[Lecture Six] Objective Communication
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 2 hours, 23 minutes
Course summary: In this course, Dr. Leonard Peikoff explores the nature of intellectual communication. The course blends student work and examples with Peikoff’s own commentary to elicit the principles of effective communication in writing, speaking, and arguing. In these lectures, he identifies the essential issues unique to the nature of each method of presenting ideas and offers guidance about how to craft one’s thinking around the specific way one will deliver it to an audience. Read more »
In this lecture: This session features students doing extemporaneous presentations followed by analysis from Dr. Peikoff.
Study Guide
This material is designed to help you digest the lecture content. You can also download below a PDF study guide for the entire course.
| During this lecture, students should pause the recording after the student presentations and make observations, based on the course material, as to the qualities of the presentation. Students should then compare their observations to those of Dr. Peikoff. |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 1:41:46 | Given that Holocaust was the highest rated TV-movie—shown and seen by more people than any other—wouldn’t it be very reasonable to use it as an example to motivate listeners, since the odds are extremely high that they would be familiar with it? |
| 1:43:46 | Does the victim in the “sanction of the victim” issue have to be consciously aware of his destroyer’s immorality and identify his immoral actions? If not, what does he sanction? |
| 1:44:47 | Does this principle apply in the case where an industrialist identifies his destroyers—the government’s policies—as wrong, knows that in the long run he will lose, but chooses to continue because it’s what he enjoys doing? |
| 1:47:05 | I was asked to give a presentation dealing with economics. The reaction was generally positive, but one recurring comment was that the audience felt that it was being “lectured to.” Is this necessarily bad, and, if so, how do you correct it? |
| 1:52:44 | How does one differentiate the concept “non-rational” from “irrational”? |
| 1:54:00 | How is romantic art delimited from other heroic art? |
| 1:58:27 | Do you intend to teach the lecture on Objectivism next September? |
| 1:58:44 | During the first lecture, you said that all knowledge is conceptual. Did you intend to include self-knowledge in your use of the word “knowledge,” or did you just mean “knowledge outside of the self”? |
| 1:59:50 | Can you define in very simple terms, using at least one example for each word, the Objectivist meaning and use of “philosophy,” “epistemology,” and “ethics”? I also need to know the difference between philosophy and epistemology and the difference between philosophy and ethics. |
| 2:01:36 | Regarding the presentation on romantic art: her topic was Romanticism and not literature or some specific form. Therefore, her excellently chosen concretizations form a delimited variety, using sculpture, etc., in the context of her presentation and I think it was most appropriate. Therefore, I disagree with you. Please comment. |
| 2:02:42 | Re: homework assignment example H: Was it an example of the complex issue to delimit it adequately? If it wasn’t that, could I reword it and say it more objectively than it is on the sheet? |
| 2:05:46 | Re: the presentation on capitalism to an audience of conservatives: I found the pace of that presentation too slow… to the point that the ideas started to seem disconnected. Isn’t too slow a pace a problem as well? You thought the pace of that talk was excellent; I found myself losing interest because of the many pauses and the generally slow pace. The numerous pauses made it difficult to keep the ideas threaded together. |
| 2:08:20 | Beyond telling the speakers that they would speak for 10 minutes, did you assist them in any other way? What knowledge, if any, did you have of their content? |
| 2:08:45 | It’s not totally clear to me why you believe the skyscraper analogy was a great motivation. I thought it was okay, but my idea of motivation is “if you don’t listen, here’s what bad thing is going to happen.” Thus: “Have you ever noticed today’s teenagers standing on street corners smoking the latest drugs, uttering the latest slogans, seemingly without goals, etc. etc.? Then listen to me!” |
| 2:12:47 | What is the proper domain of philosophy as contrasted with the special sciences? Is there any overlapping? |
| 2:14:21 | Is rationalism an outgrowth of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy? |
| 2:14:50 | Other than rationalism and evasion, can you name any important motivations for the systematization of such philosophies as Kant’s, Hume’s, etc.? |
| 2:18:04 | What is the position of Objectivism on the doctrine that states that logic is merely a branch of psychology? |
| 2:20:02 | What did you think of the use of the word “we” in the first presentation on art? |