[Lecture Seven] 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: Dr. Peikoff presents the concept of objectivity and its central importance to Objectivist epistemology. He defines what logic is and why having a method to adhere to reality matters for thinking.
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 1:04:55 | Comment on how the courses at this particular conference are illuminating each other. |
| 1:06:35 | Could you clarify the use of “essential as epistemological”? When we say that an essential characteristic is “that which makes a thing what it is,” doesn’t that mean we’re talking metaphysics? |
| 1:10:00 | Could you elaborate on the development of the concept “objective” in Ayn Rand’s thinking? |
| 1:11:20 | Can a human leg be considered non-essential? |
| 1:19:38 | What is the role of symbolic logic and how important is it to learn it in order to guard against deceptions? |
| 1:22:30 | Why did Ayn Rand chose to describe the method of logic as an art as opposed to a science? |
| 1:23:53 | By saying that the essence of cognition is integration, are you downplaying differentiation? |
| 1:25:58 | How do you relate the essence of a political situation to the essence of a concept? |
| 1:28:38 | Isn’t there an intermediate perceptual stage of implicit identification? For example, animals know more than that something exists, including that they can bite certain animals and that certain animals can bite them. |
| 1:30:45 | How can you say the law of existence defines the function of consciousness? |
| 1:33:05 | Do you know of further discussions of logic from an Objectivist viewpoint? |
| 1:34:01 | What is the status of a conclusion derived from a combination of a fact and an arbitrary assertion? |
| 1:35:40 | A question about an “arbitrary curve.” |