More than any other Enlightenment thinker, John Locke was responsible for the creation of the United States. His thoughts on the nature of human knowledge, individual rights, and the sacred value of free thought against...
Could there have been a Romantic school of art if not for the ideas of Aristotle? In this course, Dr. Robert Mayhew addresses this intriguing question.
Plato, the first philosopher with a theory of esthetics, saw...
Aristotle is the father and chief defender of the view that the human mind can achieve a deep and rich understanding of the world in terms of fundamental principles derived ultimately from sense-perception. Aristotle’s theory...
The fourth century BC, the events after the defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, is often seen as the decline of the Greek world, a mere echo of a golden age. But...
The apex of classical culture is the intellectual revolution of fifth-century Athens: she was nothing less than the intellectual capital and the exemplar of the Greek world. The political context for this development was set...
Archaic Greece encompasses the three centuries prior to the ascent of classical Greek culture. As historian John David Lewis illustrates, it subsumes intellectual, artistic, and political achievements that are self-sufficient in their own right, but...
Concepts, though fundamental, are only tools—only means to an end. The end is the practical, productive, rational use of your mind to achieve your values, secure your survival, and enhance your life. That is the...
Available with Spanish subtitles!
¡Disponible con subtítulos en español!
Ayn Rand stated the theme of Atlas Shrugged as: “the role of the mind in man’s existence—and, as corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of...
In this collection of talks spanning more than a decade, Leonard Peikoff reflects on a wide range of topics of significant importance to his life, both personally and professionally. Several of these discussions are informal:...
Free, unregulated financial markets serve the vital function of providing capital to the producers. Yet, through the ages, banking and other financial activities have been viewed as corrupt and exploitative. From the money-changers of the...
Ayn Rand held that “philosophy is primarily epistemology,” the “science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of acquiring and validating knowledge.” This class surveys Rand’s “new approach to epistemology” — the most original...
No thinker has had a greater influence on philosophy in the last two centuries than Immanuel Kant. Building on his metaphysics and epistemology, Kant proposed an ethics that dispensed with the need for a divine...