 Ayn Rand is best known for her novels, Atlas Shrugged in the Fountainhead and other works, fiction that she wrote, that defend the system of laissez-faire capitalism in her work. She shows that the businessmen are great creators. Creators, they're the ones who promote economic growth, prosperity, and civilization. And it's the government who interferes with them and tries to block them. And there are people who turn second raiders who don't like the business creators and envy them and try to reduce everything to their own level. They interfere with the creations of the great businessman. Of course, John Galt is the best known of these heroes. And she's also known, very much associated with this praise for laissez-faire capitalism. She's noted for her philosophy of ethical egoism. She wrote a collection of essays called The Virtue of Selfishness. Now, in ordinary language, selfishness is usually a bad word. Most people, if you say someone is selfish, it means something like, when all the tray of desserts is set out or plate of cookies, a person will grab all of them for himself and not leave any for other people. She didn't mean when she was praising selfishness to be defending selfishness in that sense. It wasn't that she thought people should behave in a boorish way. However, it isn't that she has the point of view of a character in one of P.G. Woodhouse's novel, who says to the famous Butler Jeeves, whenever anything comes up, I always ask myself one question, what's in it for me? It isn't that, isn't her point of view. But she's talking about egoism in the sense of each person should regulate his life as to what will advance his own well-being, what will preserve his own life. However, her view of ethics is one very much at variance with many things, most people believe in ordinary morality. For example, she holds that under laissez-faire capitalism, people who would not be able to live on their own efforts, say disabled people or people who were at mental problems, would receive private charity and there would be probably, since we'd be much more prosperous, there'd be much more scope for private charity. But she doesn't regard charitable giving even as voluntary kind as anything particularly ethically mandated or even praiseworthy. She just thinks people would do it since we tend to sympathize with one another. But her views here are quite at variance with what at least most people tend to believe, regardless of what they put in practice. But as I say, she's best known for this philosophy of ethical egoism and her defense of capitalism in her novels. But these views aren't what she regarded as the most philosophically fundamental. She thought these views, defense of capitalism and ethical egoism, were consequences of more fundamental principles. And what did she have in mind here? The underlying principle of her philosophy is best grasped if we look at the name of her philosophy, objectivism. What did she mean when she called her philosophy objectivism? By this name she meant that philosophy is concerned with the accurate grasp of existence with grasping reality. Now at first this might seem an odd principle to make your foundational principle not in the sense that we shouldn't try to grasp reality. But on the contrary, it seems odd in the sense that who, aside from a few skeptics, would deny that what we're trying to do in philosophy and all our intellectual activities is to grasp the truth. Who would we find people who say, well, I'm not interested in what reality is or what's true, what I just care about my own fantasy. That would seem on the surface at any rate to be a strange position. But Rand didn't see matters this way at all. In her view, she sees the entire history of philosophy as a battle between those philosophers who give primacy to existence and those who defend what she calls the primacy of consciousness. Now in order to see how her view is plausible, how this makes sense, we have to understand what she means by existence when she speaks of the primacy of existence. And what she meant by existence was primarily the physical world, the world that's out there. She didn't think that when people are born we immediately have a concept of a physical world in contrast with the mind. But we do immediately have the notion of something out there, something that's fixed, something that is not subject to alteration just by thinking about it. And she didn't deny that there was such a thing as consciousness. On the contrary, she affirmed it. But she thought that consciousness was not primary. When I say I'm thinking of something, my thought is directed outward toward reality. If I said, I'm thinking and you ask me, what are you thinking about? It wouldn't make sense to say, well I'm not thinking of anything, I'm just thinking. So what Rand held is that in thinking, I'm thinking of something. There's an object to my thought and the object would be something in the external world, something outside of my thought. Similarly, if I said I'm seeing something, another mental act, I have to be seeing something that's out there. It wouldn't make sense to say I'm just seeing, I'm not seeing anything, but I'm just seeing things. Now you might think, well what about can't we see or think about images in our mind rather than an external object. But in her view, images or mental content of similar sort would be secondary. An image could only come from something in the external world. So what's there externally in the world is primary. So she thought then to sum up that the mental is not primary, the mental exists, but it's directed outward. The mind is not composed of some separate spiritual substance. Some people are called dualists, say there's both matter and mind. She didn't think that the mind was some sort of independently existing entity that was composed of a different substance, that's different type of ontological substance from