Dr. Sciabarra now says that his historical thesis doesn't hinge on this specific relationship. Yet far and away the greatest energy is expended by Sciabarra in making this particular connection, rather than, for example, doing a careful study of the textbooks that would have been used by Rand. More hinges on this than he thinks, because if this connection is a mere speculation, then the central thesis of his book is undermined.
In my review I accepted without question Sciabarra's claims about what was "in the intellectual air" in Petrograd in the early 1920s. Ayn Rand tells us she was deeply repelled by most of it. The question is, Can it be established, with a reasonable degree of plausibility, that Ayn Rand absorbed a peculiar form of dialectical philosophy from the air, and made it her own? It is not enough to say "it was in the air, she must have."
Contrary to what Sciabarra says in the letter, I was careful not to present a narrower view of dialectic than he does--thus I quoted his words fairly heavily. But the "historicist conception" of dialectic which he now disowns is consistently drawn upon in his book, both in characterizing Rand's methodology, and in buttressing claims of fundamental similarity between Rand, Hegel, and Marx.
It is claimed that I ignore what is most essential to dialectics. But concepts such as "organic unity" and "integration" are not necessarily tied to a dialectical way of thinking. Dialectic views these as means of transcending dualities and apparent oppositions, etc. That is the differentiating feature of dialectic, and it was on this, among Sciabarra's characterizations, that I focused.
On Ayn Rand's dualism, I can only say that in the sense that those in the 19th-20th-century dialectical tradition take consciousness and existence to be non-dualistic--i.e., in the sense that reality is a "construct" of consciousness constituted by reason, and so on--Ayn Rand is a dualist. She is adamant on many occasions that existence in no way depends on consciousness.
As for Aristotle, he is not the father of dialectic as found in the tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Plato is the person who claimed that dialectic was the route to transcendent truth--Aristotle seriously demoted dialectic from this role, in favor of logic. "Dialectics" as the term evolved from German Romantic philosophy, the form found in Russia in Ayn Rand's youth, has little to do with Aristotle's Topics--but that takes a long argument to establish. At any rate, Ayn Rand discusses her debt to Aristotle often, and never mentions that it was his theory of dialectic that influenced her.
Sciabarra closes his letter by saying that "those who refuse to recognize this dialectical structure of mutual implication and organic unity in Rand's thought do great damage to her revolutionary message." This is a question-begging remark, one of a number in his response: to "refuse to recognize" or "fail to see" something presupposes it is there to be recognized or seen. The central thrust of my review is that Sciabarra has not given his readers reason to believe his central claims. Furthermore, it lessens, rather than increases, the revolutionary message of Ayn Rand, to assimilate her to the dialectical philosophical tradition--she is far more revolutionary than that.
It is an indirect message of my review that Ayn Rand's place in the history of philosophy has been distorted by Dr. Sciabarra's book. Thus I emphatically disagree with Dr. Branden's assertion.
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