For the New Christian Intellectual

The Objectivism Book Study met through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. Our reading this week was: Ch. 6 – Reason as an attribute of the individual 198 to 205 We begin our discussion this week by looking at a thread Jacob Brunton posted to Twitter : “Conservatives will rightly scoff at the Communist notion of pathetically making yourself and y...

The Objectivism Book Study is meeting through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. Welcome to the Objectivism Book Study (Week 18) — Nature of Man. Our reading this week was: Ch. 6 – Man (Introduction) 187-188 Ch. 6 – Living organisms as goal-directed and conditional 189-193 Ch. 6 – Reason as man’s basic means of survival 193-197 The reading this...

The Objectivism Book Study met through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. Welcome to the Objectivism Book Study (Week 17) — Certainty and Context. Our reading this week was: Ch. 5 – Certainty as contextual 171-181 Ch. 5 – Mysticism and skepticism as denials of reason 182-186 Is science nothing but a progression of exploded theories? Is all knowl...

The Objectivism Book Study met through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. Welcome to the Objectivism Book Study (Week 16) — Reason vs. the Alternatives. Our reading this week was: Ch. 5 – Reason as man’s only means of knowledge 159-162 Ch. 5 – The arbitrary as neither true nor false 163-171 Ayn Rand was once asked if she could summarize the esse...

The Objectivism Book Study met through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. Welcome to Objectivism Book Study (Week 15) — Reason and Emotion. “Philosophy is the science that defines the proper relationship between a volitional consciousness and reality.” -Leonard Peikoff (Induction in Physics and Philosophy, session 6) This week we are discussing the followin...

The Objectivism Book Study is meeting through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. Epistemology is the hill on which our civilization lives or dies. Accurate concepts and principles will make the world a better place. For the New Christian Intellectual is a podcast and online project devoted to explaining this claim and helping Christians learn to think philo...

The Objectivism Book Study met through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. In this session we continued exploring the Objectivist understanding of essences and universals. We proposed two ways Christians might view Leonard Peikoff’s (and Ayn Rand’s) conclusions about these topics. Jacob Brunton proposed that Christians could adopt Peikoff’s...

The Objectivism Book Study met through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. In this session we explored the Objectivist understanding of the hierarchical nature of knowledge. The reading was: Ch. 4 – Knowledge as hierarchical 129-141 “Concepts have a hierarchical structure… The higher, more complex abstractions are derived from the simpler, basic ones (...

The Objectivism Book Study is meeting through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. Welcome to the Objectivism Book Study (Week 12B) — Similarity​. ==> Click here for the full discussion on YouTube In this video we explore what Objectivists mean by “similarity,” an idea that is important within their theory of concepts. Differences in our unders...

The Objectivism Book Study is meeting through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. Welcome to the Objectivism Book Study (Week 12) — Context. ​This week, the reading was: Ch. 4 – Objectivity as volitional adherence to reality 116-120 Ch. 4 – Knowledge as contextual 121-128 ==> Click here for the full discussion on YouTube “The concept of...

The Objectivism Book Study is meeting through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. Welcome to the Objectivism Book Study (Week 11) — Objectivity. This week, the reading was: Ch. 4 – Objectivity (Introduction) 110 Ch. 4 – Concepts as objective 111-116 ==> Click here for the full discussion on YouTube “We need to learn not only when (and when not...

The Objectivism Book Study is meeting through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. Welcome to the Objectivism Book Study (Week 10) — Definitions. This week, the reading was: Ch. 3 – Definition as the final step in concept-formation 96-104 Ch. 3 – Concepts as devices to achieve unit-economy 105-109 Why are we doing this discussion series? Because t...

The Objectivism Book Study is meeting through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. This week, the reading was: Ch. 3 – Concept-formation as a mathematical process 81-90 Ch. 3 – Concepts of consciousness as involving measurement-omission 91-95 What are you doing when you form a concept? Can you know (and can you show) that your ideas match reality,...

The Objectivism Book Study is meeting through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. “The investigation of the meaning of words is the beginning of education.” – Antisthenes If that is true, then the completion of education is to understand not only the meanings of individual words, but also to understand how words function in human life—what they do, and...

The Objectivism Book Study is meeting through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. This week, the reading was: Ch. 2 – Human actions, mental and physical, as both caused and free (62-68) Ch. 2 – Volition as axiomatic (69-72) We are finishing out our discussion of chapter 2 (the anteroom of Epistemology). As with the reading last week, we found pla...

The Objectivism Book Study is meeting through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. This week the reading was: Ch. 2 – The perceptual level as the given 52-54 Ch. 2 – The primary choice as the choice to focus or not 55-62 “It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits...

The Objectivism Book Study is meeting through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. This week, the reading was: Ch. 2 – Sensory qualities as real, pg 44-47 Ch. 2 – Consciousness as possessing identity, pg 48-52 We are moving in Leonard Peikoff’s book toward the material on epistemology. We are still in the anteroom. To show what an Objectivist view...

The Objectivism Book Study is meeting through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. This week, the reading was: Ch. 2 – Sense perception and volition 37-38 Ch. 2 – The senses as necessarily valid 39-44 We look at common philosophical arguments that lead toward skepticism and relativism, such as: -Don’t our eyes deceive us when we see a bent stick in water, or...

The Objectivism Book Study is meeting through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. This week, the reading was: Ch. 1 – The metaphysically given as absolute 23-29 Ch. 1 – Idealism and materialism as the rejection of basic axioms 30-36 Listen to the podcast in the player below, or view the video here . Francis Bacon has a famous saying: Reading make...

The Objectivism Book Study is meeting through 2022 to study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. This is for anyone wanting to… -Get to know Christians defending individual rights and capitalism. -Sharpen skills in defending America’s unique principles. -Explore connections between Christianity and Ayn Rand’s ideas. Listen to the podcast in the player below, or view...

We invite you to check out the Objectivism Book Study, now available on YouTube and podcast. This is our series of in-depth philosophical interactions with Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand , by Leonard Peikoff. This is aimed toward anyone wanting to… -Get to know Christians defending individual rights and capitalism. -Sharpen skills in defending America’s unique principles. -Explore c...

“Man was forced to accept masochism as his ideal—under the threat that sadism was his only alternative,” wrote Ayn Rand. “This was the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind. This was the device by which dependence and suffering were perpetuated as fundamentals of life.” “The choice is not self-sacrifice or domination” (For the New Intellectual, 81). Ayn Ran...

“The code of rugged individualism was a social fact,” writes C. Bradley Thompson, “not some idealized myth.” “It began with a man, his axe, and his gun. American pioneers did not have medicare, medicaid, unemployment insurance, social security, food stamps, public housing, government schools, or Amtrak.” “Shockingly (at least to us in the 21st Century) they lived their lives free of meddling gover...

In the Americanism Book Study , we are discussing the unique set of ideas behind the original American way of government. The reading this session was from one of Ayn Rand’s workshops on ethics and politics. Rand applies her vision of a rights-based government to specific subtopics, including: -Is the consent of the governed the basis of government authority? -What power do we delegate to a...

Jacob Brunton commented on why some people have been attracted to the Alt-Right movement: “Given our current cultural atmosphere, where being a heterosexual, right-handed, white male is the epitome of evil, and that’s preached from every institution in western culture, you can kind of understand why some people have a knee-jerk reaction: Forget that! I’m not evil! That reaction c...