thoreauback

In her essay "The Missing Link" from THE AYN RAND LETTER, May 21, 1973, Miss Rand ended her discussion of "the concrete-bound, anti-conceptual mentality" with the following paragraph: "I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent. But a certain hypothesis has haunted me for years; I want to stress that it is only a hypothesis. There is an enormous breach of continuity between man and all other living species. The difference lies in the nature of man's consciousness, in its distinctive characteristic: his conceptual faculty. It is

Yes, I believe it is "ghend".... to get hold of, seize or grasp.

As a history teacher once told me…”The Greeks had a word for everything.” And, thank Zeus, they did. I became interested in word origins when I first began to try and understand “Intro. to Objectivist Epistemology”. I started with "epistemology" and found the Greek root "episteme", which my dictionary said meant "knowledge, understanding, from epistanai 'to stand upon', understand.": epi- 'upon' + histanai- 'to stand' + logy. Okay, but they also had another word for knowledge: "gnosis". Picking up the thread with the Romans, the Latin put co- in front of gnosis and it became “cognition”…