 Hi, Dr. Brooke. Thanks for joining the Western Canon podcast. Hey, Jordan. It's good to be here. Excellent. So I want to start by asking you a question that I posed to the philosopher Stephen Hicks when he was on this podcast. Stephen is an academic philosopher. He's also an objectivist. You probably know about him, which I would argue makes Stephen an extremely rare breed in academia. That is because Ayn Rand has been ostracized from the modern academy. She's not regularly discussed in philosophy programs. There are no objectivism courses being taught at any mainstream universities, or at least none that I'm aware of. If you do mention Ayn Rand's work in a philosophy class at a mainstream university, you get laughed at or told that you're juvenile. The common response I've heard is, well, I used to read her when I was a teenager. I don't know why. I don't know what that means. Sure. I would know this because I majored in philosophy. To me, I would say that this is extremely odd. Ayn Rand's work is still widely read today. Her books fly off the shelves, mainstream politicians and actors and titans of industry and artists credit her as being an inspiration and a genius. You probably could even argue that she's the single most influential and widely read woman philosopher in history. She created her own comprehensive internally consistent philosophical system. Everyone I've ever talked to has read at least one of her books. My question is, why has Ayn Rand been so unfairly maligned in modern scholarship? Why is she seen as taboo? What is it about her philosophy that draws the ire of so many in the so-called intellectual elite? Well, it's a big question. Recently, there was an article actually published in Aeon magazine, which is kind of a popularized magazine for philosophers. It was from a well-known female philosopher who said, we need to stop paying attention to Ayn Rand in academia. She gave exactly what you just said. Ayn Rand's incredibly influential. Students read her. She has more impact than our students than anybody else we're going to teach. And while she then went on to bad mouth Ayn Rand and to distort and provoke her philosophy, she said, we've got to start taking her seriously. So maybe, maybe, maybe academia is waking up to exactly this issue. I'd also say that I don't want to overstate it. There are some people who do teach Ayn Rand. I mean, certainly there are some objectivists at some pretty prominent universities like Daryl Wright at Claremont Colleges, Tara Smith, has a chair in the philosophy of objectivism at the University of Texas in Austin, a top 20 philosophy department. And Greg Salamieri actually teaches at Rutgers University, which is the top philosophy department in the world, at least some years, depending on the survey. So we do have some presence in some top universities. I don't want to be too pessimistic about where we are. But yes, I mean, generally, she is shun to take somebody to write in Aon magazine. We need to take her more seriously. And I think hopefully, and I think they are starting to take her more seriously. But I think the reason is she wasn't an academic, is one, right? She didn't speak their language. She didn't do philosophy based on how in the 20th century academic philosophers did it, particularly stylized, particularly obtuse way. And she wasn't part of the club. And it's important to be part of the club, I think, you know, for the philosophers, for people inside the club, they don't like outsiders. But of course, it's deeper than that. I think the real reason, although I think that's part of it, the real reason is that she challenges so much of conventional philosophy and she approaches it from a completely different, fresh, new perspective. So it's not just that the content of her philosophy is different. Her methodology is different. So her whole approach to epistemology and as a consequence, the whole way in which she presents the objective philosophy is different. So she really is much more Greek than she is modern. But they don't know how to fit her in because she's not 2,000 years old. They can kind of tolerate that because that's old. But she doesn't fit into a post-Christian, post-Cons, era of philosophy both because of the way she presents the ideas. And then, of course, the content turns everything upside down, right? Philosophy, to some extent or another, has been dominated by some form of you know, primacy of consciousness or a rejection of reality as it is since Kant, maybe even since Descartes to some extent. It's very suspicious of reason, reason as Ayn Rand had understood it. Of course, reason, Ayn Rand understands reason in a completely different way than academic philosophers talk about reason. They talk about reason as a content for that kind of thing in a sense only happens inside your mind that is not that related to actual reality. Her understanding of reason is much more enlightenment related but the enlightenment is kind of out and it's not quite the enlightenment because she is more refined in the enlightenment, it's more resilient. And then, of course, in ethics, she completely overturns. She says there is no dichotomy between is and art and which academics don't even know how to think about because of the way they think about reason and the way they think about reality. And then she's a rational egoist which overturns 2,000 years of one way or another altruistic philosophy, altruistic ethics. And, of course, ultimately she is a consequence of all that, a radical for capitalism in a world where most academics, number one and most philosophers are quite left and quite suspicious. They are quite suspicious of anybody who is pro-markets. I think even academic philosopher who did all the things but landed up being pro-capitalism at the end of the day. They would look suspiciously on them because politics, partially the problem is that they've convinced themselves that politics is everything. I think this maybe comes out of English and the post-modernism and so on that everything is political. There's nothing in life that's not driven by politics and therefore maybe the post-modernists don't quite have that big an effect on philosophy departments but they have some. Certainly, personally so many of these people can't think of philosophy separated from politics. So I think for all those reasons and again her methodology which is English, right? She speaks in complete English sentences and comprehensible ones. She speaks in clarity. Nobody writes like that in academic philosophy at least. Although they do respect, they seem to respect Samuel Otsacho and Camus and the existentialists who wrote in plain language but I think it's because they were conventional at the end of the day. Philosophically they weren't revolutionaries. But even the existentialists are out now. They're out and I think a big part of that is that they talk a lot about freedom and responsibility and so they're out. Yes, and I don't know how big they were in philosophy ever. I just don't know. They seem to have impacted other fields in the humanities much more than they impacted philosophy itself.