[Lecture Five] Advanced Seminars on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 1 hour, 55 minutes
Course summary: In this course, Dr. Peikoff presented material from his then-new book, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. The manuscript had its earliest roots in Peikoff’s comprehensive 1976 lecture course on Objectivism. As he worked on the material for publication, he discovered new connections and implications of major ideas in the philosophy as well as new insights on its integrated, hierarchical structure. Peikoff used these seminars to discuss what he learned in the process and to demonstrate how it would allow students of Objectivism to gain a new understanding of the philosophy. Read more »
In this lecture: In this lecture, Dr. Peikoff begins his explanation of the Objectivist epistemology, with special attention to the unit perspective and Ayn Rand’s idea of measurement omission.
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 35:06 | Aren’t you really describing the process of discovering similarity? |
| 41:13 | Is there an analogy here involving fractions and integers? |
| 55:06 | On page 129, does by “so far” mean “up to this point in this section”? |
| 57:22 | What does a concept consist of as a mental unit? |
| 1:02:42 | What’s actually leftover in your mind after you finish forming a concept? I take it that what’s left in your mind is a word? |
| 1:03:43 | Could a word be a mental picture? |
| 1:07:59 | Are you suggesting that similarity, as opposed to difference, is given to us automatically? |
| 1:16:36 | What is the status of this discussion of concepts? Is it just a description of the process or a proof? |
| 1:24:17 | Is it the case that nominalists are viewing every different instance of a characteristic as a different characteristic? |
| 1:27:50 | How do you draw the line between what is an “optimal characteristic” and one that is essential to the concept? |
| 1:32:10 | Does measurement omission apply also to non-essential characteristics? |
| 1:39:03 | Why do you say “omit all measurements within appropriate limits”? |
| 1:41:15 | Is there a reductionalistic element to this theory of an improper materialistic kind? |
| 1:47:15 | Would the concept of “like and love” be a perfect example of something that we can use implicit measurement for without having any quantitative, numerical, explicit unit? |
| 1:49:29 | Does Ayn Rand’s use of “open-ended” compare to Aristotle’s use of “actual” and “potential” with respect to concepts? |