On Saturday, October 23, 1999 1:08 AM Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
> > You think she changed her name because she was ashamed of her Jewish
> > heritage? That's a very odd theory. Her first name was originally
Alice.
> Why
> > did she change that too?
> Yah, I believe she changed her name because she was ashamed of her Jewish
> heritage. Since she was born in Mother Russia, so i'm guess'in that Alisha
or
> some varient was her birth name and maybe not precisely the English,
Alice.
> Where "Ayn" comes from I don't know.
I'm not sure if she was so much ashamed of her Jewish heritage as just wanting to break free of any heritage. In a lot of ways, I think she saw herself at the beginning of a new tradition, though her ideas are not totally original...
> Her views and values ain't mine since
> they all appear to be conjured out of whole cloth rather then empirical.
> Suprising for such a rationalist.
I disagree. I think, if you read her _The Virtue of Selfishness_, _Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology_, and some of her other nonfiction, you do see her basic method at work, which, I believe, Chris Sciabarra illustrates well in his _Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical_. This is that she tried to dialectically transcend the various schools of philosophy she saw around her. Not that she was always consistent; her philosophy some work. (See my web site below for areas where I think she got it wrong.:)
However, her basic method was to take seemingly contradictory views and try to identify how each can fit together. Thus, her views of mind-body integration, fact-value relationships, and her view of how social change occurred.
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
http://mars.superlink.net/neptune/