The 'Foundations of Knowledge' is a 5-lecture series which remains to this day the most thorough and profound explication and analysis of Objectivist epistemology.

Lecture 1: The Primacy of Existence
The primacy of existence asserts that there is one objective world, which exists independently of consciousness. Citing Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged and the title essay in For the New Intellectual, Dr. Kelley explains why many philosophers have mistakenly denied the primacy of existence and embraced the primacy of consciousness, in what he terms the 'diaphanous model'of awareness. A lucid defense of Objectivism's standard of the primacy of existence, thus clearing the way for a rational theory of knowledge.

Lecture 2: The Epistemology of Perception
Epistemology studies the nature, acquisition, and validation of knowledge. Perception is the foundation of knowledge and the source of everything we know. The epistemology of perception studies the connection between perception and the rest of our knowledge—for example, the formation of concepts—and the nature of this integration. Dr. Kelley answers the critics who have challenged the reliability of the senses and tackles the important distinction between sensation and perception.

Lecture 3: The Nature of Free Will
The question of free will is the foundation of ethics. In Part I of this talk, Dr. Kelley focuses on the formulation of the free will theory as opposed to the determinist position Ayn Rand's theory of free will and the argument that the existence of free will would violate the law of causality. Part II examines volition from a biological perspective and daringly posits how the development and expansion of the brain—and man's conceptual form of cognition—could also have been expected to give rise to free will as well.

Lecture 4: Universals and Induction Unlike other species, man can generalize