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1. Atlas Shrugged
Lecture 1
Metaphysics and Epistemology

2. Overview of Rand’s Philosophy
• Ayn Rand is best known for her novels defending
capitalism and also for her defense of ethical
egoism, “the virtue of selfishness”. But these views
were not the basis of her philosophical system.
• She thought that they were the consequences of
more fundamental principles.

3. The Key Principle of Rand’s
Philosophy
• The underlying principle of her thought is best grasped
from the name of her philosophy, “Objectivism.”
• By this name, she meant to signify that her philosophy
had as its primary goal the accurate grasp of existence.
• At first, this seems an odd point to emphasize. Who,
aside from a few unusual figures, would deny that they
sought to attain truth?

4. Opposition to Subjectivism
• Rand did not see matters this way at all. In her
view, the history of philosophy can be seen as a
battle between those philosophers who give
primacy to existence and those who defend what
she calls “the primacy of consciousness”.
• To make her view of the history of philosophy
plausible, we have to grasp what she meant by
“existence”.

5. Enemies of Existence
• By “existence”, Rand meant primarily the physical world,
the world disclosed to the senses and studied by science.
• She did not deny the mental; to the contrary she affirmed
the existence of consciousness. But she did not believe in
a separate mental realm that exists apart from the
physical.
• She rejected idealism, a philosophy that claims that only
mind exists. She also rejected views that postulate a
separately existing realm of universals.

6. Heroes and Villains
• Given this way of looking at things, it isn’t surprising
that Rand condemned Plato. He thought that there was a
separately exiting world of Forms, and that the sensory
world was just an inferior copy of these forms.
• Rand takes this to be a denial of reality, and she
considers the Platonic tradition a key source of
irrationalism throughout the history of philosophy.
• She takes it to be a type of mysticism: there is insight to
gained superior to that gained through the senses.

7. Still More Heroes and Villains
• Despite her atheism, she surprisingly takes a favorable
view of Thomas Aquinas. He revived Aristotle’s
philosophy and broke with the Platonism of the earlier
Middle Ages. In her opinion, the revived Aristotelian
philosophy was principally responsible for the
Renaissance.
• Descartes is another “bad guy”, He began from his own
consciousness and thus rejected the primacy of
existence.

8. Heroes and Villains Continued
• Plato’s main enemy, and the source of the good tradition in
philosophy, was Aristotle. Although there are Platonic
residues in his thought, he emphasized knowledge gained
through the senses and denied the independent existence of a
world of universals.
• As the earlier critical reference to mysticism suggests, Rand
rejects belief in God. Atheism is a fundamental principle. If
God exists, then the physical world is controlled by God’s
mind. This rejects existence.

9. Kant and the Nazis
• A fundamental point of Objectivism, which has already been
suggested several times, is that philosophical ideas are not
merely of theoretical importance.
• To the contrary, ideas are the primary factor in human history,
and philosophical ideas are the most important.
• Thus, in Ominous Parallels, Leonard Peikoff traces the
growth of Nazism to Kant’s philosophy.

10. Ideas in Atlas
• We can see the importance that Rand gives
to ideas from the basic plot of Atlas
Shrugged.
• The whole novel revolves around the ideas
of the creators and inventers, like Galt and
Rearden, in a struggle against the
destructive ideas of Jim Taggart, Wesley
Mouch, Dr. Ferris, and Mr. Thompson.

11. Rand and Epistemology
• Rand’s philosophy has distinctive doctrines in
epistemology as well as metaphysics.
• The mind begins as a blank slate (tabula rasa) The senses
grasp similarities and differences among concrete entities.
• From these percepts, the mind acquires concepts through
a process of abstraction. These abstractions can be built
up into a highly complex and ramified system, but all true
concepts must ultimately stem from the senses. Those that
do not are meaningless.

12. Rand and Ethics
• If our aim in philosophy is to respond adequately
to reality, this has definite consequences for ethics.
• A reality-based ethics is based on human biology.
Man, unlike other animals, does not survive by
relying on instincts. He must use reason. The goal
and standard of ethics, for each person, is his own
survival.

13. Rand, Politics, and Economics
• If man wants to survive, he needs to establish a
political system that recognizes individual rights,
in particular property rights.
• Establishing such a political system is essential for
the functioning of the only productive economic
system, laissez-faire capitalism. The government
must be strictly limited to defense and justice.
However, anarchism is not a desirable alternative.
Within each territory, there should be only one
legitimate protection agency

14. Rand’s Metaphysics: The Law of
Identity
• With this overview completed, we will now look more
closely at Rand’s metaphysics and epistemology.
• The fundamental principle of Objectivist metaphysics is
the Law of Identity, A=A. Together with this is the
principle of Non-Contradiction, Nothing is both A and
not-A.
• Almost all logicians accept these laws, but in the non-
controversial sense they are purely formal laws. They
say that no proposition that has the form a and not-a is
acceptable

15. Galt on Identity
• In Galt’s radio broadcast, Part Three,
Chapter VII, Galt says:
• “Centuries ago, the man who was—no
matter what his errors—the greatest of your
philosophers [Aristotle], has stated the
formula defining the concept of existence
and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A
thing is itself.

16. Galt Continued
• You have never grasped the meaning of his
statement. I am here to complete it.
Existence is Identity, Consciousness is
Identification.”

17. Objectivism and Necessity
• For Objectivists, all of the properties of an entity
are part of its essence. If light travels at 186,000
miles per second, it must do so: this is a defining
characteristic of light. Their understanding of
A=A is all-embracing. The Law of Identity
requires that all of an object’s properties hold of
necessity.

18. The Nature of the Universe
• If an entity’s properties are necessary, its causal
properties are also necessary.
• Further,nothing can come into existence without a
cause.
• If this is so, the ultimate material constituents of the
world have existed eternally. No other set of
ultimate existents is conceivable. The set we
actually have necessarily exists.

19. • If an entity’s properties are necessary, its causal
properties are also necessary.
• Further,nothing can come into existence without a
cause.
• If this is so, the ultimate material constituents of the
world have existed eternally. No other set of
ultimate existents is conceivable. The set we
actually have necessarily exists.