the rest of reality. She thought there were minds, but they're not composed of some sort of mental substance. So given these views, she rejected idealism, which is the philosophical doctrine held by Bishop George Barkley in the 18th century, that only mind exists, Barkley held. There was no such thing as matter, there were just ideas and acts of thought. So she rejected that. And she also rejects the notion of a separately existing realm of universals. Now to understand what her view is here, we have to get what is a universal. Well suppose I'm looking at, I can consider various red objects. I'm looking at a red pencil or a red wall or red brick. I can say what does, do all these objects have in common? The property, like redness, you can say an adjective, redness. Now there are some philosophers who held that aside from these individual entities that have the redness, redness itself exists apart from these entities. We can talk of the red itself, not just red things. And she rejected that view. She said there are no independently existing universals. We find just properties or hell or in objects. Now given this way of looking at things, it's not surprising that she condemned Plato. It was the great Greek philosophy because he held, one of his primary doctrines, his famous theory of forms where he accepted this view that universals exist separately from various entities that have them. And he not only accepted independent universals in the sense of independently existing properties. He thought, although his view varies at various times in his dialogues, that all entities were really copies of some sort of other world that consisted of ideal properties or ideal objects. So we could say existing tables, kind of a table I can see in front of me right now, are really just a copy of the ideal or perfect table. In turn, these forms or universals were unified in some kind of system. There is a supreme form, universal form of the good that really was the ultimate principle underlying this set of forms. So Rand rejected that view and she held that when Plato advanced it, he was really succumbing to irrationalism. He was rejecting reason because to her reason is something that must work from concepts that we obtain through the senses. But Plato claimed that we could have a direct knowledge, not a sensory knowledge, but a direct knowledge of the world of these universals that we wouldn't grasp through sensory means. She regards this as a type of irrationalism and she felt that Plato had inaugurated a whole tradition of philosophy, a rationalism in this kind and that this had serious effects on the whole subsequent history of philosophy. The great mathematician philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in his process in reality, 1929, said that the history of philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. So if you accept that account, then Rand's view would have a consequence that a great deal of a history of philosophy is wrong. Now what I'm trying to do now is just give you an overview of Rand's entire system and we're going to concentrate in some of the lecture today a bit more on the metaphysics and epistemology, but I should say what I'm trying to do now is just give you an overview of her thought. Now, Plato's main enemy, and in Rand's view, the source of a good tradition in philosophy, which is opposed to this bad platonic irrationalist view, was Aristotle. Although there are residues of Platonism in Aristotle's thought, he rejected the independently existing world of forms. He thought universals just exist in objects. So Aristotle will say, go back to our earlier example of the red pencil, the red brick, the red wall. He would say, well, there are these objects that are red, but there's no such thing as redness that exists apart from these objects. Now Rand's view of universals we'll see later isn't the same as Aristotle, but she thought this was definitely a step in the right direction. Now one further very important point about Rand's thought is as you will have gathered already from my mentioning that she condemned Plato for mysticism, she regarded religion and belief in God very negatively. Her philosophy is very firmly based, or has one of its key principles, atheism, a rejection of existence of God, and why does she reject God? Well, you can see already why she would be led to this position where she said about the primacy of existence in the sense taking the physical world as primary to consciousness. Now if God exists, at least God has taken in the traditional sense, God is the spiritual substance who created the world, as we Genesis 1-1, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. So if you accept belief in God in this way, you would be saying that the existence, the world that's given to us in the senses, the physical world depends on consciousness, namely God's consciousness, and this violates the fundamental principle of her system. Now despite her atheism, though she takes a surprisingly favorable view of St. Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval philosophy, they usually consider the greatest philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church. This is surprising at first because Aquinas not only believed in God, he thought that he could show, he could prove by reason that God exists. Now of course she rejected Aquinas's proofs for existence of God, but she thought that Aquinas had developed the tradition of Aristotle much further in certain of his work, such as his work on the emotions and on various other topics. He had extended Aristotle's thought and in reviving Aristotle, he broke with the Platonism of the earlier Middle Ages. Now there's some authorities on Aquinas who think that Aquinas was pretty much, retained much of Platonism, but she didn't accept that interpretation. And Rand and the philosophies in her tradition, her followers such as Leonard