The Ayn Rand lexicon: objectivism from A to Z - By Ayn Rand & Harry Binswanger Page 0,1

in order to found and edit The Objectivist Forum, and did not resume work on it until two years after her death. Consequently, she read only about 10 percent of the material.

I have endeavored to cull from the Objectivist corpus all the significant topics in philosophy and closely allied fields, such as psychology, economics, and intellectual history. The Lexicon, however, does not cover Ayn Rand’s fiction writings, except for those philosophical passages from her novels that were reprinted in her book For the New Intellectual. Material by authors other than Miss Rand is included only if she had given it an explicit public endorsement—as with Leonard Peikoff’s book The Ominous Parallels and his lecture course “The Philosophy of Objectivism”—or if it was originally published under her editorship in The Objectivist Neusletier, The Objectivist, or The Ayn Rand Letter. I have also made use of four Objectivist Forum articles that Miss Rand read and approved.

To keep the book to a manageable size, I have had to omit many passages which could have been included. I have sought to include under each heading only the essential passages, roughly proportioning the length of the entries to their scope and importance, within the limits of the amount of material available in the sources. The entry under Immanuel Kant, for instance, is as long as it is not merely because Miss Rand had so much to say about Kant’s philosophy, but because of his immense influence on the history of philosophy, and thus on history proper. Miss Rand regarded Kant as her chief philosophical antagonist. Nevertheless, I may have missed some passages that merit inclusion, and readers are invited to send me any such passages c/o New American Library for their possible inclusion in future editions. For some headings (e.g., KNOWLEDGE), I give only the term’s definition and rely on the cross-references to lead the reader to other topics for elaboration.

In accordance with Miss Rand’s wishes, I have included statements about other philosophies only in selected instances: on Aristotle (whose system is the closest to that of Objectivism), on Kant (whose system is the diametrical opposite of Objectivism), on Friedrich Nietzsche (whose views, though fundamentally opposed to Ayn Rand’s, are often taken to be similar), on John Stuart Mill (the philosophical father of today’s “conservatives”), and on some influential contemporary schools: Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, and Linguistic Analysis. Those interested in the Objectivist analysis of other philosophies may consult For the New Intellectual and The Ominous Parallels.

In a number of instances, I have used oral material from Leonard Peikoff’s tape-recorcfed lecture courses. Dr. Peikoff has edited these passages for this purpose. I have also included a few statements by Miss Rand from the question-and-answer periods following these lectures. Miss Rand’s answers, which were wholly extemporaneous, are presented virtually unedited.

In excerpting from written material, I have sought to minimize the clutter of ellipses and square brackets. Where I have excised material from within a continuous passage, I have, of course, used ellipses to indicate that deletion. But I have not used ellipses at the beginning or end of entire passages, even when I have made initial or terminal cuts. Thus, the reader is put on notice that, at the beginning of a passage, some words from the start of the original sentence may have been dropped. Likewise, at the end of a passage, sentences in the original may continue on beyond where they end here.

Square brackets are used to indicate my own interpolated words or introductory notes (except that I have retained the square brackets used by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, etc. to insert their own comments within a direct quotation from someone else). In a few instances, I have deleted italics, but as a rule they are as they appear in the original texts; in no case did I add italics.

Some entry headings appear in quotation marks. The quotes are used to indicate either a concept that Objectivism regards as invalid or obfuscatory (as with “COLLECTIVE RIGHTS”), or a term used in a new or special sense (as with “STOLEN CONCEPT,” FALLACY OF). The content of the entry should make clear which function, in a given case, these quotation marks serve.

Some explanation is necessary about the manner in which I have identified the sources of the passages quoted. The references include page numbers for both hardcover and paperback editions when possible (only paperback editions are currently available for Intruductiun to Objectivist Epistemology, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal). I have cited