Based on a series of lectures by Leonard Peikoff and edited by Marlene Trollope, Discovering Great Plays provides the ability to understand, judge, and savor the values offered by great drama. Listeners will discover plot-theme as the key to a play; see Antigone as a great heroine and Iago as the darkest villain in literature; learn about the Cornelian hero; see how Schiller’s “Grand Inquisitor” scene is the most dramatic and philosophic in all of theater; and discover Shaw’s brilliance in presenting the genius against society.

Plays discussed include: Antigone by Sophocles; Othello by Shakespeare; Le Cid by Corneille; Don Carlos by Schiller; An Enemy of the People by Ibsen; Saint Joan by Shaw; Monna Vanna by Maeterlinck, and Cyrano de Bergerac by Rostand.

This brilliantly conceived and well-organized book is based on a lecture course given by Dr. Leonard Peikoff in 1976, prepared with the help of Ayn Rand and entitled “The Philosophy of Objectivism.” Ayn Rand said of these lectures: “Until or unless I write a comprehensive treatise on my philosophy, Dr. Peikoff’s course is the only authorized presentation of the entire theoretical structure of objectivism—that is, the only one that I know to be fully accurate.”

As Rand’s designated heir and foremost interpreter, Peikoff here reveals both the abstract fundamentals of objectivism and its practical applications, covering topics from certainty to money, from logic to art. With much new material that Rand offered only in private conversations with Peikoff, these clear, cogent chapters illuminate objectivism and its creator with startling clarity.

Dr. Peikoff makes a compelling case for a rational system of education by contrasting three approaches to philosophy and the different educational alternatives they propose to replace our present system. He translates the usual abstract discussions in this field into material easily comprehensible to the listener. In the process, he defines a proper methodology and curriculum that will produce thinking high school graduates confident of their ability to achieve their goals.

In his groundbreaking and controversial book The DIM Hypothesis, Dr. Leonard Peikoff casts a penetrating new light on the process of human thought and thereby on Western culture and history.

In this far-reaching study, Peikoff identifies the three methods people use to integrate concrete data into a whole, as when connecting diverse experiments by a scientific theory, separate laws into a constitution, or single events into a story. The first method, in which data is integrated through rational means, he calls Integration. The second, which employs nonrational means, he calls Misintegration. The third is Disintegration–which is nihilism, the desire to tear things apart.

In The DIM Hypothesis Peikoff demonstrates the power of these three methods in shaping the West by using the categories to examine the culturally representative fields of literature, physics, education, and politics. His analysis illustrates how the historical trends in each field have been dominated by one of these three categories, not only today but during the whole progression of Western culture from its beginning in ancient Greece.

Extrapolating from the historical pattern he identifies, Peikoff concludes by explaining why the lights of the West are going out–and predicts the most likely future for the United States.