Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
May 21, 2025
Epistemology, the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy that defines the nature, means, and standards of knowledge.
Rationalism is the school that scorns sensory perception and constructs intellectual castles in the air. Empiricism is the school that scorns abstractions and demands that men hold their minds down to the animal level of unconceptualized, unintegrated sensing. Rationalism ultimately degenerates into mysticism, as in its ancient father: Plato. Empiricism ultimately degenerates into skepticism, as in its modern father: Hume.
epistemology has succumbed to the Kantian onslaught, leaving men to face the lethal false alternative of mysticism versus skepticism.
The mystics say that science is wrong — false in its conclusions and blasphemous in its contravention of the Bible or the Koran. The skeptics say that science is neither right nor wrong — that truth, falsehood, good, and evil are baseless “constructs” imposed by a “patriarchal power-structure.”
What is required is a theory that upholds both sensory perception and logic, a theory that shows how abstract, conceptual knowledge derives in a logical fashion from perceptual observation.
At the base of Rand’s view of reason is her new theory of how abstractions, i.e., concepts, are formed from perceptual observation. Concepts are the tools of reason, and it is by means of concepts that man stores and accesses his knowledge.
But even pre-scientifically, what is evident to anyone is that perception requires the active use of our senses to explore the world, gather information, and make discriminations.
An organism’s actions are adapted to securing its survival. Consciousness, like the heartbeat, is a biological activity that evolved because it promotes survival. But few philosophers in history have regarded consciousness that way.
The ability to abstract, conceptualize, and think is not only pro-survival, it is man’s basic means of survival.
Biologically, seeing is for moving, ideas are for doing, theory is for practice.
Pragmatism opposes principles on principle.
Materialism is the idea that there are no ideas.
The one-sentence, highly condensed overview is: consciousness is a living organism’s active process of perceiving reality to acquire the information required for its survival.
For the open mysticism of the medievals, these philosophers substituted Rationalism — the idea that the intellect can spin out truths on its own, without needing sensory data.
One must uphold the efficacy of the unaided individual mind. This means defending both the senses and reason. The remainder of this book is devoted to doing just that. I establish two fundamental points: 1) perception is the base of all knowledge; 2) valid concepts are formed from perception by an objective process.
Consciousness is a difference-detector.
Platonism pits the perceptual and conceptual levels against each other, opposing spirit to matter, mind to body, intellectuality to worldly concerns, theory to practice. For Platonists, man’s consciousness is split between mind and body — between a faculty directed toward a “World of Forms” (heaven, in effect) and a faculty dealing with this earth. Man is caught in an internal war between his “higher” and “lower” nature; Christianity took over and intensified this Platonic dichotomy, damning outright all things earthly.
As I have stressed, consciousness is a difference-detector. When a naïve, pre-conceptual child attends to two items, it is their differences, not their similarities, that will be prominent.
