 Thank you very much. I thought I would sort of skirt around the edges of the topic first since I didn't know I'm as well as Barbara does And then she will occupy the center of the of the subject after me. I came to know Ein Rand in the early 1960s when she gave a lecture faith and force at Brooklyn College where I was teaching and After that I invited her to lunch and she said okay. I've got one hour That was at noon and we were still sitting there discussing philosophical subjects at six o'clock and I didn't know that that was the beginning of Comparatively long Relation I knew her for regular and saw her regularly for about three years before coming to California in the later 60s She Went to an NBI lecture and then I Was invited to her apartment. I came with a very much marked copy of Atlas shrugged and She said I'll trade you so she gave me an autographed copy of hers. I said well These comments in the margin are really They're just my own reactions. They they're not necessarily the most important things. She said that's all right That's why I want them. I want to see what your spontaneous reactions are and she said at first we want to discuss Atlas shrug We'll discuss the aesthetic aspects. I want to know what you think of it as a work of art well, that helped to get our friendship off on a very Pleasant footing because of course I had nothing but admiration for Atlas shrugged So I discussed with her the structure of it and the intricate way it was put together Even at her request I she wanted to hear about favorite passages what passages I liked the best and so I Seized upon several of them first of all They wanted the opening of the railroad in Colorado and that turned out was one of her favorite passages I said well, but you know all this and I that you know, he says I want to hear it from you What you what what you think of these various points? And so for several evenings We usually met every two weeks For several evenings we discussed various aspects of it. She said well, we'll leave the philosophy alone for the moment I just want your aesthetic reactions. Well from that we went to two other things We Discussed various works of literature I Had memorized considerable parts of Shakespeare and I would quote some of those to her She wasn't too impressed by Shakespeare, and I never did get an agreement with her on that too much of a tragic sense of life and so on but There were other things on which our reactions corresponded precisely She indicated She showed me a few things that she enjoyed in literature And sort of to my surprise She turned to some poems by Swinburne. She said no, this is not philosophy. I don't necessarily agree with his views But just as as pure poetry this is near perfection and I Agreed but I also thought that Shakespeare sonnets probably merited that That same praise Anyway, we went through that a number of times And we got on to music. It was about at that time, but she was starting to Have a weekly broadcast on the Columbia University radio station that I think it lasted for about a year and Wanted some opening music, so I brought along a whole bunch of records. I thought good introductory music so some of Handel Handel overtures bits of Bach Purcell's trumpet voluntary things that I thought would just be ideal to introduce a program She didn't want any of those What she wanted that she said all these this is 17th and 18th century that's a static universe I said well, if you wanted dynamic universe, how about Beethoven? How about Wagner? Well, she didn't want those either we ended up with what was her favorite Rock Mononof her two favorite composers were rock Mononof and Chukovsky. I didn't consider it accidental that they were both Russian She thought that all Aesthetic judgments Objective she said I can't prove it in the case of music She said I don't know what to say about those but she said that all these are objective qualities that I discern and then I I Said look I think that a lot of the terms that we use to praise or dispraise works of art terms like beautiful Terms like appealing terms like expressive They Have more to do with our reactions to the work Then they do with the nature of the work itself. I said now granted many of them may be a mix But I said we have to disentangle these because we want to keep apart the terms that that described something and terms they describe the qualities of something and those that describe our reactions to it and But there was some degree of disagreement there It's very difficult to encapsulate in just a few minutes What was actually took place over a long time and it was forgotten again and then resumed at a later time We did a great deal of this but this it is through this Through aesthetic concepts that I got an idea of what? Objectivism is the all aesthetic qualities are objective. They're out there They're really in the object to see and I expressed some doubts about that not that I was a subjectivist I wasn't but I said that Many qualities many so-called qualities In including the second secondary qualities as they're called like color shape smell objects. I thought those also may be relative to the State of the observer and dependent on the observer's organism and so on so that I Tried I always tried to think of exceptions to whatever whatever general principle