Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Upcoming talk in Stockholm

Stephen Hicks — Fri, 17 May 2013 15:25:25 +0000

From May 23-25, I’ll be participating in a colloquium on “Virtues and Entrepreneurship,” organized by Sweden’s Ratio Institute. My talk will be an extension of the theme of my “What Business Ethics Can Learn from Entrepreneurship,” arguing that the success traits of entrepreneurship map onto an updated Aristotelian virtue set. The conference will include keynote speeches by Deirdre McCloskey, author of The Bourgeois Virtues, and Saras Sarasvathy, author of Effectual Entrepreneurship.

Rimsky-Korsakov on the “hardship” of the composer’s life

Stephen Hicks — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:26:35 +0000

According to Shostakovich:

“Rimsky-Korsakov used to say that he refused to acknowledge any complaints from composers about their hard lot in life. He explained his position thus: Talk to a bookkeeper and he’ll start complaining about life and his work. Work has ruined him, it’s so dull and boring. You see, the bookkeeper had planned to be a writer but life made him a bookkeeper. Rimsky-Korsakov said that it was rather different with composers. None of them can say that he had planned to be a bookkeeper and that life forced him to become a composer.”

[Source: Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New York: Harper and Row, 1979, p. 65.]

The Crisis of Socialism [EP audiobook]

Stephen Hicks — Wed, 15 May 2013 15:31:09 +0000

This is the fifth chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.

Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube] [74 minutes total]

Marx and waiting for Godot [mp3] [YouTube]
Three failed predictions [mp3] [YouTube]
Socialism needs an aristocracy: Lenin, Mao, and the lesson of the German Social Democrats [mp3] [YouTube]
Good news for socialism: depression and war [mp3] [YouTube]
Bad news: liberal capitalism rebounds [mp3] [YouTube]
Worse news: Khrushchev’s revelations and Hungary [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s ethical standard [mp3] [YouTube]
From need to equality [mp3] [YouTube]
From Wealth is good to Wealth is bad [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s epistemology [mp3] [YouTube]
Marcuse and the Frankfurt School: Marx plus Freud, or oppression plus repression [mp3] [YouTube]
The rise and fall of Left terrorism [mp3] [YouTube]
From the collapse of the New Left to postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]

Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes]
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube] [102 minutes]

Forthcoming:
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]

Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.

Telecommunications — the FCC’s ‘Fairness Doctrine’ [Business Ethics Cases series]

Stephen Hicks — Sun, 12 May 2013 13:36:02 +0000

My video lecture on the Federal Communications Commission’s controversial “Fairness Doctrine,” part of the Business Ethics Cases series.

Contents:
1. The early days of radio and a tragedy of the commons.
2. What is fairness? Two competing answers.
3. The argument for the “Fairness Doctrine.”
4. The argument against the “Fairness Doctrine.”
5. Related issues: whether politics is special, whether the medium matters, scarcity, unintended consequences, and abuses of power.

The entire video (70 minutes total):

Supplements:
Tom Beauchamp, “The FCC’s ‘Fairness Doctrine’” [pdf].
Summary flowchart of the arguments pro and con [jpg].

Go to the Business Ethics Cases series. Full playlists at YouTube.
Go to the Philosophy of Education lecture series.

Wendy Steiner on Kant and modernism in art

Stephen Hicks — Sun, 12 May 2013 01:02:33 +0000

I am reading Wendy Steiner’s Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art. Steiner, a professor of literature at Penn, argues that “In modernism, the perennial rewards of aesthetic experience — pleasure, insight, empathy — were largely withheld, and its generous aim, beauty, was abandoned” (p. xv).

Steiner notes that “the main symbol of such beauty, the female subject,” especially was abandoned in the twentieth century. “The avant-garde were utterly hostile toward the ‘feminine aesthetics’ of charm, sentiment, and melodramatic excess, which they associated with female and bourgeois philistinism” (pp. xxiv-xxv). (See also: Were the Modernist painters misogynist?)

All of which raises the question: Why? Steiner’s first statement of her thesis is that the experience of beauty is a profoundly relational experience. In philosopher-talk, it is neither purely an intrinsic feature of the object nor a purely subjective state. We are moved by the object, and “in our gratitude toward what moves us so, we attribute to it the property of beauty, but what we are actually experiencing is a special relation between it and ourselves” (p. xxiii).

