I don’t have much to report from the third day of the Ayn Rand Institute’s summer conference (a.k.a. OCON). The morning was free, so Paul and I only had two lectures to attend:

Pat Corvini: “Two, Three, Four, and All That: The Sequel,” Class 2 of 3:

• I struggled a bit with the material today, particularly the postulational method of defining various kinds of numbers, but after some discussion with Paul, that’s all reasonably clear to me. However, I haven’t the foggiest idea how Pat’s objective approach to number will shed light on Cantor — although I’m sure that she has something very good up her sleeve.

Dina Schein Federman’s lecture “Ayn Rand as Intellectual Activist“:

• This lecture was good — and even relevant to questions about activism today. But it wasn’t eye-popping like her 2006 lecture on Ayn Rand’s Home Atmosphere. In that lecture, the content was wholly new, based on Ayn Rand’s family’s letters to her, none of which were even translated until Dina began her work on them. That lecture was interesting in its own right, but I also enjoyed it as a total refutation Barbara Branden’s very negative portrayal of Ayn Rand’s relationship with her family.

Tomorrow is the final day of the first half of the conference. It’s going to be busy. We’ll start with the final lecture of Lin Zinser’s course, then Tara Smith’s lecture on pragmatism, then the final lecture of Pat Corvini’s course, then the ARI Open House including the Workshop on Cultural Change, then the Q&A with Leonard Peikoff, and finally an informal meeting of Objectivist Bloggers.

I’m tired just thinking about it!