A Companion to Ayn Rand

This expansive Companion to Ayn Rand’s work provides vital orientation and context for scholars and educated readers grappling with Rand’s varied and controversial corpus . Rand’s work has been often ignored and sometimes disdained in the academy, yet she continues to fascinate readers with her dramatic novels, wide–ranging essays, and Objectivism, her philosophy of reason, egoism, and laissez–faire capitalism. After an informative introduction and a brief biography of the Russian émigrée who went on to celebrate and defend her vision of the American way of life, each chapter of this Companion focuses on a different area of the philosophy she developed, or on a selection of her writings. Several chapters tackle aspects of her views on ethics and the metaphysical and epistemological foundations of her philosophy. Others examine Rand’s thoughts on political theory, her approach to literature (as both critic and author), and her acute analysis of contemporary events – including epoch–making moments in history that she personally witnessed. Taken together, the chapters provide an overview of Rand’s distinctive approach, relating the different aspects of her thought together, and relating each to philosophers and theorists in related fields. This publication provides a thorough, scholarly grounding in Rand’s varied and highly original work, offering the most wide–ranging and up–to–date survey available.

Allan Gotthelf was Anthem Foundation Distinguished Fellow at Rutgers University, USA, and emeritus Professor of Philosophy at The College of New Jersey. For nine years he was a visiting professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. His influential papers on Aristotle are collected in Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology (2012). He was Secretary of the Ayn Rand Society (a professional group affiliated with the American Philosophical Association) and the primary editor of its Philosophical Studies series. Gregory Salmieri is Visiting Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Boston University, USA, and Co–Secretary of the Ayn Rand Society. He has taught philosophy at Boston University and The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and has published on Aristotle’s epistemology and ethics and on Rand’s philosophy and novels. His current projects include a monograph on Aristotle’s epistemology and an edited multi–author collection on the same subject.