The Art of Thinking
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
- 8 lectures, 14 hours
- Recorded in 1992
In this course Dr. Peikoff explains what happens in the mind when one thinks and offers a structure for how to get better at thinking. He applies the key principles of Objectivist epistemology to everyday thinking. The course explains the mental process of changing one’s mind, the role of integration and essentialization in proper thinking, and the application of thinking in principle and what certainty means.
Download the entire course (594 MB) to listen in the audio player of your choice—or listen online starting with Lecture One below. If listening to the course from this website, be sure to make a note of the current lecture and timestamp before leaving so that you can easily resume where you left off.
Study Guide
This course includes a study guide, featuring questions and other material designed to help you digest the course content. This material accompanies the individual lectures and is also available below as a PDF.
Lecture Guide
Summaries of the lecture content are provided below for your reference and convenience.
| Lecture 1 | Dr. Peikoff begins this course by considering how we deal with adopting new ideas that present clashes with old ideas that we have held. He identifies the key issues in holding different contexts that suggest different answers to a question. He explains how an act of volitional adherence can help achieve clarity once one knows the truth on a subject. He describes the process of integrating new knowledge and dis-integrating old knowledge. |
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| Lecture 2 | In this lecture, Dr. Peikoff explores the broader meaning of cognitive integration as it relates to thinking. He describes the role of integration throughout the stages of cognition with special attention to how we integrate our generalizations and higher order thinking. Focusing on the hierarchy of knowledge, he further identifies the way that our knowledge needs to have integration both in the vertical and horizontal directions. Using examples, he works through reductions of ideas to determine which is most fundamental. |
| Lecture 3 | This lecture identifies and describes the process of thinking in essentials. It explores what it means for something to be essential and how one determines that for any given idea. Dr. Peikoff illustrates the key ideas by working through examples of how to determine the essence of a person, a philosophy, or an argument. |
| Lecture 4 | Q&A Session |
| Lecture 5 | This lecture explains and illustrates what it means to think in principle. Dr. Peikoff shows how we arrive at principles and then how we apply them when thinking about other topics. He describes the four key stages of thinking in principle on any topic and illustrates these with many examples and in contrast to thinking in essentials. |
| Lecture 6 | Dr. Peikoff discusses what it means to be certain about a topic and illustrates the ways that certainty is the result of the earlier methods he analyzed in the course. He shows what contextual knowledge is, how it guides us in determining the state of our certainty, and how we specify our context as a means of reaching certainty. The lecture reviews the four areas that have proven the most difficult for students to grasp the Objectivist position on certainty. |
| Lecture 7 | Dr. Peikoff reviews the differences between the thinking tools he described in earlier lectures and the issues that arise in writing. He highlights eight issues that arise only when one is writing and not just thinking about a topic. Using examples submitted by students in the course, he concretizes the application of his guidance to real letters to the editor. |
| Lecture 8 | Q&A Session |