Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #343117 in Books
• Published on: 1990-12-01
• Formats: Abridged, Audiobook, Box set, Illustrated, Large Print
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Customer Reviews

Ayn Rand is an amazingly lucid thinker.
Of all Ayn Rand's own expository works that I've yet read, this is the most well-organized. As always, she treats the subject matter with a level of lucidity that I only came to fully appreciate after reading the works of other philosophers. The degree of precision -- and concision -- with which she treats every important topic is simply astounding. Her ability to isolate the essentials of any issue is displayed brilliantly in this book. Her theory of concepts, and her entire philosophy, is groundbreaking.

There are those who would detract from her towering achievement based on the questionable behavior of a few of her "followers"; however, the behavior of individuals has no bearing on the validity of her ideas. I highly recommend this book.

Ground-breaking book
This is THE reference work on epistemology. Rand explains clearly how we derive concepts from reality and the conversation form of the book is very lively and enlightening. This is a must-have book for anyone interested in philosophy, period. A brillant account of human cognition. This book helped me understand the nature of concepts and how to apply this with real-life concepts.

The criticisms about this book are shoddy, to say the least. I usually don't comment on what others say, but this is too silly to pass up. "Scott Ryan" says that Rand's ideas hold the theory of a priori knowledge, but that is patently false. He also says that negation and necessity would be hard to deal with, but that is not obvious at all. Negation, for example, is part of logical operations on concepts, and its differentia is reversing (negating) said concept.

"A reader" says that we cannot use measurement-omission unless we know the concepts of length, colour, etc. But that is akin to saying that a baby needs to know what "identity" means before he acquires such. They are all perceptual characteristics which can be used implicitly.

Critics don't know what they are talking about
To the guy who says that "length" is question-begging : there is a difference between perception and conceptualization. A child cannot conceptualize the notion of length, he acquires it implicitly by observation. Then we conceptualize it. Anyone who cannot see that doesn't deserve to rate an Objectivist book.