Peacock, held the view that this revived Aristotelianism of Aquinas led to the Italian Renaissance, that the Italian Renaissance was fundamentally Aristotelian. This is a very controversial view. There are historians such as Ernst Kassir, a great German historian of philosophy who thought the Italian Renaissance was primarily Platonic, but she didn't accept that view. And there are other historians such as Paul Oscar Christeller who hold the same view as she did, that Aristotelianism was very important in the Renaissance. Now another philosopher who came in in the, in the 16th or like 17th century, that she thinks very much as a bad guy was Descartes, René Descartes, the founder of so-called Cartesian tradition. Cartesian is based on Descartes' name. So what, why did she view Descartes as an enemy? You see, in her history of philosophy, it's really a struggle between good guys and bad guys. You know, she was an excellent novelist and she knew how to tell a good story, so she can make the history of philosophy seem to be very much into a battle of good and bad people. So she makes it very interesting. Now Descartes in his thinking said, he wanted in famous meditation, said he wanted to try to doubt anything that could possibly be doubted. So after this method of doubt was applied, what was he left with? Well, his own thinking, he said, he can't doubt that he thinks and if he's thinking then he exists, so he can't doubt that he exists. Now Rand rejected this starting point, not of course because she doubted that people thought or existed, but she said, if this is what her father's called an inside-out philosophy, you're starting with your own consciousness or thinking and then saying, how can I proceed from that to prove the existence of the external world? So from her part of you, this is the wrong way to go. What you're supposed to do is start with the world out there and that's primary. Existence exists, remember is the fundamental slogan, so we don't start with trying to think up what's in our consciousness, go from what's in our consciousness to what's really out there. Now, we now come to the main villain in the entire history of philosophy and this in her view was Immanuel Kant. Now, why did she have such a negative view of Kant? Well, as she interpreted Kant, Kant thought that we don't perceive reality as it is in itself. On the contrary, the mind has a certain set of categories that it uses to construct reality. So what we perceive is what Kant called the phenomenal world, the world as it appears to us in Rand's view this amounts to saying that the mind makes up reality. So this is worse than Descartes because Descartes in her view was just saying we're starting with the mind, how do we get from the mind to the real world. Kant was saying the mind makes up the real world. So this in her view is much worse and she thinks of Kant and his successors such as Hegel and Nietzsche is inaugurating modern irrationalism that they had the view that really the mind is making up the world. And one of the fundamental points in Rand's entire thought is that ideas about metaphysics study of what the ultimate foundations of existence and epistemology, the theory of knowledge have consequences for practical affair for history. Really these are the metaphysical and epistemology the most fundamental determinants of history. So in the work of one of her followers Leonard Peacock who's her literary air called ominous parallels, Peacock argues that Kant's philosophy led ultimately to the Nazis because the Nazis rejected reason and thought really they could impose their will on reality, but impose their fantasies of racial domination on reality and in Rand's view this ultimately stems from a Kantian approach. I should mention just as interesting when this book by Peacock first appeared I did a very critical review of it and it's got me into quite a bit of trouble with the supporters of Rand. I'm still rather inclined to think better of the book than I did when I wrote the review although I still have problems with it but this is a view that the book you should read the book if you can because it shows how important Rand thinks ideas about metaphysics and epistemology are in their practical significance. Now again continuing this overview Rand's philosophy has distinctive doctrines in epistemology as well as in metaphysics. If our aim in philosophy is to grasp the world as it actually exists, the real world out there, according to Rand the way to do this is the world that we have to get all our concepts by abstraction from the senses. So according to Rand the mind begins as a blank slate in the Latin phrase that John Locke used the mind as a tabula rasa blank slate. We don't have in her view innate ideas or instincts. It variants here with certain views in modern biology and psychology but that's her view. We don't have innate ideas or instincts and when we say the senses perceive things say before we have ideas or concepts the senses can perceive similarities and differences in things. Let's go back to our example. We're looking at red pencil, red brick, red wall and say let's imagine before we have the color concept we don't have the idea of red, we can see these red objects probably be very young if we don't have the color concepts yet. So in Rand the senses can grasp what the similarities and differences of these objects are and the senses will be able to see what they have in common, namely their color and then the mind can put aside the differences and get the similarity, namely the red color and then the mind would get a concept of red. Now once you've gotten some concepts you can combine them and get a very elaborate system of concepts built up and very highly structured but according to her all the concepts have to really come from the senses. We start with the sensory concepts. If there's a concept that you have, some idea you have that