To Professor Jennifer Burns

 

Sent to Professor Jennifer Burns, author of a rather philosophically inaccurate and heavily biased book on Rand:

 

To Jennifer Burns, Professor

Although you have done a very competent job in your book, from a historical perspective, I continuously found your attitude towards the philosophy in itself to be that of someone who either strived to misrepresent it or who simply did not understand it and did not put much effort to understand it at all. I am aware that your focus is a historical one, but it seems to be a very obvious oversight to attempt a book about a philosopher without actually studying the philosophy itself.

At best you have offered an incomplete portrait, at worst you have presented a disingenuous reduction of the personage by not attempting to understand the concepts of the philosophy and instead relegating your explanation of Rand to a point of view which is aimed as a platform for your criticisms of the person in question and not as an honest evaluation of the person *and* the philosophy.

A philosophy by itself can be the subject of a book, but the biography of a philosopher without integrating an honest study of the philosophy itself is inconceivable. I kept finding several philosophical mistakes concerning your conception of Objectivism at large (such as Rand's conception of selfishness, which you seem to have taken to be some sort of conception of cynical exploitation and misanthropy), and I must hope that these were honest mistakes - for the alternative must be that you sought to misrepresent the philosophy intentionally, which is a level of intellectual dishonesty that I do not wish to consider in an academic of your stature.

It is in absolute sincerity that I suggest you read the book "Objectivism in one lesson" by Andrew Bernstein- not as an attempt to 'convert' you but as a source against which you may wish to compare your assertions about the philosophy and correct, in a future edition, your intellectual inaccuracies regarding some very salient and important aspect of the philosophy. It is only the intellectually honest thing to do.