Roger E. Bissell is an independent scholar living in Antioch, Tennessee. A research associate with the Molinari Institute, he has edited no fewer than ten books and is the author of more than three dozen scholarly essays in philosophy and psychology, as well as four books, including How the Martians Discovered Algebra: Explorations in Induction and the Philosophy of Mathematics (2014) and What’s in Your File Folder? The Nature and Logic of Propositions (forthcoming, 2019). A lifelong professional musician, he has an MA in music performance and literature (University of Iowa) and a BS in music theory and composition (Iowa State University). He has written extensively on aesthetics and logic and dialectical method and applies this unusual background in his chapter on the Great American Songbook and its cultural and historical context, which is also the subject of a conference he created and directed for Liberty Fund in March of 2019.
Jason Lee Byas is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on rights theory, alternatives to punishment, and justice beyond the state. In addition to his academic work, he has been a Fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society since 2011. He holds an MA in philosophy from Georgia State University and a BA in philosophy and Sociology from the University of Oklahoma.
Robert L. Campbell is a professor of psychology at Clemson University. For thirteen years, he was the co-editor of New Ideas in Psychology. He has published articles and chapters on Jean Piaget’s genetic epistemology and is the English translator of Piaget’s Studies in Reflecting Abstraction. He has been affiliated with The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies since its founding and has written extensively on Rand’s epistemology and on the relationship between Objectivism and psychology. His latest publications are a retrospective on the staged debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky (which took place in 1975) and a critique of the ongoing efforts to maintain, as part of Objectivist epistemology, the doctrine that what is asserted arbitrarily can neither be true nor false.
Troy Camplin has a PhD in the humanities and is the lead consultant at Camplin Creative Consulting. He has published several academic papers and book chapters on spontaneous order theory, short stories, and poetry. He is also the author of the book Diaphysics (2009) and the novella Hear the Screams of the Butterfly (2016).
Kevin A. Carson is a senior fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society and a freelance writer whose work has appeared, in addition to C4SS, at P2P Foundation Blog, The Freeman and Future of Freedom Foundation. He has four books in print—Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution and The Desktop Regulatory State—and is working on a fifth (draft manuscripts to-date can be found at https://exodus875.wordpress.com). Carson is an anarchist without adjectives who is heavily influenced by the Boston individualists, Elinor Ostrom, commons-based peer production, autonomism, and municipalist movements in cities like Barcelona, Madrid, and Jackson.
Gary Chartier is distinguished professor of law and business ethics at La Sierra University. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of seventeen current or forthcoming books, including Public Practice, Private Law (Cambridge, 2016) and Anarchy and Legal Order (Cambridge, 2013). His byline has appeared over forty times in journals including the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Legal Theory, and Law and Philosophy. After receiving a BA from La Sierra (1987, magna cum laude), he earned a PhD at the University of Cambridge (1991) with a dissertation on the idea of friendship. He graduated with a JD (Order of the Coif) from UCLA in 2001. The University of Cambridge presented him with an earned LLD in 2015 for his work in legal philosophy. A proud southern California native who wishes he had been able to attend UC Sunnydale, he shares a slowly improving 1920 home with Willow Rosenberg the Kitty and Rupert Giles Feline.
Billy Christmas is a lecturer in political theory at King’s College London in the Department of Political Economy. He earned his PhD in politics at the University of Manchester, after which he was a Fellow at the New York University School of Law. His work occupies the intersection of philosophy, politics, economics, and law, and engages specifically with the topics of rights, property, and justice. He is currently working on a book manuscript and a number of papers on the conceptual structure of rights, and the theories of property in early modern natural law theorists such as Grotius, Locke, and Kant. He is particularly interested in how such approaches can be informed by Elinor Ostrom’s work on common pool resources, and how that might change the overall shape of their theories of justice.
