"The Strangest Conference I Ever Attended"

I must confess to being jealous of all of Spiros' friends who have received the red box.

I wonder if other departments get sent so many bizarre gifts.

There was a period where the Ayn Rand Institute seemed to every month or so send us weird things like Leonard Peikoff's lectures on "logic" (Peikoff seriously maintains non-Aristotelian logic to be so obviously immoral that one cannot believe in it without deserving excommunication from the ARI). And every couple of years someone mails me their self-published novel (e.g.). And let us not forget all of those blue books by the guy with the Italian last name (Rossini? Rosmini? Rouzelati? alas, we do seem to have forgotten him), sent on by his monastary.

One of the strangest of all these free books has been David Birnbaum's Summa Metaphysica (parts I and II). Being myself a pluralist and in a Frankenstein dept. (for us, welded together in the dead of night with Religious Studies), I never knew whether to class the thing with Peikoff or not. One person's weirdness is another's bread and butter. Was I right to put it on my ever expanding stack of weird free books?

Well, thanks to the good folks at Bard College, it is now clear that I was. Full story HERE.