Definitions 2: Doctrine of Concepts as the Principle Unit of Knowledge . This doctrine is expounded in Rand's Epistemological workshops:...

Definitions 1: The Doctrine of Immaculate Definitions. For Rand, the basic unit of human knowledge is the concept, which she defined as fo...

Definitions: Introduction. The heart and soul of Rand's Introduction to Objectivism Epistemology is the chapter on definitions. I have...

Relation of moral concepts to reality. Rand contended that the failure of "modern" philosophers to solve the "problem" ...

“Cato will become a more Objectivist organization."  - New president John Allison, via tweet by Arthur Zey.

Not.  Here's the number of US Government employees per capita in the last decade. The brief spike in 2010 was the temporary census h...

Universals, definitions, and morality. In the 1949 book Ideas Have Consequences , Richard Weaver advanced the following rather unusual argu...

Essences as "epistemological." Rand explains this rather odd juxtaposition of terms as follows: Let us note . . . the radical...

The ARI's Yaron Brook: “Unless Ayn Rand changes the direction of the world, we are doomed to suffer another dark ages...the next renais...

Natural kinds. Rand claimed to have solved the "problem of universals." But it is not clear that she even understood this problem...

"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand... " ...

The Problem of Universals. Rand wrote (in an oft-quoted passage here at ARCHN): To negate man's mind, it is the conceptual level of ...

Necessary validity of the senses. Objectivism has a rather strange doctrine which could be summed up as "the senses never err." P...

Objectivist Theory of Perception. When it comes to the issue of perception, Rand tries to have it both ways. She seeks to be a direct reali...

Fallacious Presumptions: The validity of knowledge depends on "proper" concept formation. Rand assumes that the "validity...

Fallacious Presumptions: Rand's implicit theory of mind. Although Rand never developed a complete theory of mind, an implicit theory of...

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

Fallacious Presumptions: over-emphasizing how one attains knowledge. In his book on logic, John Stuart Mill asserted the following: "...

Fallacious Presumptions: Active Consciousness.   In my last post, I discussed what I described as the primary fallacy behind the Objectivi...

Successful banker and Ayn Rand Institute board member John Allison IV  has been appointed as the acting head of Cato following a n ugly pub...