Philosophy

Hegel on war’s purifying powers — Baxter article

Professor Kimberly Baxter’s article summarizes Hegel’s argument that the state’s higher ethical purposes necessitate war as a means. According to Hegel, war is a “positive moment” wherein the state asserts itself as an individual and establishing its rights and interests. Sacrifice on behalf of the the state is the “substantial tie between the state and […]

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Art critic Clement Greenburg on Kant as the first Modernist

Greenburg was the most influential art critic of the twentieth century. In the opening paragraph of his “Modernist Painting” (1960), Greenburg made a big claim: “Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as, the first real Modernist.” Greenburg’s earlier “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in Partisan Review

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Philosophy of Education: My lectures online

Fifty hours of my video lectures on Philosophy of Education are available free online. * The course cover issues from metaphysics, epistemology, human nature, and ethics that are directly relevant to education.* The lectures also cover major philosophies  Idealism, Realism, Pragmatism, Behaviorism, Existentialism, Marxism, Objectivism, and Postmodernism — that have enormously influenced contemporary education.* Along

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The surprising origin of “the dismal science” [Slavery versus Free-market capitalism]

Reprising from my interview with economist David Henderson: I asked him how economics came to be called the “dismal science.” The source, he explained, was Thomas Carlyle, the nineteenth-century historian and essayist. The surprising reason for his coining the phrase? Carlyle was attacking free-market liberals for advocating the end of slavery. Free-market liberals argued that

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“Only a God Can Save Us” documentary

The line is from Martin Heidegger’s resigned and despairing Der Speigel interview, shortly before his death in 1976. At Rockford University we hosted a showing of Jeffrey Van Davis’s film on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy and his disturbing relationship with National Socialism. After the showing, we had a panel discussion featuring director Van Davis, professors David

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Ideological capture of universities in China, Russia, America — the same illiberal pattern

Via mandatory DEI statements, many universities in the West have been imposing ideological conformity oaths upon their faculty. That urge to control is paralleled in China and in Russia: Russia: It’s the 21st century, and the battle for liberal education is still uphill. (Thanks for Larry Liu for the China excerpt and Alexey Zhavoronkov for

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Claude Lévi-Strauss, anthropology, and postmodernism

When the expanded edition of Explaining Postmodernism: From Rousseau to Foucault was being published, I re-read several transition figures, i.e., those twentieth-century intellectuals who were important in preparing the groundwork for postmodernism. One is anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), whom I first read as an undergraduate. Lévi-Strauss formally studied philosophy and law, but because the bulk

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