Beauty is a connection between the self and the Other, but it also generates an elevating action component: “finding something or someone beautiful entails becoming worthy of it — in effect, becoming beautiful, too — and recognizing oneself as such” (xxiii). One is thus energized and challenged by the beautiful Other and “rises to recognize oneself in it” (p. xxiv).

Steiner’s account seems to imply that the full experience of beauty requires that one be a certain kind of person — capable of being so moved, of thinking oneself worthy and beautiful, of being energized to elevating challenges. That in turn seems to imply a profoundly different aesthetic for a profoundly different kind of person. What if, for example, one’s deepest sense of being is of estrangement, self-doubt, of an unbridgeable gulf between oneself and others, of alienation from reality?

The previous paragraph is my interpolation, but I was struck by the next step Steiner’s analysis, introducing “the Kantian sublime, which was the aesthetic model for high modernism” (xxiv).

In the Kantian sublime, Steiner points out, there is a supreme disconnect between the self and the Other. It is “specifically the non-recognition of the self in the Other, for the Other is inhuman, chaotic, annihilating.” The self realizes “the immensity of this gap” and is left “unfastened, unconnected to the object of its awe” (p. xxiv). There is no mutuality and no connection possible, so no action is worthwhile. One can only persist in the more sublime-relevant emotions of fear or awe or passive submissiveness. The Kantian sublime is an aesthetic of profound alienation.

And thus some groundwork is laid for Modernism’s “violent break” from the rest of art history.

Sources:

Steiner, Wendy. 2001. Beauty in Exile, The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art. The Free Press.

More quotations from various scholars connecting the Kantian sublime and modernism in art: Kant and Modern Art and More on Kant and Modern Art.

My “Why Art became Ugly.”

Exams for my courses — Spring 2013

Stephen Hicks — Thu, 09 May 2013 21:59:06 +0000

Business and Economic Ethics [pdf].
Philosophical Foundations of Education [pdf].

Experimental cancer drugs: Laetrile [Business Ethics Cases series]

Stephen Hicks — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:13:58 +0000

My video lecture on the experimental cancer drug Laetrile, part of the Business Ethics Cases series.

Contents:
1. Context and defining the issue.
2. The argument for legalizing Laetrile.
3. The argument for banning Laetrile.
4. Comparing the arguments for and against Laetrile.

The entire lecture (65 minutes total):

Supplements:
Tom Beauchamp, “Manufacture and Regulation of Laetrile” [pdf].
Summary of context: Identifying the issue and parties involved.
Summary: Flowchart of the pro and con arguments.

Go to the Business Ethics Cases series. Full playlists at YouTube.
Go to the Philosophy of Education lecture series.
Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.

Interview with Robert Salvino

Stephen Hicks — Thu, 02 May 2013 19:34:21 +0000

Robert Salvino (Economics, Coastal Carolina University) spoke at Rockford College on “Entrepreneurship and Public Policy.” In this follow-up interview, Salvino and I discuss entrepreneurial success traits, the institutional framework within which entrepreneurship best flourishes, the relative success of market-friendly versus government-chosen entrepreneurship policies (including examples such as Google, Apple, Solyndra, etc), the effect of employer-provided healthcare on self-employment rates, Salvino’s suggested general entrepreneurship-friendly public policies, and China’s success in lifting 600 million people out of poverty over the last generation.

The talk was sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship.

The Climate of Collectivism [EP audiobook]

Stephen Hicks — Thu, 02 May 2013 00:48:25 +0000

This is the fourth chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.

Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube] [102 minutes]

From postmodern epistemology to postmodern politics [mp3] [YouTube]
The argument of the next three chapters [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to socialism’s crisis of theory and evidence [mp3] [YouTube]
Back to Rousseau [mp3] [YouTube]
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment [mp3] [YouTube]
Rousseau’s collectivism and statism [mp3] [YouTube]
Rousseau and the French Revolution [mp3] [YouTube]
Counter-Enlightenment politics: Right and Left collectivism [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant on collectivism and war [mp3] [YouTube]
Herder on multicultural relativism [mp3] [YouTube]
Fichte on education as socialization [mp3] [YouTube]
Hegel on worshipping the state [mp3] [YouTube]
From Hegel to the twentieth century [mp3] [YouTube]
Right versus Left collectivism in the twentieth century [mp3] [YouTube]
The Rise of National Socialism: Who are the real socialists? [mp3] [YouTube]

Forthcoming:
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]

Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.

