[Lecture Four] Objectivism Through Induction
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 1 hour, 31 minutes
Course summary: In this course, Dr. Peikoff demonstrates how to grasp philosophic ideas and principles in the same way that they were discovered—through induction from the facts of reality. Working through a process of generalizing from observed facts, Peikoff shows how a student can come to grasp and validate key ideas in Objectivist philosophy. Key concepts covered in the course include the idea of objectivity in both knowledge and values, egoism, reason as man’s means of survival, and the metaphysical status of sex. Read more »
In this lecture: This lecture begins with the completion of the induction of the concept of egoism by focusing on the cognitive contrast to altruism. It then begins the consideration of how to induce the concept of justice.
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.
| Explain the importance of inducing the contrast of altruism from the same types of concretes. |
| How does considering the widest scale application of these contrasts help clarify the issue? |
| What kind of conclusion is available when you attempt to integrate the inductions considered so far in this course? |
| What is the difference between validating the virtue of justice and the value of justice more generally? |
| Explain how one can get to the perceptual level about the human need to evaluate or judge things generally. |
| Why is action necessarily tied to the basic judgments we make? |
| What are the crucial steps to get from judging inanimate things to other men? |
| How does the analogy of food and nutrition help clarify judging men and their actions? |
| How does one move from evaluating people as being immediately good or bad in a local context to finding more general principles about their characteristics? |
| What is the contrast or genus approach to the need for judging? |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 27:37 | Adults must use the knowledge and ideas, good or bad, that we have gathered. Therefore, as someone with a modern upbringing, we’re first forced to work deductively, learning Objectivist principles as a basis for the future and then working inductively to validate them or root out error? |
| 30:58 | Why use a dictionary? Isn’t that the use of someone else’s deductive description? |
| 33:56 | Why do you constantly lead us to our conclusions? Why do you say, for instance, “let’s prove that man’s basic means of survival is reason”? Shouldn’t the question be, if we are true inducers, “what is man’s basic means of survival”? Likewise of egoism, shouldn’t the question be “what is our first basis of survival,” etc.? |
| 36:32 | Given what you said on the crow epistemology and its relationship to rationalism, to what extent does this let Kant off the hook? |
| 38:12 | Please induce the principle that “all knowledge is conceptual.” |
| 41:22 | How might the subordination of the environment to egoism be distorted if, in fact, by saving the environment, you might save the long-term viability of man? |
| 46:00 | How do you arrive at the idea that something is what you should be focusing your attention on? |
| 49:43 | Have you heard of an article by a Harvard professor that presents induction in a positive light, and could this indicate the beginnings of a new Enlightenment period in our educational system? |
| 51:56 | I am wondering how you yourself arrived at the idea of induction being crucial. |