All recorded lectures of Leonard Peikoff are to become available here.
Thank you for this.
Peikoff doesn’t look so great. =\
I got to attend this lecture Certainty in person on 7 July 1992. That was part of a series of lectures he delivered at a conference in Williamsburg, VA. In the early 70’s, I had attended a recorded series of lectures he had made on history of modern philosophy. In ’77 I had attended the recording-series of his ’76 lectures “The Philosophy of Objectivism.” I learned from and was profitably stimulated by all those lectures.
I’m overwhelmingly a reading-and-writing sort of person myself. I gather that much of this recorded lecture material of Peikoff’s was never worked up into papers or books, and anyway for many other people, recorded lectures are a better way for them to learn than by reading, especially given their life circumstances.
So it’s nice so many of these compositions were recorded and preserved and are becoming widely available. Nice too, on part of the personal level, that a trace of Peikoff’s personality stays on in these recordings. But of course, for Peikoff, as for Rand or me, the most deeply personal are the ideas, and these are our communion with minds deceased long before our start.
I just wish he hadn’t appeared on Fox News suggesting pancaking Iran was a viable option to use fear to keep the rest of the Islamic Terrorists and their backers off America and the West. It reminded me of the plans they had with the superweapon in Atlas Shrugged or the Death Star. ‘Fear will keep the systems in line. Fear of this battlestation.’ That was the first clip I found of Mr. Peikoff when I looked on YouTube and it wasn’t a good one.
I’m looking forward to listening to the one you’ve posted today to hear a thinker at their best.
Leonard Peikoff’s lectures in the early '70’s on the history of philosophy are HERE.