[Lecture One] Objectivism: The State of the Art
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 1 hour, 31 minutes
Course summary: In preparing the material for his treatise, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Dr. Leonard Peikoff confronted unique problems and challenges in how properly to systematize the material. Based on his earlier comprehensive course on Objectivism in 1976, Dr. Peikoff had to question whether he had developed the content to the most precise and accurate formulations. In completing this process, he arrived at new insights that allowed him to present the material more clearly and to demonstrate the proofs for them. He reviews this material in this course. Read more »
In this lecture: This lecture examines the logical structure of Objectivism specifically with the question of how it relates to logical priority. Dr. Peikoff examines the hierarchical necessity of the parts of Objectivism.
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.
| What problem does doing philosophy as an adult create? |
| What implications does it have in approaching the question of understanding the structure of a philosophy? |
| Choosing one specific point from each of the fundamental fields of philosophy, explain why each is logically dependent on the others. |
| Why is there a logical necessity in the order of learning philosophy? |
| How does the spiral theory of knowledge help us understand the difference between adult integration and childhood learning? |
| What are the things that one must know prior to beginning to understand the field of epistemology? |
| Why does Dr. Peikoff believe that these topics belong in an anteroom? |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 1:14:48 | When did it first come to your attention that that was not the proper hierarchical order, when you were writing your book? |
| 1:16:07 | Isn’t the best order of presentation dependent on the context? For example, the order in which John Galt explains Objectivism is not precisely the order in which you lay it out here. |
| 1:18:19 | I was wondering if you could give an example to concretize the typical child and walk through those to help me integrate. |
| 1:19:34 | For a technical, philosophic dissertation, would you have the anteroom as “the metaphysics of man”? Would you have a sixth category of philosophy? |
| 1:20:55 | The point that you mention at the beginning about the series of lectures being able to get to the point where we can hear a very abstract idea and then get a quick perceptual feeling of it… can you elaborate a little on why this is important if one could do this, vs. somebody who could laboriously derive it? Is it just for polemical purposes? |
| 1:25:57 | In 1983 in the Understanding Objectivism course, you have a hierarchical structure to Objectivism. Does the material that you just presented change that? |
| 1:27:14 | In your experience, does the child develop and follow his hierarchy exactly? |