This course will examine the most influential egoistic theories of tradition: the Sophists, Plato and Christianity, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Nietzsche. All of them, excluding Aristotle, hold that man is and/or should be a "drooling beast." All of them, including Aristotle, ground egoism in some variant of subjectivism. Altruism, the only historical alternative to egoism, also is grounded in subjectivism. Thus ethics has been a struggle of 

whims: those of self versus those of others. We will see how Objectivism's proof of life as the standard of value cuts through centuries of subjectivism to provide egoism with an objective base.