From the flyer for the reading group:

In 399 BCE, Athens executed Socrates for impiety and corrupting the youth. Plato immortalized the trial and death of Socrates in his dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. These are not merely historical dialogues, but philosophical treatises that examine the nature of piety, philosophy, justice, and death. The Reading Group will discuss each of these dialogues and the philosophical issues they raise.

Each meeting will take place at the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship office on the second floor of Burpee, from 1-2 pm. There will be light refreshments. A free copy of the book will be provided to participants.

Dates:
September 10: Overview and Introduction
September 17: Euthyphro
October 1: Apology
November 5: Crito
November 19: Phaedo

Related: Two posts of mine about Socrates are here:
Socrates’ two bad arguments for not escaping
Quotations from Apology and Crito on reason and character

I’ve been reading David Freedman’s Corps Business: The 30 Management Principles of the U.S. Marines, and I learned that FedEx founder and CEO Fred Smith is a former Marine.

Amusingly, Freedman reports a tribute to Smith and FedEx seen on a t-shirt at a Marine base: The U.S. Marines: When it absolutely, positively has to be destroyed overnight.

Also featured in Kaizen are the spring semester’s student essay contest winners — Brandon McNames and Matthew Weber — a report on guest speaker Jeffrey Orduno, and other news from the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship.

My full interview with Dr. Bradley will be posted at the CEE site next month.

If you would like to receive a complimentary issue of the print version of Kaizen, please email your name and postal address to CEE [at] Rockford [dot] edu.

More Kaizen interviews with leading entrepreneurs are at my site here or CEE’s site here.

And here are some of my publications and posts that are relevant to this semester’s material:

The Best Work of the Best Minds
Warren Buffett and the power of corporations
John Allison on the financial crisis
What Business Ethics Can Learn from Entrepreneurship [pdf]
What is the US economy?
Money and monetary systems
Ayn Rand and Contemporary Business Ethics [pdf]
Defending Shylock: Productive Work in Financial Markets [pdf]
My interviews for Kaizen with leading entrepreneurs

Here is the Syllabus and Schedule [pdf] for my Introduction to Philosophy course this Fall 2010 semester. It’s also posted in the Courses section of this site.

And here is a collection of past posts relevant to this semester’s course:

Before Philosophy: Homer’s world

Why does philosophy begin with Thales?
Philosophy begins: Thales’ revolution

Socrates’ two bad arguments for not escaping
Quotations from Apology and Crito on reason and character

Who is the real father of modern philosophy? [Descartes versus Bacon]

Freud and original sin
The best footnote ever [on micturation]

Why C. S. Lewis gives me the creeps
Freud and original sin [with a comparison of Lewis's and Freud's views on human nature]

Ayn Rand [at The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
Roark and Keating: First meetings
Toohey’s five strategies of altruism
Gordon Prescott: Heidegger’s disciple?

Wisdom about the challenge of learning from a great genius and then finding one’s own path. Here is Zarathustra:

“Now I go alone, my disciples, You too, go now, alone. Thus I want it. Go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you. The man of knowledge must not only love his enemies, he must be able to hate his friends. One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a student. And why do you not want to pluck at my wreath? You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you. You say that you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? You are my believers—but what matter all believers? You have not yet sought yourselves; and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to so little. Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.”

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The image is Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” [circa 1818].)

The site is co-founded by Internet entrepreneur Kevin O’Connor, who was co-founder of the very successful DoubleClick.com. O’Connor describes the thinking that led to the development of FindTheBest.com:

“I could find endless amounts of information on any subject but when I had a complicated decision to make, I found myself wasting hours, or even days, compiling information I could compare. Or, I found sites offering their ‘top 10′ recommendations, only to discover they were secretly getting ‘kickbacks’ from the sites they were recommending.”

Last year I interviewed O’Connor for Kaizen on the theme of Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital. Well worth reading.

Update: A short interview here with O’Connor about his new comparison engine (not search engine).

From my introductory section:

“Gibson’s approach is middle-of-the-road in the content of his beliefs about business and ethics, so this is a mainstream publication. As such Ethics and Business embodies the strengths of the mainstream—and a few of its weaknesses. So from the perspective of someone outside the mainstream, let me indicate what I take those weaknesses to be in the context of reviewing a textbook written for students. …”

But I showed the pictures briefly to a colleague, who frowned and said Más dominación por corporaciones, which I translate loosely as More goddamn big businesses asserting their control over our lives by polluting our public places with their insidious messages. And foreign corporations to boot. Or something like that.

My colleague’s reaction was automatic, but built into it is the idea that a better solution would be to force everyone to pay for the signs through taxes. That would eliminate the advertising, and the businesses would receive no benefit from their imposed tax costs. That is to say, my colleague believes implicitly that a compulsory win/lose solution is preferable to a voluntary win/win solution.

All of which makes me wonder how some people become so invested in adversarial ideologies that they so automatically reject any suggestion of the mutually beneficial.

“The anti-smoking campaigns of the Nazis: a little known aspect of public health in Germany, 1933-1945″ [pdf].

