Para el nuevo intelectual

A challenge to the prevailing philosophical doctrines of our time.Although Ayn Rand went down in history mainly because of her formidable novels, turned into true modern classics, she also gave birth to highly original and tremendously influential thinking. The author, in fact, considered herself a novelist and a philosopher at the same time.In this book, Ayn Rand presents the foundations of her philosophy from extracts from her novels, reconstructing the general lines of the philosophical framework that is implicit in all of them. In the book's title essay, Rand undertakes an analysis of Western culture, explains the causes of its progress, its decline, and its present bankruptcy, and points the way to an intellectual renaissance.In her first nonfiction text, Rand offers a condensed summary of her philosophical system, Objectivism, whose essence is the reason-individualism-capitalism triad. For the new intellectual, she develops the theories of the American thinker on free will, the radical ethics of rational egoism or the defense of laissez-faire present in novels such as The Spring or Atlas Shrugged. And she does so by conversing and arguing with the most important authors of the Western philosophical tradition.Rand's devastating critique of altruism, as a basic moral obligation to live for others, brought his unconventional views into conflict with established beliefs in an age that, like ours, was dominated by dogmatism and collectivism. .As incisive and suggestive as it was then, the work is addressed to those who want to assume the responsibility of becoming the new intellectuals. People willing to think for themselves will find in these pages an inspiration for an integrated and innovative vision of man and existence.