Next Meeting: Tuesday Sept 28th from 6:00pm to 8:00pm - Philosophy Who Needs It

The topic for our next meeting this Tuesday is philosophy itself. We are going to discuss Ayn Rand's essay Philosophy: Who Needs It, and the shorter essay Introducing Objectivism.

Philosophy Who Needs It is available as the first essay in the book by the same name, it's also in one of the pamphlets we handed out for free at Fall Fest (by the way, we got a mention in an article about Fall Fest in The Advocate, go Kirk and Yuriy! Here is the link: http://www.ucdadvocate.com/news/fall-fest-brings-students-closer-1.1641727 ). The essay is also available online as an audio at the ARI site: http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reg_ar_pwni.

The second much shorter essay, Introducing Objectivism, is available at the ARI site as well: http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=objectivism_intro

We are going back to our regular meeting location, building 1020 in the 9th street park by Einsteins which is number 26 on this map: http://www.ahec.edu/campusmaps/AHEC3D.pdf

See you all on Tuesday, and as usual we'll go out for beers and dinner afterward.

Next Meeting: Tuesday Sept 21st from 6:00pm to 8:00pm - Roark and the Dean

For our next meeting tomorrow (Sept 21st) we will discuss Roark and the Dean, an excerpt from the beginning of The Fountainhead. You can read it on The Ayn Rand Sampler (we have free copies of those), on The Ayn Rand Reader (pages 3-17), or on The Fountainhead itself (pages 15 - 27).

For this week only, our location is going to be the Golda Meir house right next to St Cajetans, it's building number 18 on this map: http://www.ahec.edu/campusmaps/AHEC3D.pdf (note: we normally meet in building 1020 in the 9th street park by Einsteins which is number 26 on the map, it will only be this Tuesday that we are meeting in a different location, and this location is close to where we normally meet.)

We'll meet from 6 to 8, and then we'll go to Old Chicago for dinner/drinks.
See you all tomorrow!

Next Meeting: Sept 14 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm - The Goal of My Writing

Great turnout for our first meeting this week!

For our second official meeting of the semester, we will be discussing Ayn Rand's essay "The Goal of My Writing". This essay was first published in The Romantic Manifesto, where Ayn Rand presents her theory of aesthetics, but you can also find it in The Ayn Rand Reader, and in the free booklet The Ayn Rand Sampler.

According to the synopsis in the website of the Ayn Rand Institute, in this essay "Rand articulates the goal of her own fiction writing as 'the projection of an ideal man, as an end in itself'—and explains that she originated her philosophy as a means to this end."

Most of the readings for this semester can be found in The Ayn Rand Reader, so it would be a good idea to get it, you can currently get it used from Amazon for about $1.

Next Meeting: September 7th from 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Our first official meeting will be watching and discussing a short (30 minutes with quick Q&A) video by Dr. Leonard Peikoff entitled "Why Ancient Greece is My Favorite Civilization."

Here's a quick synopsis:
In this heartfelt tribute to Greek culture, Dr. Peikoff names its essential virtue as man-worship. Greece, he says, was the only fully secular civilization in history—the "only conceptual-level culture ever."

This talk offers profoundly original identifications, such as: the significance of the Olympic Games; the Greeks' attitude toward male nudity and toward homosexuality—and its parallels with the Founding Fathers' attitude toward slavery; the difference between the Greek and the Enlightenment views about emotions