Rating: 
Summary: Ground-breaking book
Review: This is THE reference work on epistemology. Rand explains clearly how we derive concepts from reality and the conversation form of the book is very lively and enlightening. This is a must-have book for anyone interested in philosophy, period. A brillant account of human cognition. This book helped me understand the nature of concepts and how to apply this with real-life concepts.The criticisms about this book are shoddy, to say the least. I usually don't comment on what others say, but this is too silly to pass up. "Scott Ryan" says that Rand's ideas hold the theory of a priori knowledge, but that is patently false. He also says that negation and necessity would be hard to deal with, but that is not obvious at all. Negation, for example, is part of logical operations on concepts, and its differentia is reversing (negating) said concept. "A reader" says that we cannot use measurement-omission unless we know the concepts of length, colour, etc. But that is akin to saying that a baby needs to know what "identity" means before he acquires such. They are all perceptual characteristics which can be used implicitly.
| 
