Philosophy of History

Appendix 3: Quotations on German anti-Semitism [Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Appendix 3 of Nietzsche and the Nazis. Sources for the quotations are at the end of this post.] Appendix 3: Quotations on German anti-Semitism Martin Luther (1483-1546): “The Jews deserve to hang on gallows, seven times higher than ordinary thieves.” And: “We ought to take revenge on the Jews and kill them.”[189] Immanuel

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Philosophy of History | G.W.F. Hegel | Philosophers, Explained by Stephen Hicks

Who are the great philosophers, and what makes them great? Episodes: The full playlist. Stephen R. C. Hicks, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, USA, and has had visiting positions at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., the University of Kasimir the Great in Poland, Oxford University’s Harris Manchester College in England, and Jagiellonian

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Why did Portugal become a great exploring nation?

Reprising these reflections from reading Eric Axelson’s Congo to Cape: Early Portuguese Explorers. Always an interesting question to ask how great ventures begin: Why did they start when and where they did? Why were they initiated by those individuals or groups and not others? The circumnavigation of Africa was a great achievement over many decades.

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Anti-Slavery in the Americas: A Primer [Atlas Intellectuals]

In this week of the Atlas Intellectuals course on Slavery we feature Stephen Hicks’s analysis of slavery’s history: Anti-Slavery in the Americas: A Primer. The first two points: Before Columbus’s Atlantic crossing, slavery had long been practiced by every major culture in the world, with the likely exception of Australia. Virtually no individuals known to

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Victor Davis Hanson interview: war and foreign policy

I guest-hosted The Atlas Society Asks program and interviewed classicist Victor Davis Hanson for 30-minutes on what we moderns can learn from the classics about human nature and war. Some of the questions we covered: Is a lesson of history that freer societies prevail over authoritarian ones? E.g., how the Greeks were able to defeat

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Johann Herder as prophet of the contemporary university

[Herder (1744-1802) was an early Counter-Enlightenment voice calling for group identity politics and value relativism, along with a rejection of cultural appropriation and an embrace of zero-sum cultural conflict. The following is excerpted from Explaining Postmodernism.] Herder on multicultural relativism Sometimes called the “German Rousseau,”[1] Johann Herder had studied philosophy and theology at Königsberg University. Kant was

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