Dr. Leonard Peikoff is a Canadian American academic and Objectivist. He’s also a famous philosophy professor and celebrated nationally syndicated radio talk show host.

 

He was a close colleague of Ayn Rand, who appointed him as her heir upon her death. Subsequently, he was one of the co-founders of the Ayn Rand Institute in 1985 and has written several philosophy books.

 

Early Life

 

Leonard Peikoff was born in Manitoba, Canada, on October 15, 1933. His father was a prominent surgeon; before marriage, his mother led a band in Western Canada.

 

As a teenager, he had the good luck of being invited to the home of Ayn Rand, a famous novelist and Objectivist philosopher, an encounter that changed the course of his life. Little did he realize that this singular event would be the spark that fanned the flame of a deep friendship and professional collaboration that would endure until her untimely death in 1982.

 

Peikoff returned to his native Canada to finish his pre-med program at the University of Manitoba. But every six months, he traveled to New York to visit Rand. Peikoff was attracted to Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism because he identified with its view “…of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

 

Academic Career

 

In 1953, he transferred to New York University to pursue a degree in philosophy. He studied under Sidney Hook at NYU until he earned his doctorate in 1964. While earning his degree, Peikoff taught philosophy at Hunter College, Long Island University, New York University, the University of Denver, and the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, between 1957 and 1973.

 

Peikoff’s work on The Ominous Parallels took him across the country, lecturing and teaching courses on Ayn Rand’s philosophy, which were recorded and replayed to groups of students in more than 100 cities around the U.S., Canada, and Europe. In addition, he frequently spoke at financial conferences about the philosophical basis of capitalism.

 

He has lectured on Objectivism to audiences worldwide to live audiences and through audio recordings of his courses for decades. Rand endorsed his 1976 course on the entire theoretical structure of Objectivism, which later became the underpinnings of his book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991).

 

The DIM Hypothesis

 

Between 2004 and 2012, Peikoff dedicated himself to authoring “The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out.” The book categorizes three methods of information integration, the process used to correlate data to create an interconnected whole, through disintegration, integration, and misintegration, thus DIM. He illustrates the effects of the three in the West’s past and forecasts for America’s future.

 

Dr. Leonard Peikoff is still writing, lecturing, and teaching, and it appears that he’ll continue doing so until his death, hopefully in the very distant future.