[Lecture One] Unity in Epistemology and Ethics
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 1 hour, 39 minutes
Course summary: In these four lectures, Dr. Peikoff explores the role of unity in the Objectivist philosophy. He explores how the perspective of unity helps to further illuminate different elements in the philosophy that might otherwise seem unconnected. He considers the connections between history and philosophy, the role of simultaneous differing definitions, and the virtue of integrity as an illustration of unity in human character. Read more »
In this lecture: In this lecture, Dr. Peikoff analyzes and illustrates the idea that all knowledge and everything in the universe is interrelated. He demonstrates that human cognition always features the processes of differentiation and integration, with a special emphasis on the crucial role of integration that leads to unity.
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.
| Why are differentiation and integration always required together in cognition? |
| What are the different integrations through the levels of knowledge? |
| Explain an original example of these different types of integrations. |
| What allows us to move from a single unity to a separate single unity at the other end of a process of integration? |
| How did the Greek idea of the “one in the many” apply to both physical and intellectual worlds? |
| What are the consequences of the modern philosophic sundering of the one and the many? |
| What is the key to the Objectivist view of unity? |
| Explain the metaphysical perspective on unity. |
| What does it mean to say that knowledge is inherently relational? |
| How does grasping one item of human knowledge imply grasping the totality? |
| Using an original example, reconstruct a sketch of how an ordinary item of knowledge shows the integrative nature of knowledge. |
| Does the ultimate integration of all knowledge require specific knowledge in a specific mind? |
| Why is reification such a temptation for rationalists? |
| What does it mean that there are no separate fields of knowledge, only cognition? |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 1:26:33 | Is the idea of entities or existents as individual things strictly an epistemological perspective of the universe in which metaphysically there is no separation, so that metaphysically there is not a many, and many is our perspective that enables us to grasp reality? |
| 1:30:20 | When you “draw a little square” and you work within the square, then you’ve got to reintegrate or connect it to the whole… would you agree that even the work you do within the square involves interrelating things outside the square, so that if you do it properly within the square you’re also connecting to other topics? |
| 1:32:47 | I have a question about the “plane being two hours late” example that you were using. I see how virtually every field of human knowledge implicitly, and some more explicitly, leads up to the existence of the plane and all that. But it doesn’t seem to me that every other discrete datum of human knowledge is necessarily implicit… for example that there’s a Mrs. Jones in Omaha. |
| 1:37:28 | One of the premises that you state is that “all that makes a fact possible is required in order to grasp that fact”… |