Fallacious Presumptions: the facts upon which epistemology is based are discoverable through introspection. Early on in her Introduction to...

Introduction. Now we venture forth into the thorniest reaches of Rand's philosophy: the Objectivist Epistemology. Rand's epistemolo...

Innate components of religion. Objectivism considers religion a mere execrescence of irrationality, a product of wrong premises misintregra...

Sam Anderson, in a review of Anne Heller's biography of Rand, notes: "Eyewitnesses say that [Rand] never lost an argument." G...

Rand on rock music. While Rand was well known for being outspoken to the point of palpable rudeness, she could become, when she wanted to, ...

“Man’s survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don’t.” I will assume that Rand doesn't mean thi...

“Self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think.” It's not clear whether this is meant as a definition or as a statement of fact. Obje...

“[Intellectual appeasement] is an attempt to apologize for his intellectual concerns and to escape from the loneliness of a thinker by profe...

“The process of forming a concept is not complete until its constituent units have been integrated into a single mental unit by means of a s...

“Definitions preserve ... the logical order of their hierarchical interdependence.” This touches on the Objectivist contention that knowled...

“To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem.” It is not surprising that n...

“Reason is man’s only means of grasping reality and of acquiring knowledge.” The first difficulty we must confront is trying to entangle wha...

“Man’s values control his subconscious emotional mechanism that functions like a computer adding up his desires, his experiences, his fulfil...

“An emotion that clashes with your reason is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.” How on earth d...

The conscious mind “programs” the subconscious mind. Rand's view is that the conscious mind serves as a kind of gate keeper for what ge...

“Emotions are not tools of cognition.” Rand elaborates as follows: An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that...

Emotions are automatized value judgments. "Emotions are the result of your value judgments," Rand declared in her Playboy Intervie...

Human beings have no innate tendencies. Instead of providing evidence for this assertion, Rand and her followers merely provides a couple o...

Man is a being of self-made soul. Rand explains this assertion as follows : "The use or misuse of his cognitive faculty determines a m...

Introduction. What is the biggest problem with Ayn Rand? A fairly convincing argument could be made that Rand’s biggest problem was her lac...