Douglas J. Den Uyl is vice president of Educational Programs at Liberty Fund in Indianapolis. He has published essays or books on Spinoza, Smith, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, and others. His most recent books include The Virtue of Prudence (1991), The Fountainhead: An American Novel (1999), God, Man and Well-Being: Spinoza’s Modern Humanism (2008), and with Douglas B. Rasmussen has co-edited the anthology The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (1984), and co-authored the books Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order (1991), Liberalism Defended: The Challenge of Post-Modernity (1998), Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (2005), The Perfectionist Turn: From Metanorms to Metaethics (2016), and their forthcoming The Realist Turn: An Alternative to Constructivism (2020). He was a founder of the North American Spinoza Society and a co-founder and first president of the International Adam Smith Society. He also co-founded (with Douglas Rasmussen) the American Association for the Philosophic Study of Society (AAPSS). He taught philosophy and was department chair and full professor at Bellarmine College (now Bellarmine University) before coming to Liberty Fund.
Nathan Goodman is a PhD student in the Department of Economics at George Mason University. He earned his Bachelor of Science in mathematics from the University of Utah. He has worked as a research fellow for the Center for a Stateless Society, a program intern for the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University, and a summer fellow at the Fully Informed Jury Association. His research interests include defense and peace economics, Austrian economics, public choice economics, and self-governance.
Robert Higgs received his PhD in economics from the Johns Hopkins University and has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, and Seattle University. He has also been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University and held visiting professorships at the University of Economics, Prague, and George Mason University. He is Senior Fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute and editor-at-large of the Institute’s quarterly journal, The Independent Review. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is an American economic historian and economist who draws from Public Choice, the New Institutional Economics, and the Austrian school of economics in his work.
Steven Horwitz is the Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the Department of Economics at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. He is also an Affiliated Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center in Arlington, Virginia, and a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute of Canada. He is the author of three books, including most recently Hayek’s Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions. He has written extensively on Hayek and Austrian economics, monetary theory and history, and American economic history, and is a frequent guest on radio and cable TV programs. A member of the Mont Pelerin Society, Horwitz has done public policy research for the Mercatus Center, Heartland Institute, and the Cato Institute. He has spoken to professional, student, policymaker, and general audiences throughout North America, as well as in Europe, Asia, and South America.
Stephan Kinsella is a registered patent attorney and libertarian writer in Houston. A former partner with Duane Morris LLP and General Counsel of Applied Optoelectronics, Inc., he is executive editor of Libertarian Papers, director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom, and was adjunct professor at South Texas College of Law. He has published numerous articles and books on intellectual property law, international law, and the application of libertarian principles to legal topics, including Against Intellectual Property (2008), Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe (co-editor, 2009), and International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (co-author, 2005; second edition forthcoming 2019). He received an LLM in international business law from King’s College London, a JD from the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at LSU, and BSEE and MSEE degrees from LSU.
Roderick T. Long (AB Harvard 1985, PhD Cornell 1992) is professor of philosophy at Auburn University, president of the Molinari Institute, a Senior Fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society, editor of the Molinari Review, and co-editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. He has also taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Michigan. His chief research interests include ethics, political philosophy, Greek philosophy, philosophy of action, and philosophy of social science. He blogs on philosophy, politics, and science fiction at Austro-Athenian Empire (aaeblog.com).
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey taught until 2015 economics, history, English, and communication, adjunct in philosophy and classics, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Author of eighteen books and some four hundred scholarly articles ranging from technical economics and statistics to gender studies and literary criticism, she has taught in England, Australia, Holland, Italy, and Sweden, and holds ten honorary degrees. Her trilogy of books (2006, 2010, 2016) on the “bourgeois era” explains modern liberty and riches not from trade or exploitation or science, but as an outcome of a new respect after 1700 and especially 1800 for commercially tested betterment, Adam Smith’s “liberal plan of [social] equality, [economic] liberty, and [legal] justice.” McCloskey is often classed with “conservative” economists, Chicago-School style (she taught in the Department of Economics there from 1968 to 1980, tenured in 1975, and during her last year also in history). She still admires supply and demand. But she protests: “I’m a literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative.’ I’m a Christian libertarian, or a humane liberal.”
