Reddit mentions of The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (The Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman Memorial Lectures Series)

> The fact that all concepts and abstractions ... are based in observation and reality...

Are you so sure about that purported "fact"? On what grounds? What I'm getting at is, that there's an implicit epistemic theory underlying that assumption, and it doesn't necessarily stand up to critical evaluation. Take a spin through Schopenhauer's On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. I think he makes a compelling case for supposing that our observations of reality are contingent on internal factors, and not vice versa.

> makes it so that you can't deny your senses.

Sure you can. People deny their senses all the time. "I misread that," is a simple example. And ultimately we can say that, if our scientific theories are correct, then our senses are as contingent on the sort of animals we are as they are on the impressions they receive. Jacob Bronowski has written an admirably concise corrective to naive sense literalism; check out The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination if you're interested.

But the important thing, from my perspective, is that Rand uses those axioms as a way of cutting through the Gordian knot of skeptical Pyrrhonism. She takes all of the problems of the long tradition of epistemic philosophy and claims to have resolved them by no more compelling a method than sheer fiat.