If somebody is going to try to paste a person's view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. Don't give me Ayn Rand.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge. By what conduit do we know what we know?
But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?
Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn't believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn't prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.
My books are based on observing others, not myself.
When I was younger, I was drawn to Ayn Rand books and other works of fiction celebrating individualism.
'Orthodoxy' is the seminal book of ideas in my life. That book I've read more than any other book. It's the spinal column that leads up to my brain and informs the way I think. Flannery O'Connor is my favorite American writer.
To attempt this would be like seeing without eyes or directing the gaze of knowledge behind one's own eye. Modern science can acknowledge no other than this epistemological stand-point.
I analyze religious knowledge and consciousness.
I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.