[Lecture Six] Objectivism Through Induction
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 1 hour, 32 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 works through the induction of the concept of objectivity in the Aristotelian sense. It covers the distinction between percepts and concepts, the discovery of logic, the ideas of validation and proof, and the contrasts of objectivity.
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.
| Describe the origin of the distinction between percepts and concepts in early Greek philosophy. |
| What crucial step or observation did Aristotle introduce in this distinction? |
| Identify and explain what Aristotle had to learn to understand how to answer Plato’s misconception of concepts. |
| What method did Aristotle use to grasp the process of forming concepts? Why was this so unique? |
| What did the early Greek thinkers have to observe about ideas to get them to the starting point for discovering logic? |
| What steps did Aristotle have to take to form his concept of logic? |
| Why is the question of form so important? |
| What are the steps between understanding validity and understanding proof? |
| What are the relevant contrasts to objectivity? |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 1:21:32 | Does rationalism come in kinds? Isn’t there an important distinction between a groping “inductivist” who retains remnants of rationalism because he doesn’t have a clearly grasped method as against a methodologically consistent, committed-to-deduction rationalist… or is it all just a matter of degrees? |
| 1:23:45 | You seem to do reduction by taking a definition and then taking some key parts of it and breaking it down. How do you know what parts of the definition to choose? I tried to do this and I can’t do it. |
| 1:27:07 | Given the inductive proof of causality in Lecture One, how do we dismiss out of hand claims that causality is inapplicable to new areas that were not covered in the original induction, for example subatomic particles? Is the answer that the burden of proof is on the claimant to specify in what way subatomic particles are different from all the things we sampled in our original induction? |
| 1:30:50 | How can the right to life be inalienable if capital punishment is justified? How do you induce that capital punishment is moral? |