Leonard Peikoff

Leonard Peikoff (born 1933) is an Objectivist philosopher

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• A: "Your objection to the self-evident has no validity. There is no such thing as disagreement. People agree about everything."
  B: "That’s absurd; people disagree constantly, and about all kinds of things."
  A: "How can they? There’s nothing to disagree about; no subject matter. After all, nothing exists."
  B: "Nonsense. All kinds of things exist, you know that as well as I do."
  A: "That’s one. You must accept the existence axiom, even to utter the term “disagreement.” But to continue, I still maintain that disagreement is unreal. How can people disagree when they are unconscious beings who are unable to hold any ideas at all?"
  B: "Of course people hold ideas. They are conscious beings. You know that."
  A: "There’s another axiom, but even so, why is disagreement about axioms a problem? Why should it suggest that one or more of the parties is mistaken? Perhaps all of the people who disagree about the very same point are equally, objectively right."
  B: "That’s impossible. If two ideas contradict each other, they can’t both be right. Contradictions can’t exist in reality. After all, A is A."
  Existence, consciousness, identity are presupposed by every statement and by every concept, including that of "disagreement." … In the act of voicing his objection, therefore, the objector has conceded the case. In any act of challenging or denying the three axioms, a man reaffirms them, no matter what the particular content of this challenge. The axioms are invulnerable.
  The opponents of these axioms pose as defenders of truth, but it is only a pose. Their attack on the self-evident amounts to the charge. "Your belief in an idea doesn't necessarily make it true; you must prove it, because facts are what they are independent of your beliefs." Every element of this charge relies on the very axioms that these people are questioning and supposedly setting aside.
  • Objectivism : The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1993)

• To save the world is the simplest thing in the world. All one has to do is think.
  • Epigram at Peikoff's personal web site

• Now, the United States’ response, the western response to this is a continuation of the appeasement that was started back in the ’50s with Eisenhower when Iran seized western oil companies. The Americans, the British, and the Israelis, as I remember, launched an attack to try to reclaim it and — or at least the British and the Israelis did and Eisenhower vetoed it.
  • On Middle East history and American foreign policy, in What do you think of the plan for a mosque in New York City near Ground Zero? (28 June 2010) - Transcript

• Now if you ask me, in conclusion, “Well, what, then should properly be done?” Obviously war, but I mean in regard to this issue I would say: Any way possible permission should be refused and if they go ahead and build it, the government should bomb it out of existence, evacuating it first, with no compensation to any of the property owners involved in this monstrosity.
  • What do you think of the plan for a mosque in New York City near Ground Zero? (28 June 2010)

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• I will not vote for any Republican until the party repudiates its affiliation with Christianity.

• The unphilosophical majority among men are the ones most helplessly dependent on their era's dominant ideas. In times of crises these men need the guidance of some kind of theory; but, being unfamiliar with the field of ideas, they do not know that alternatives to the popular theories are possible. They know only what they have always been taught.

• [The proud man] does not demand of himself the impossible, but he does demand every ounce of the possible. He refuses to rest content with a defective soul, shrugging in self-deprecation 'That's me.' He knows that that 'me' was created, and is alterable, by him.

• To those who oppose war, I ask: If not now, when? How many more corpses are necessary before this country should take action?

• Responsible parenthood involves decades devoted to the child's proper nurture. To sentence a woman to bear a child against her will is an unspeakable violation of her rights: her right to liberty (to the functions of her body), her right to the pursuit of happiness, and, sometimes, her right to life itself, even as a serf. Such a sentence represents the sacrifice of the actual to the potential, of a real human being to a piece of protoplasm, which has no life in the human sense of the term. It is sheer perversion of language for people who demand this sacrifice to call themselves 'right-to-lifers.'

Quotes about Peikoff

• Don’t let his manner deceive you. That skinny little guy with the comically high voice, and the pencil thin neck, is a potential mass murderer, whose followers are entirely capable of violence incited by his murderous "philosophy" – a philosophy that might be described as Bizarro "individualism," i.e. the complete opposite of everything that Rand – and any other individualist worthy of the name — ever stood for.
  • Justin Raimondo, in "Haters Go After the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’" (23 July 2010)

• What gets me is that this self-proclaimed "philosopher," and advocate of the "supremacy of reason," doesn’t even bother to get his facts straight: Peikoff’s ignorance of the history of the Middle East, and specifically Iran, is monumental – and he knows it. But history, knowledge, and facts are unimportant to him, as they are to all haters and the vicious demagogues who want to make use of them. If history won’t conform to Peikoff’s ideological delusions, he simply makes it up, to wit.
  • Justin Raimondo, in "Haters Go After the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’" (23 July 2010)

• According to Peikoff and his tiny clique of foaming-at-the-mouth followers, the killing of innocents is the only "moral" way to fight a war. Yes, you read that right: that’s what they believe. If the US goes to war, it must never take into account the innocent lives of bystanders, since, according to them, there can be no such category of persons.
  • Justin Raimondo, in "Haters Go After the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’" (23 July 2010)

• What makes Peikoff’s views and those of his "Objectivist" comrades even creepier is their pretense at "objectivity," "reason," and "logic." They worship at the shrine of an author whose early disciples called her "Mrs. Logic" – and yet they are so far from being logical that the distance can only be measured in lightyears. Indeed, there is an emotional ferment obvious in the tone and content of Peikoff’s diatribe, which originated as a podcast: you can hear the hatred bubbling up from the very depths of his being as he chokes out his prescription for mass death and massive rights violations. By his "logic," it would be "rational" to lock up every Muslim in a concentration camp, or – to save money – simply liquidate them, as the Soviets used to say. In the Peikoffian worldview, applied to the realm of military strategy, anything less than genocide is appeasement.
  • Justin Raimondo, in "Haters Go After the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’" (23 July 2010)

External links

• Leonard Peikoff's Official Home Page
• "The Philosophy of Objectivism", Peikoff's summary of Objectivism
• "End States That Sponsor Terrorism", originally published as a full-page advertisement in the New York Times
• American Writers: Ayn Rand at C-SPAN (2002) video with Peikoff starting at minute 55
• Peikoff On Abortion
• "American Versus Americans" WGBH
• Unofficial Index to Dr. Peikoff's Podcasts