David L. Prychitko is a professor of economics at Northern Michigan University, his undergraduate alma mater. He received his MA and PhD in economics from George Mason University. As a 1989 Fulbright grant recipient he engaged in post-doctoral research studying the demise of self-managed socialism in the former Yugoslavia. Prychitko’s books include Marxism and Workers’ Self-Management: The Essential Tension and Markets, Planning and Democracy: Essays after the Collapse of Communism, as well as the textbook The Economic Way of Thinking, co-authored with Paul Heyne and Peter Boettke, which has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Hungarian. His scholarly articles have appeared in a variety of journals, including Cambridge Journal of Economics, Review of Political Economy, Review of Austrian Economics, and Journal of Economic Education.
Douglas B. Rasmussen is professor of philosophy at St. John’s University in New York City. He has authored numerous articles in scholarly anthologies and in journals such as: the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, American Philosophical Quarterly, International Philosophical Quarterly, The New Scholasticism, The Personalist, Public Affairs Quarterly, Social Philosophy & Policy, The Review of Metaphysics, and The Thomist. He has co-authored several books with Douglas J. Den Uyl (listed above) and has co-edited several anthologies (including the one with Den Uyl, listed above). He was a visiting scholar at Liberty Fund (1998–1999) and at Bowling Green University’s Social Philosophy and Policy Center (2001, 2008, 2011), and was a visiting professor at the Université Pantheon in Paris (2002). He co-founded (with Den Uyl) the American Association for the Philosophic Study of Society (AAPSS), and he has served on the Steering Committee of the Ayn Rand Society (ARS) and as a member of Executive Council of the American Catholic Philosophical Association (ACPA). His areas of research interest are epistemology, ontology, ethics, and political philosophy, and he has received numerous research fellowships, and grants, as well as a number of awards for outstanding teaching and scholarly achievement.
Chris Matthew Sciabarra received his PhD, with distinction, in political theory, philosophy, and methodology from New York University. He is the author of the “Dialectics and Liberty Trilogy,” which includes Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (1995), Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995; expanded second edition, 2013), and Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (2000). He is also coeditor, with Mimi Reisel Gladstein, of Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand (1999), and a founding co-editor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (1999–present). He has written over a dozen encyclopedia entries dealing with Objectivism and libertarianism, given over 50 interviews published in such periodicals as The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Village Voice, and The Economist, and published over 150 essays, which have appeared in publications as diverse as Critical Review, Reason Papers, Liberty, Reason, The New York Daily News, Film Score Monthly, Jazz Times, Just Jazz Guitar, and Billboard.
John F. Welsh recently retired from his position as professor of higher education at the University of Louisville, where he taught and directed dissertations in higher education administration. He has published extensively on social and educational theory in research journals and books on educational policy. He is the author of After Multiculturalism: The Politics of Race and the Dialectics of Liberty (2007) and Max Stirner’s Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation (2010). Information about his publications can be obtained from the John F. Welsh Collection of Libertarian and Individualist Thought at Pittsburg State University.
Edward W. Younkins is professor of accountancy and executive director of the Institute for the Study of Capitalism and Morality at Wheeling Jesuit University. He is the founding director of the university’s undergraduate program in political and economic philosophy and its master’s programs in business and accountancy. He is the author of many articles in accounting journals and in free-market-oriented publications, and he is the editor of the series in which this particular volume appears. He has written or edited ten books including his trilogy of freedom and flourishing: Capitalism and Commerce: Conceptual Foundations of Free Enterprise; Champions of a Free Society: Ideas of Capitalism’s Philosophers and Economists; and Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society: Toward a Synthesis of Aristotelianism, Austrian Economics, and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.