[Lecture Two] Unity in Epistemology and Ethics
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 1 hour, 42 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 demonstrates that seemingly opposite fields of human knowledge—history which looks backwards at what was and philosophy which discusses what should be—actually depend on each other in crucial ways. Through extended application of the spiral approach to knowledge, he concretizes this with examples from multiple branches of philosophy.
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 is it convincing that either philosophy or history had to come first as a field of knowledge? |
| How is it proper to say that history is the source of philosophic integrations? |
| What is the difference between the implicit and explicit understanding of a philosophic principle? |
| Explain the spiral theory of knowledge as it applies to the priority of history or philosophy. |
| How does the philosophic validation of a rational politics depend on history? |
| Indicate some of the ways that other abstract aspects of philosophy depend on history. |
| How does one come to the conclusion that reason is man’s basic means of survival? |
| Why did Rand hold that she could only formulate her philosophy after the Industrial Revolution? |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 1:25:16 | Related to an answer to an answer to that, it seems that the past view that all concepts are open-ended and philosophy, being a concept, is always open-ended and that what was there before can’t be contradicted by what came after. |
| 1:26:10 | Would you say that the most defensible or practical use of deductive logic would be to serve as a means to essentialize and reprise the conclusions of an inductively arrived at argument or set of conclusions and that, rather than being a tool of rationalism, it can practically serve as a means to keep the conclusions in mind in essentials, so that if you properly integrated it, it allows you to get access to the chewing that you’ve already done. |
| 1:30:05 | My question is relating to the lectures you gave some time ago on tape elucidating Objectivism. And in that you talked a lot about the rationalist and empiricist ways of thinking. And you related the fact that you discovered that most men tended toward rationalism where often women will tend to empiricism. Thinking of that, I was wondering if you could just speak for a few minutes on the empiricist error using the example of ethics that you used to talk about the rationalist error. |
| 1:35:10 | Ayn Rand said that axioms are implicit and self-evident in your very first perceptions, which would include therefore by implication causality, which is the corollary of identity. On the other hand you mentioned that it took centuries to fully grasp that. Now, is the principle here that to go from the implicit to the explicit take a great deal of additional inductive observation other than your first perceptions? |
| 1:38:16 | Could you expand on what you said yesterday about what it means to grasp an item of knowledge fully? For instance, if we take a simpler item of knowledge, say, “the leaves on that tree are green.” It’s close to the perceptual level, and yet it does relate to a lot of scientific knowledge… |