New ARU Courses on Logic, Epistemology with Dr. Binswanger

“Since man is not omniscient or infallible,” argued Rand in her essay “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” “you have to discover what you can claim as knowledge and how to prove the validity of your conclusions.” Because human life depends on knowledge, the science that deals with these issues – epistemology – is a crucial subject of study.

We are happy to announce two new Ayn Rand University courses on this subject led by Dr. Harry Binswanger: Objectivist Logic and ITOE (a seminar on Ayn Rand’s monograph Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology). Dr Binswanger, a member of ARI’s board of directors and the author of How We Know and The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, is one of the top experts on Rand’s philosophy.

Objectivist Logic will review “the three most important ideas of Aristotelian logic and then [focus] on the new principles of proper thinking developed by Ayn Rand.” It is a course for those interested in studying “the art of non-contradictory identification” in depth.

In a recent episode of New Ideal Live, asked about the course, Binswanger said:

There is so much rich content in what Ayn Rand was teaching us that was actually logic, such as the fallacies that she identified: the fallacy of the “stolen concept,” . . . and the fallacy of self-exclusion, and the fallacy of context-dropping.

In the ITOE seminar, students will systematically study the monograph that presents Rand’s theory of concepts and concept-formation. Binswanger explains that the goal of the course is “to get fully clear on what the theory is” and “why it was needed.” In New Ideal Live he elaborated on why ITOE is such an important book:

[The book] validates reason; she shows why reason is valid; she shows how it operates, how it relates to our contact with reality, which is sense perception, which is something that no philosopher – including Aristotle – was ever able to do.

Both courses start in April and end in September 2023. You can sign up as a student or an auditor for Objectivist Logic here, and for ITOE here.