Chris Matthew Sciabarra

This commentary is part of The Atlas Society's 1999 online "CyberSeminar" entitled "The Continental Origins of Postmodernism."

I found Stephen Hicks’s essay “Derrida and Deconstruction” most thought-provoking. His discussion of Foucault and Derrida’s departure from the search for objective truth is important, as is his overall discussion of deconstruction and its context.

This commentary is part of The Atlas Society's 2000 online "CyberSeminar" entitled "Nietzsche and Objectivism."

Just a note on my initial claims in Russian Radical (that the evidence for Ayn Rand’s “Nietzschean phase” is inconclusive)...

This commentary is part of The Atlas Society's 2000 online "CyberSeminar" entitled "Nietzsche and Objectivism." 

This commentary is part of The Atlas Society's 2000 online "CyberSeminar" entitled "Nietzsche and Objectivism." 

Rand and the Silver Age

I have found the subject-matter of our CyberSeminar to be both fascinating and provocative, and while I have not been regularly contributing, I wanted to thank all of our participants and Stephen Hicks and Will Thomas especially, for the enlightening discussions.

December 2004 -- There is much to celebrate on the occasion of the Ayn Rand centenary. Books on Rand and Rand citations in the scholarly literature have multiplied exponentially in the past decade; there's even a Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, of which I am a founding co-editor. In addition, we have witnessed Rand's cultural ascendancy as an iconic figure, as references to her proliferate on television; in movies, plays, novels, and music; and even in cartoons and comic books.

It has long been said that when twentieth-century "serious" music adopted noisy traffic horns or long periods of silence as stand-ins for composition, genuinely Romantic themes went "Hollywood." In the lush film scores of composers such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman, and Miklos Rozsa, the Romantic impulse was preserved and extended.

"You want to stand alone against the whole world?" That's certainly how it seems for Howard Roark as he's expelled from architecture school for refusing to copy the classical styles of the past. He'd sooner work as a day laborer than compromise his imaginative designs. He knows that every building, like every person, must have integrity if it is to survive in a harsh world. He'll take his lumps, but at least he'll keep his self-respect.