Today’s world crisis is a frenzied oscillation in the ever-narrowing gap between the false alternatives that have chained man throughout history: mysticism vs. skepticism, mind vs. body, self-sacrifice vs. other-sacrifice, statism of the left vs. statism of the right. The grandfather of all these false alternatives is the intrinsic vs. the subjective—and Ayn Rand’s deepest contribution to philosophy is to cut through these false alternatives by grasping and defining the real alternative: a new concept of objectivity. This is the concept for which Objectivism is named.

These two lectures present and “chew” her concept of objectivity, integrating it with the primacy of existence, the law of identity, and free will, and contrasting it with the intrinsic and the subjective schools in the fields of epistemology, ethics, politics, art and economics.