Leonard Peikoff - After Rand's Death

After Rand's Death

Rand named Peikoff the legal heir to her estate. As the executor of Rand's will, Peikoff handles the copyrights to all of her works (with the exception of Anthem, which has passed into the public domain). He has supervised the editing and release of Rand's unpublished works in several volumes, including her letters, philosophical journals, and the fiction not published in her lifetime, and he has written forewords for all the current printings of her fiction. For several years, he continued Rand's tradition of lecturing annually at Boston's Ford Hall Forum, and his other lecture appearances have included an address to the cadets at West Point and another while cruising the Greek islands.

In 1985, Peikoff founded the Ayn Rand Institute. Peikoff revised his 1976 lecture course on Rand's ideas into book form as Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, published in 1991, the first comprehensive presentation of Objectivism. In the mid-1990s, Peikoff taught courses at the Ayn Rand Institute's Objectivist Graduate Center (which was later renamed the Objectivist Academic Center in 2000) along with Harry Binswanger and Peter Schwartz.

From 1995 through 1999, Peikoff hosted a nationally syndicated talk radio show focusing on philosophy and culture, leaving it to work on his next book. From February 2006 to June 2007, Peikoff posted an online Q and A of various questions relating to Objectivism that had been e-mailed to him, updating with a few more answers approximately every month. In August 2007 his website announced that this would be replaced with a podcast, which debuted on October 22, 2007, and has been released regularly ever since.

Peikoff's lectures or books have been utilized extensively in the works of Allan Gotthelf, Harry Binswanger, Andrew Bernstein and Tara Smith, writers who are associated with the Ayn Rand Institute, and also in works such as David Kelley's The Evidence of the Senses, George H. Smith's Atheism: The Case Against God, and the treatise, What Art Is: the Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand by Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kahmi, despite these authors' other differences with him.

Peikoff's 1983 lecture course Understanding Objectivism was edited into a book of the same title by Michael Berliner, editor of the Letters of Ayn Rand, and Peikoff's theory of logical induction, first presented in the lecture courses Induction in Physics and Philosophy and Objectivism Through Induction, has been developed further by David Harriman in his book, The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics.

Peikoff's next book is titled The DIM Hypothesis, and there he defines the three approaches to cognitive integration—disintegration, integration, and misintegration—and applies the hypothesis to physics, philosophy, education, politics and other fields. He states that it is completed and will be published in the Fall of 2012.

His articles have appeared in publications as diverse as Barron's and The New Scholasticism, and his television appearances have ranged from Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect and Bill O'Reilly's The O'Reilly Factor to C-SPAN panel discussions. He also appears in Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, the Academy Award nominated documentary by Michael Paxton.

Peikoff resides in Irvine, in Orange County, California, which is also home to the Ayn Rand Institute.

By his second wife, Cynthia, Peikoff has a daughter, Kira, a novelist.