is Enunciated that sometimes irritated her but sometimes she she enjoyed it as well And so we had spent some time on secondary qualities And then the so-called tertiary qualities like beauty and goodness and so on but in general her position is these They're all really out there. Could we but could we but no it's the difficulty is in our appreciation And I didn't necessarily agree with that, but we would go from one subject to another in a Friendly way she I think her ideal art was always heroic and Like like Atlas But I think I was much more Tolerant of a lot of things in art that she was sort intolerant of I like Picasso. She didn't I like James Joyce. She had no patience with James Joyce at all and There were occasional Arguments about this friendly arguments. I would sometimes take her to concerts in ballet modern dance. She didn't always like it But we had a great time there and There just didn't time to discuss everything that I could say about those wonderful evenings that we spent in Restaurants concert halls and so on then we'd go to her place and talk until usually Till four o'clock in the morning and very often we're still talking at eight in the morning And she'd make me breakfast and I go off to class and that happened Many times over a period of several years It's difficult to give a brief impression of I Think I was somewhat more pessimistic in my view of the universe than she was I've mentioned once rinsed at the status of animals I said which animal would want to come into this world Knowing that they don't only be prey for other animals none of them living to old age All of them say dying from hunger disease and so on and so on She didn't exactly deny that but she thought I was emphasizing the wrong thing and In fact Although I was pessimistic about that. I told her look. I'm just trying to take a realistic view of things. I'm not I'm not Personally depressed. I feel life is wonderful, but I'm just trying to see the universe as it is and Curiously when I expressed some reservations about the profession I was in teaching and That I would have a class and I'd try to clarify their concepts and I work hard on the students and then the term or the year would be over and Just as they were starting to get somewhere and then you'd have a whole bunch of New ones the next the next term and then the full of the same mistakes as the previous ones Then it would all start over again, and I said this is becoming monotonously Repetitive she said no she said you are in the most influential profession in the world You may not know it, but you are its ideas It's ideas not physical things that mold the world and she said the It's it. It's when bad ideas replace good ones. That's when we have the kind of world that we have now. I Never forgot that It sort of gave me renewed inspiration to go ahead With my profession and I never since then reached the the doldrums in my feeling about the profession That I did at the time that I had it was in at the time that I met her well She had we disagreed a lot about contemporary philosophy She hadn't read a lot in contemporary philosophy, especially angle American and it was difficult to convey a brief Impression of that because so much of this involves Multiple meanings of words and things that she didn't really have much patience with and I thought that this was the important Essential avenue for getting to that. She thought apparently that most modern philosophers by modern She meant 20th century that most modern philosophers were Skeptics about the existence of a physical world And I said well and they take the physical world to be a hypothesis Which is highly confirmed if not totally validated. I said but none of them deny it She thought that it would be unusual to find a philosopher who who took the existence of the physical world as axiomatic And did not require any argumentation and I showed her Long article of one of my favorite contemporary philosophers Norman Malcolm of Cornell I still remember the article and I traced I typed up the argument of the article for her called Knowledge and verification and the the conclusion was that knowledge of certain things about the physical world around us is not just probable But active but but certain and and she said Let's get him over here and talk with him because he this would be the exception in Contemporary philosophy that no that's not the exception They modern philosophers are not what you apparently think they are they may they may put on a skeptical guys And they may say a lot of things that are skeptics of skeptical about perceptions skeptical about science skeptical about religion You can be skeptical about all sorts of things, but She was always Suspicious of that thought that I was presenting contemporary philosophy in all too rosy you in order to promote it to her and And to the end she had she had very little patience with it I might have come through to her on a few things But our backgrounds were too were dissimilar I didn't really fully understand what hers was until I read Chris Yabbar's book On iron Rand which came out last year about her education Petersburg and so on that's a long long story which I can't go into here, but We had we had lots of Friendly disagreements some of them not so friendly I always tried to be easygoing friendly, but