Work in progress (5)

Some interesting work-in-progress out there to report:

Roderick Long has a very interesting paper up on his website, “Why Character Traits are Not Dispositions,” and I have some comments on it there (only tangentially related to the main claims of the paper, I have to admit). The paper is relevant to some of the discussion we’ve been having here on moral luck (and is also a good way of helping me buy time to produce my long-promised third installment on that topic). The link goes to a post on the Alabama Philosophical Society meeting in Pensacola in October. It’s a very impressive line-up, and I’m sure putting it together was as much work as writing a paper on character traits and dispositions.

The Atlas Society’s Roger Donway has just announced the “online publication” of a co-authored piece (with Robert Bradley) on Gabriel Kolko‘s A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, originally called The Triumph of Conservatism. The link takes you to a page of description on The Atlas Society’s website; there’s a link there to the PDF version of the published essay in The Independent Review. The Bradley-Donway essay was in fact published six months ago, but apparently the six-month embargo is up, hence my scare-quoted reference to it as a new “online publication.”

I suppose a third work in progress is IOS’s own Fall Seminar on concepts, to take place exactly a week from now at the Glen Ridge Community Center. Everything’s in place for that, and Carrie-Ann and I are really looking forward to it. I’ll try to post a few things here on concept-related material within the next few days. Meanwhile, here’s something to chew on.

Irfan

P.S., 7:05 pm: I myself am at work on some annotations (posted on a different part of the IOS website) of Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. I have a long annotation on the first paragraph of the book, which I take pretty conclusively to imply an “open” as opposed to “closed” conception of Objectivism (if a “closed” conception can even be coherently stated in a way that contrasts clearly with an “open” conception, which I doubt, since I don’t think anyone has ever managed to do it). Anyway, I just finished with a commentary on sentence (1) of IOE [!], but the commentaries on sentences (2) and (3) should be shorter (should be), because their logic just follows from what I say about (1). I’m hoping to put more stuff on IOE (beyond the first paragraph) up on that page in advance of next Saturday’s epistemology seminar.