The Ayn Rand Society

Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association

December 2007

The Foundations of Ethics: Objectivism and Analytic Philosophy

Speaker: Irfan Khawaja

Commentator: Paul Bloomfield

Chair: Allan Gotthelf

Location: Baltimore Marriott Inner Harbor at Camden Yards

The program announcement reports that Irfan Khawaja “has completed his doctoral thesis in philosophy at the University of  Notre Dame and expects to defend, and receive, his PhD in the coming months. The dissertation, Foundationalism and the Foundations of Ethics, is an exploration, from an Objectivist perspective (but with detailed attention to the analytic literature), of the concept of the foundations of ethics in meta-ethics and moral epistemology.” Happy report! What a long and arduous path to this plateau. Irfan Khawaja is the author of an important essay in Objectivity titled “A Perfectionist-Egoist Theory of the Good” (V2N5).

Paul Bloomfield is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He has broad research interests which range across analytic philosophy, specializing in metaphysics and moral philosophy (both ancient and contemporary). His publications include: Moral Reality, Oxford University Press, 2001; "Let's Be Realistic about Serious Metaphysics," Synthese, 2005; "Disagreement About Disagreement", in The Biology and Psychology of Morality, W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed) (forthcoming); and, as editor, Morality and Self Interest, Oxford University Press (forthcoming).

The Ayn Rand Society

Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association

March 2008

Egoistic Virtue in Nietzsche and Ayn Rand

Speaker: Christine Swanton

Commentator: Darryl Wright

Chair: Allan Gotthelf

Location: Hilton Pasadena

Christine Swanton is senior lecturer of philosophy at the University of Auckland. She is the author of Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View (OUP 2003) and Freedom: A Coherence Theory (Hackett 1992).

Darryl Wright is associate professor of philosophy at Harvey Mudd College. He is working on a book on Ayn Rand’s ethical theory.