edited by Stephen Boydstun on 2/24, 3:16pm)
|
|
