[Lecture Eight] Advanced Seminars on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 1 hour, 52 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 explains the importance of hierarchy and context for understanding the nature of human knowledge and how one arrives at a proof. The lecture also explains the two flawed approaches to these topics known as subjectivism and intrinsicism.
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 0:18 | In what sense do you mean “interconnected” in the context of “metaphysically there’s only one universe”? |
| 3:48 | Do you come to this conclusion from the fact that there is one reality, not more than one? |
| 5:46 | Could you please clarify the paragraph about concepts as a relational form of knowledge? |
| 11:10 | Could you switch the order of this section with the following one on “knowledge is hierarchical”? |
| 14:22 | Could you say something about where to start or stop integrating and how much to do or not do? |
| 21:04 | Does the statement “human knowledge is relational” come from the fact that entities are related? |
| 22:17 | Do you establish “relationships exist” as a corollary to identity or existence? |
| 27:21 | What is it that we’re actually doing when we integrate? Are we relating material or connecting it by means of similarities? |
| 49:31 | Isn’t what you just said with capitalism an example of induction, not reduction? |
| 1:00:20 | Is there such a thing as an invalid discipline? |
| 1:02:35 | Observation from an attendee that, without the epistemology of Objectivism, a book of conceptual roots would be impossible. |
| 1:03:23 | There is such a thing as causal relationships in reality. If that is what is invalid in hierarchy, why can’t you say that there’s a hierarchy in reality? |
| 1:06:58 | Is it within everything’s nature to change? |
| 1:10:57 | Is hierarchy the same for every consciousness? |
| 1:26:00 | Would you comment on the school of conceptualism and how it differs from Objectivism? |
| 1:27:34 | Why do you say “in some century yet to come that this approach will perhaps” lead to another renaissance? |
| 1:32:11 | Are all forms of reasoning forms of reduction? |
| 1:32:33 | Did you bring up invalid concepts at this point in order to show us that how we determine invalid concepts is through the process of reduction? |
| 1:34:42 | Since all knowledge has to be integrated, why is it that you can’t connect “egoism” to “chemistry” or directly to “biology”? |
| 1:39:44 | Can you go even stronger than say what you did, that integration is a necessary supplement to reduction? |
| 1:41:39 | How does a child get from the preliminary chaos to the conceptual-measurement-omitting level? |
| 1:42:48 | Why is man a rational animal and not a rational primate? |
| 1:45:05 | Can languages be better or worse as evaluated by a conceptual epistemological standard? |
| 1:48:31 | If you imported specialized knowledge into philosophy, you would lose its broad generality and, consequently, you would lose its ability to keep the forest apart from the trees, correct? |