can't be traced ultimately to the senses Rand thinks this is a meaningless concept so all properly formed concepts have to be abstracted from the senses not necessarily immediately but you have to be able to trace them back to sense perception in her view. Now also the aim in philosophy is to respond adequately to reality this has definite consequences for ethics as well. Now in Rand's view ethics is really based on biology in this sense that man is different from other animals survived by instinct they've been built by evolution in a certain way to respond in various ways to things they're likely to come across so they instinctively know how to act in various situations but Rand remember in her view has no instinct so human beings have to rely on reason in order to survive. So given this fact that we have to rely on reason in order to survive she thinks that this gives us the purpose of ethics and the standard of ethics that each person is to use reason to secure his own survival as a reasoning being. So because we have no instincts we have to use reason in order to survive and this gives us the purpose of ethics. Now if a man wants to survive he has to how can he do that? Well one thing he has to do in order to survive is to establish a political system based on recognition of individual rights and particularly recognition of property rights and he also has to establish a system of laissez-faire capitalism because this is the only economic system that will enable human beings to attain prosperity and promote their own survival. So here her views on economics are very similar to those of Ludwig von Mises whom she admired. She didn't like Mises philosophy all that much but she did think highly of his economics and just as Mises does she stresses that it's through social cooperation through the free market is how human beings can attain prosperity. We don't have to fight each other. There's no basic conflicts between people but we can cooperate. There's harmony of interests among people that's promoted if we have free market and if we have a free market recognition of individual rights then in her view there's only a very limited role for government. Government really exists for protection and justice and defense and there is she there's just we don't have as we do today government that redistributes well government is strictly limited however she didn't accept and she explicitly rejected the view held by Murray Rothbard that defense and protection justice can be handled by the market as well. She was a monarchist not an anarchist and she thought that in each territory there should just be one protection agency. She didn't favor competing with protection agencies. Now this completes the overview that I want to give of Rand's philosophy and what I want to do now and will continue in the next lecture is to go into more details about Rand's metaphysics and epistemology and look at how sound the arguments are that she advances for her views. The fundamental principle of objectivist metaphysics is the law of identity. A is A and connected together with this the law of non-contradiction nothing can be both A and not A at the same time in the same respect both I say I'm looking at a table now well the table is the table can't be the case that this table is both a table and not a table now that seems perfectly straight forward but in the way these principles are understood by most modern logician they're taken in a purely formal sense. What I mean by that is that logicians would say suppose you have some statement that has the form of both A and not A then you can reject that statement it's a malformed statement it violates log non-contradiction but laws of identity and non-contradiction don't tell you much by themselves they just say they don't really tell you what the nature of the world is they just say whatever the world is they conform these laws are true they're purely formal statements Objectivists understand the law of identity in a much more far-reaching way and to understand their views we have to introduce some philosophical and some distinctions that are very common in modern philosophy and here to get the Objectivist point of view the key essay to read is one by Leonard Peacoff called the analytic synthetic dichotomy if you're able to get a copy of Rand's book introduction to Objectivist epistemology in the second edition it's readily available in paperback I'm sorry I didn't want to put it on the reading list because it's not available online but you can find this inexpensively very easily so this book has Peacoff's essay and I think if possible everyone should try to read this it's a very important essay to get the Objectivist view of metaphysics so the philosopher is often distinguished between two kinds of statements analytic and synthetic an analytic statement is one that's true just because of the concepts of which it consists and a synthetic statement is one that isn't true just because of the concepts of which it consists it's one that you would know to be true or false just by testing just from experience now example will make this distinction clear let's consider the statement all bachelors are unmarried well I don't have to go out into the world and test this I don't have to say well all bachelors so far have turned out to be unmarried but maybe there's one I'll find that is married it's a part of definition of bachelor that bachelors unmarried so I'm not going to find anyone that's married there can't be married bachelors it's ruled out by definition but let's contrast that with the statement bachelors tend not to live as long as married men I don't know whether that's true but if it is true it would be something we could only find out by investigation it isn't part of the meaning of the terms in that proposition that married men I mean that bachelors tend not to live as long as married men that statement true there's