The campaign was mounted despite the arguments that (1) taxes on tobacco were a significant source of income for the German government and (2) the tobacco industry provided thousands of jobs. Political principles were at stake.

The chief anti-smoking activist, one Adolf Hitler, stated that “Nazism might never have triumphed in Germany had he not given up smoking.”

I gave the Nazi anti-smoking campaigns a passing mention in Nietzsche and the Nazis, in the context of discussing the Nazis’ socialization of the body politic, and Proctor has developed the anti-smoking theme in much greater detail.

Kirzner is one of the pioneers in the study of entrepreneurship. His key works are Competition and Entrepreneurship (1973), Perception, Opportunity and Profit (1979), and The Meaning of the Market Process (1992).

Side note: Historically, Beloit is the brother college to Rockford, both having been founded in the 1840s by the same group of individuals.

“There are over 150 city bus lines called Colectivos, each one managed by an individual company. These compete with each other, and attract exceptionally high use with virtually no public financial support. Their frequency makes them equal to the underground systems of other cities, but buses cover a far wider area than the underground system. Colectivos in Buenos Aires do not have a fixed timetable, but run from 4 to several per hour, depending on the bus line and time of the day. With very cheap tickets and extensive routes, usually no further than four blocks from commuters’ residences, the colectivo is the most popular mode of transport around the city” (Wikipedia).

By contrast, many U.S. city governments continue to experiment with top-down, politically-enforced, and economically wasteful public transportation systems. Here is John Catoe, the general manager of the Washington, D.C., Metro system:

“One thing that it is important to understand though is that the fares only pay a portion of the operating budget. This year, about 53%. If you add the money we earn from advertising and other sources, we cover about 60% of the cost. In fact no transit agency in the country makes a profit or breaks even. The rest comes from the local governments that partner with Metro.” [Emphasis added.]

Another example is Houston, which is in the midst of a heated debate about whether to expand or contract its currently troubled government-run system.

Time to take a lesson from the Argentines?

Meanwhile, I’m in the area for this fun event and to interview a highly-entrepreneurial Argentine for an upcoming issue of Kaizen.

The abstract: “Philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand are often identified as strong critics of altruism and arch advocates of egoism. In this essay, Stephen Hicks argues that Nietzsche and Rand have much in common in their critiques of altruism but almost nothing in common in their views on egoism.”

My opening paragraph: “To what extent is Ayn Rand’s ethical theory Nietzschean? Three Friedrich Nietzsches are relevant to making that judgment. …”

The major sections of the article:

Part One: On Critiquing Altruism
Three Nietzsches and Ayn Rand
Some intellectuals on Nietzsche and Rand
Egoism, altruism, and “selfishness”
A Nietzschean sketch
God is dead
Nihilism’s symptoms
Two bio-psychological types
Psychology and morality
Genealogy
Comparing Nietzsche’s and Rand’s critiques of altruism
Rand’s break with Nietzsche’s critique

Part Two: On Egoism
Rand’s egoism
Nietzsche’s rhetoric and system
The major differences between Nietzsche and Rand
Are individuals real?
Do individuals have free will?
What is the source of moral values?
How does the self identify its nature and values?
Are individual selves ends in themselves?
Are fundamental values universal?
Are the relations of individuals win/win or win/lose?
Rights, liberty, equality before the law?
Slavery and freedom, war and peace
Conclusion

Clips 1-3:

Previous: [Part 14: Postmodern education] Postmodern education: science.
Next: Appendix.
Return to the Philosophy of Education page.
Return to the StephenHicks.org main page.

The hardcover will be released mid-August.

Here also is a copy of the brochure for the book [pdf], which includes the Table of Contents and more information about availability of the book and documentary.

1 Clip:

Previous: Postmodern education: Literature.
Next: Postmodern education: Science.
Return to the Philosophy of Education page.
Return to the StephenHicks.org main page.

1 Clip:

Previous: Postmodern education: History.
Next: [Part 15: Conclusion] The importance of the Philosophy of Education.
Return to the Philosophy of Education page.
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“It is a general fact, and almost without exception in the history of Greece and of Italy, that the tyrants sprang from the popular party, and had the aristocracy as enemies. ‘The mission of the tyrant,’ says Aristotle, ‘is to protect the people against the rich; he has always commenced by being a demagogue, and it is the essence of tyranny to oppose the aristocracy.’ ‘The means of arriving at tyranny,’ he also says, ‘is to gain the confidence of the multitude, and one does this by declaring himself the enemy of the rich. This was the course of Peisistratus at Athens, of Theagenes at Megara, and of Dionysius at Syracuse.’”

Setting aside any comparisons to contemporary politics, how well does Coulanges’s observation hold up historically? He mentions examples from Greece and Italy. Are the Jacobins of the French Revolution an example? Hitler and the National Socialists? Mao and the Communists? Counter-examples?

(Coulanges’s quotations from Aristotle are from Politics V.8, VIII.4, 5, and V. 4. The image is of statues of tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who killed Peisistratus’s son Hipparchus.)

1 Clip:

Previous: Henry Giroux on education.
Next: Postmodern education: Literature.
Return to the Philosophy of Education page.
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