I could see the signs of impatience and sometimes anger rising There was there's always a reason for the for the anger She was For instance, I remember that one night I quoted her quite casually and I told Francis statement The rich have the same right as the poor to sleep under bridges And that really set her off. It's just she was apoplectic with anger and I Didn't understand that at the time. I subsequently saw You know she saw so much in that To refute it to talk about property rights and how if there were sufficient attention to property rights The things that were described in this about the poor sleeping under bridges would not occur I mean that was a long long story, and I wasn't yet all that into free enterprise economics and so on but we went into that all Quite a bit later When she had these bouts of anger I Could always detect that there was something very profound behind it, and I didn't always realize what that was So I tried to keep an even keel and just tried to learn from her And I did learn a great deal from her even as I tried to teach her some things about contemporary philosophy that That she really didn't know or some things I thought It was misrepresented to her and I tried to give it a fair appraisal There are lots of and I don't have time to go into those. I'll go into one or two very briefly We discussed for example causality and I casually threw out the suggestion to her Once upon a time if a occurs and then be occurs and then that happens again a b a b a b Then we have some title to say that a caused b and she immediately recognized this as Hume's constant conjunction theory of causality and She didn't like that at all. Of course. I was about to augment this theory I wasn't satisfied with Hume just that as it was stated, but I said, you know, look If if you're in a theater and you're hearing the clattering of horses hoops on the film and just at that moment An earthquake shakes the theater you get the impression that the earthquake is what caused the clattering of horses hoops I said but and if it turned out at every time You saw that film there was an earthquake in the theater then you would suspect that there was some causal relation between the two That was an example of what was ordinarily called the regularity view of causation But I said of course be careful a person can say I get up an hour before sunrise every morning and Bow to the east and lo and behold every morning the sun rises But lest I think that my my action caused the Sun to rise one morning I won't get up and then I'll see what happens and then you'll know what does and does not help cause the sunrise So I went into this in quite a good deal of detail and she said yes But that's not enough in causation Because acts upon the effect And I said, okay, okay, but now let's see what this phrase act on means What about situations like As in a traditional situation the this Domino's near that domino and the first hits the second the second hits the third and so on until the tenth one comes down This is causation by contact. This is the most familiar one that familiar to us in everyday life That the one acts upon the other in a clear sense now what about This situation the Sun is over here and other stars many light years away, but there's a considerable Gravitational attraction from the one to the other What acts on what? Well the Sun acts on the other star. Yes, but there's is certainly is not in the traditional way Because there's nothing between them I said well in the 19th century ether hypothesis there is something permeating all space that is between them But I said that theory went out with the end of the 19th century and Has never been revived Would you say that that is would you say nevertheless that that's acting on it seems to say yes That was acting on even though it action at a distance. Yeah, you know that that seems to be okay so far Then we got into Discussion of ESP. I didn't know that that was such an explosive issue with her I was just wandered into it, you know unknowing and I Was presenting some data that I had read about the so-called Shackleton experiment in Great Britain about A person in one room guessing what cards were being pulled Simultaneously when a bell rang in another room soundproof three door through three rooms away and so on a bunch of scientists there to make sure there was no No dirty work going on and no cheating of any kind and Here's one person who almost always gets it right. I mean here's his here's cards a bunch of cards spades clubs and so on and suppose that when clubs is Being drawn over here the guy over three rooms away always guesses correctly what it is. I said now that's If you define ESP as one mind having access to another mind without the intermediary of the sense organs in in between this seems to be a pretty good case of ESP and No, no She thought it was shameful that I even read that stuff That's not the way nature works you're misconceiving the nature of the world I Said well, you but you can't just say a priori what nature is like you can't just figure it out as you do in mathematics sometimes you have to look and see and If the evidence favors ESP and I didn't I don't care whether it does or not But if it does well, then we have to accept it even though we can't explain it This seemed to me just