nothing about bachelors that has anything that implies anything about how long bachelors tend to live but objectivists don't agree with this distinction they think there isn't a separate kind of statement that's made true just from the meaning of the terms as opposed to another kind of statement that's just learned to be true from experience they hold that there aren't any analytic statements there isn't a separate set of truths of meaning now related to the analytic synthetic distinction is another distinction between a priori and a posteriori truths a priori truth is one that can be known just by thinking about it an a posteriori truth is one that has to be known through experience as you can see this distinction between a priori and a posteriori is very closely related to the previous distinction analytic and synthetic in fact some philosophers line up these two distinctions exactly with each other they'll say all and only analytic statements are a priori and all and only synthetic statements are a posteriori I take again all bachelors or unmarried is something I could find out to be true just by thinking about it but bachelors tend to live not as long as married people is something I could only know to be true by investigation I couldn't know just by thinking about it so again some philosophers line up these two pairs of distinctions exactly the same way there are some propositions that are a priori you can know just by thinking about them but are synthetic are ones that are give you knowledge of the world but isn't just by because of the meaning of the terms in the statement so Kant thought there were propositions that are not analytic not true just because of the meaning of the term but nevertheless you could know to be true just by thinking about them so that's a very controversial view now the objectivists as you would expect reject the a priori because they say all truths come from experience all our concepts come from experience so there aren't any a priori truths now philosophers often make a third distinction and this is one between necessary and contingent truths now a necessary truth is one that couldn't have been otherwise whereas a contingent truth is one that could have been otherwise in this distinction often but not all philosophers lines up with the other two distinctions between analytic and synthetic and a priori, a posteriori let me give you an example let's go back to our now happening example bachelors are unmarried well this couldn't possibly be false we couldn't find a situation which we come across a married bachelor as long as we keep the meaning of the term the term concept it isn't that they're in the actual world the world we're living in bachelors are unmarried where in science fiction world in which bachelors are married it's just there's no possible situation no possible world in which bachelors are married so it's a necessary truth that bachelors are unmarried but suppose we take this statement I'm now giving a lecture well that seems contingent I imagine circumstances which I'm not giving this lecture suppose I just decided I don't want to give a lecture so it's contingent I wouldn't be giving one it's contingent that I'm giving the lecture now you would probably expect given the way I explained how the objectivists reject the distinction between analytic, synthetic and also reject a priori, a posteriori they would also reject necessary propositions between necessary and contingent and they largely do but the way that they do this is surprising you would expect them to say there aren't any necessary propositions and this in fact is exactly the path taken by the great century philosopher W. V. O. Quine who rejected analytic statements and also a priori statement he also said there aren't any necessary statements but the objectivists don't take this path on the contrary they hold that aside from human choices everything else in the world is necessary so everything that exists in the world necessarily exists with all its properties so for objectivists all of the properties of an entity are part of its essence they're necessary properties so suppose we find that light travels at approximately 186,000 miles per second then in their view it's part of the definition of light that it travel at that speed there's no possible world in which light travels at a different speed this is a defining characteristic of light so the objectivist view is that all of an object's properties hold of necessity and objects properties include its causal properties suppose we say the earth has a causal property of being able to attract certain objects to it by gravitation this is also an essential property it's one that holds of necessity so all the properties including its causal properties are necessary properties now a further claim they make is that nothing can come into existence without a cause something can't just pop into existence they take that to be a violation of the law of identity also so we can see this if they hold these two doctrines that existence without a cause and all an object's properties aren't necessary then this has a consequence well what about the ultimate constituents of the world suppose we say certain things are caused by other things then we get to things that don't have a cause both we just got the ultimate constituents of things then what we say about them well since they don't have a cause they can't come into existence so therefore they've existed eternally the ultimate constituents of things have existed eternally and further it's necessary that they have all their properties necessarily so in the object's view there have been another set of ultimate constituents so in the next lecture we'll continue going into more detail about Rand's metaphysics and epistemology and we'll try to go over some of the arguments that see how valid some of the arguments are that she advanced for her abuse