Advanced Seminar Brings Together Objectivist Scholars
For the last three years, an elite group of scholars has attended the Advanced Seminar in Objectivist Studies, held immediately prior to the general sessions of the summer seminar. The Advanced Seminar is TOC's incubator for encouraging new scholarly work that examines and extends the Objectivist system of ideas. This year, the Advanced Seminar was held June 27-29 at the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown. Attending the seminar were a mix of promising students, private scholars, and professors of philosophy and psychology.
The seminar sessions were held as moderated discussions of a previously circulated paper or selection from a book. The author or authors opened each session with a brief disquisition highlighting key issues, and several hours of discussion followed in which the authors were challenged to explain and defend their arguments.
The seminar opened on Wednesday, June 27, with David Kelley's presentation of his paper "Theory of Propositions." That paper discussed two epistemological issues regarding propositions: What is the cognitive process by which we integrate concepts into propositions? And how does a proposition relate to reality? Kelley hopes to use the seminar discussions as a stepping stone for developing his ideas further.
On Thursday morning, Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi discussed Ayn Rand's theory of art. Drawing from their book, What Art Is, the two discussed the historical definition of the fine arts and how that concept has broken down over the past several centuries. The discussion revealed the richness of Rand's approach to aesthetics and raised new questions for future research to address, such as the nature of the boundary between the fine and decorative arts.
Michael Huemer, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado-Boulder, presented a paper on Thursday afternoon: "Is Benevolent Egoism Coherent?" Huemer's paper, forthcoming in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, claimed that ethical egoism and the notion of individual rights are incompatible. The paper also explored the possibility that Rand was not an ethical egoist in the conventional sense. Huemer challenged Objectivists to offer strong arguments for the standard interpretation of Rand's ethics, and was challenged by the seminar participants to defend his own views.
That evening, Allen Costell discussed his paper "Analyzing and Reinterpreting the Objectivist Ethics." Costell, who recently completed his M.A. in philosophy from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, critiqued a theme in the traditional presentation of the Objectivist ethics that often emphasizes the primacy of reason. Costell argued for a more holistic conception of the ethics that integrates the cardinal values of purpose, self-esteem and reason. On Friday, June 29, Ken Livingston, a professor of psychology at Vassar College, discussed his paper "Is Darwin Overbought? Evolutionary Theory and Psychology." One of the highlights of the Advanced Seminar, Livingston's paper criticized extreme and dubious claims put forward by some evolutionary psychologists, while arguing that insights from evolutionary biology can enrich a rational understanding of human neurological development. Discussion centered on such issues as whether the human mind consists of function-specific, computer-like modules and what evolutionary environment might have led to the development of conceptual consciousness.
That afternoon, Christopher Robinson, a graduate student in cognitive science at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, led a discussion of his paper "How Expectancies Influence What We Remember." Robinson attempted to survey and interpret recent studies that attack the notion of the human senses as passive transmitters. Discussion centered on the criteria for developing experiments about human perception and the degree to which new evidence squares with David Kelley's analysis in his Evidence of the Senses. Robinson discussed questions of expectation and error in perceptual judgment and memory.
The seminar ended on Friday with a banquet at Chaser's, a restaurant in the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown's student union building. "Each year the seminar gets better," commented William Thomas, the conference's organizer. "It was a thrill to have such a variety of quality work before us, including David Kelley's exciting research in epistemology and Torres and Kamhi's ground-breaking book on aesthetics. I think this is a sign that the Advanced Seminar is developing into the venue for developing and promoting Objectivism in the intellectual arena that we hope it will be."