eminently common-sensical. She never got over that. She thought this was not the way nature works, and I should have known better to begin with and And any attempt to show that ESP might actually exist is fraudulent I mean I should be onto the fraud before I even started with the business. I Said well, you know, I can't really know these things a priori some things we have to look and observe and and see and That that was a regular Things like this became a regular bill of fair Between us When we talked about the causal principle that everything that happens has some cause or other and I She thought that it was true. Yeah in general. I did too But I said what is the status of this of this statement? Is it a statement at all? Since I said it's epistemologically very suspect Don't you think I'm because every time we find a cause for something we say yeah, the causal principles been further confirmed But when we don't find it we said we don't say it was disconfirmed We say we haven't found it yet, and when I see those one-sided businesses I get suspicious So that is what led some people to say the causal principle is not a statement about the world at all It is a kind of rule of the game The rule of the scientific game We we adopted as a rule It helps us to find more causes that encourages us and so on has certain pragmatic effects But maybe it's neither true nor false Well, and I mentioned a lot of things that look as if their Statements factual reports about the universe and maybe I said maybe just maybe they're not reports of the universe What the universe gives us it's what we import and bring to the universe And we see it through some of our own expectations and desires Well that smacked a little bit of Kant although I didn't put it in those terms And again that that was that was totally rejected There were a whole bunch of issues like that. I mean we discussed definitions. We discussed a Great many of just hosts of philosophical issues and just some scientific ones too in general She didn't have a lot of sympathies with certain developments in contemporary science She totally rejected the say the Heisenberg principle of indeterminacy and so on and I get Einstein's statement God did not play dice with the universe, but When I suggested well, you know, maybe the indeterminacy is right out there in nature It's not just that there is a definite situation And we don't know what it is, but it's that indeterminacy is really out there She was Ashamed in me that I should think such a thing that my head wasn't really on quite straight that I That I would say things like that and So it continued. I'm only giving a very very brief impression and I'm almost Through there were we discussed theory of definition many many times They don't have chance to to do all that right now anybody that wants to ask about it will will I'll Amplify on just about anything that you that you care to discuss but I just wanted to give a brief hint of the sort of thing that we that we sometimes Talked about She was Sometimes she'd get very angry that Something that she thought I was confused about or something that I had said and then She'd go into the kitchen and prepare tea and I'd hear the clattering of cups and she came back and she'd come back and say This was a philosophical anger. It's not a personal anger. It's not directed against you And sometimes when I said something that she very much approved of or like she'd say I love you in the true Philosophical sense of that term. Oh, I didn't know exactly what that was But I wasn't you want to ask anything. That's I'd say well that that's true of me and spades and Well 30 years I've elapsed and I Still miss her Tremendously I think of her on all kinds of occasions Barbara and I were discussing this the other day. She was saying that When the Berlin Wall came down she was thinking of mine and I was too And the same now today that her books are available in Russian and her own native native Leningrad It's unfair that she didn't live to see that That would have been tremendous When the iron ran letters appeared It was an experience of Vividly re-experiencing things of many years ago That I thought had faded from memory somewhat and they hadn't When I wrote my book on ethics a year and a half or so ago, and I was writing at it It's the book I have before me here you in conduct just came out earlier in 1996 I thought of her a great deal. It wasn't primarily about her. She does figure prominently in it I've discussed her a bit and especially issues like the refutation of socialism I thought she would like that. She would appreciate it On the other hand, I could also hear her saying John I told you so this isn't right. You shouldn't say that But I also might think I'd say Yes, you were right about that. You still have the 19th century mind that I like forget about Forget about the 20th century go back to the 19th century and you'll be okay How many times she had said to me variations of things like that Maybe she would even have said Maybe I'm sorry. I got angry with you about this because Now I see where you are coming from anyway It's many years ago But it was a great experience One that life would just not have been quite as wonderful if it hadn't happened Okay, I guess I better stop there, but after Barbara's finished any questions