What philosophers believe today

Stephen Hicks — Wed, 01 May 2013 19:14:00 +0000

Philosophers David Bourget & David J. Chalmers have a paper forthcoming in Philosophical Studies that presents the results of a survey of 1,972 contemporary philosophers, most of them in the Anglo-American world. The survey’s main results on thirty issues:

1. A priori knowledge: yes 71.1%; no 18.4%; other 10.5%.
2. Abstract objects: Platonism 39.3%; nominalism 37.7%; other 23.0%.
3. Aesthetic value: objective 41.0%; subjective 34.5%; other 24.5%.
4. Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes 64.9%; no 27.1%; other 8.1%.
5. Epistemic justification: externalism 42.7%; internalism 26.4%; other 30.8%.
6. External world: non-skeptical realism 81.6%; skepticism 4.8%; idealism 4.3%; other 9.2%.
7. Free will: compatibilism 59.1%; libertarianism 13.7%; no free will 12.2%; other 14.9%.
8. God: atheism 72.8%; theism 14.6%; other 12.6%.
9. Knowledge claims: contextualism 40.1%; invariantism 31.1%; relativism 2.9%; other 25.9%.
10. Knowledge: empiricism 35.0%; rationalism 27.8%; other 37.2%.
11. Laws of nature: non-Humean 57.1%; Humean 24.7%; other 18.2%.
12. Logic: classical 51.6%; non-classical 15.4%; other 33.1%.
13. Mental content: externalism 51.1%; internalism 20.0%; other 28.9%.
14. Meta-ethics: moral realism 56.4%; moral anti-realism 27.7%; other 15.9%.
15. Metaphilosophy: naturalism 49.8%; non-naturalism 25.9%; other 24.3%.
16. Mind: physicalism 56.5%; non-physicalism 27.1%; other 16.4%.
17. Moral judgment: cognitivism 65.7%; non-cognitivism 17.0%; other 17.3%.
18. Moral motivation: internalism 34.9%; externalism 29.8%; other 35.3%.
19. Newcomb’s problem: two boxes 31.4%; one box 21.3%; other 47.4%.
20. Normative ethics: deontology 25.9%; consequentialism 23.6%; virtue ethics 18.2%; other 32.3%.
21. Perceptual experience: representationalism 31.5%; qualia theory 12.2%; disjunctivism 11.0%; sense-datum theory 3.1%; other 42.2%.
22. Personal identity: psychological view 33.6%; biological view 16.9%; further-fact view 12.2%; other 37.3%.
23. Politics: egalitarianism 34.8%; communitarianism 14.3%; libertarianism 9.9%; other 41.0%.
24. Proper names: Millian 34.5%; Fregean 28.7%; other 36.8%.
25. Science: scientific realism 75.1%; scientific anti-realism 11.6%; other 13.3%.
26. Teletransporter: survival 36.2%; death 31.1%; other 32.7%.
27. Time: B-theory 26.3%; A-theory 15.5%; other 58.2%.
28. Trolley problem: switch 68.2%; don’t switch 7.6%; other 24.2%.
29. Truth: correspondence 50.8%; deflationary 24.8%; epistemic 6.9%; other 17.5%.
30. Zombies: conceivable but not metaphysically possible 35.6%; metaphysically possible 23.3%; inconceivable 16.0%; other 25.1%.

I’m in the minority on 16 of the issues, the majority on 10, and on four issues I don’t have an informed view.

Minimum wages [Business Ethics Cases series]

Stephen Hicks — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:24:46 +0000

My video lecture on minimum wages, part of the Business Ethics Cases series.

Contents:
1. The standard employer/employee relationship.
2. The argument for minimum wages.
3. Contrasting the initial arguments’ claims about economics, ethics, and politics.
4. The economic argument against minimum wages.
5. Minimum wages: ethics and politics.

The entire video (53 minutes total):

Supplements:
Linda Gorman on “Minimum Wages” (at the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics).
Summary flowchart of the arguments for and against minimum wages.

Go to the Business Ethics Cases series. Full playlists at YouTube.
Go to the Philosophy of Education lecture series.
Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.

More on Marx and violent revolution

Stephen Hicks — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 21:59:36 +0000

In an earlier post on Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, I offered two explanations for why the 1848 Marx held that communism could only come about by violent revolution.

In response to that post, Tibor Machan pointed me to this passage from an 1872 speech Marx gave in Amsterdam:

“We are aware of the importance that must be accorded to the institutions, customs, and traditions of different countries; and we do not deny that there are countries like America, England (and, if I knew your institutions better, I would add Holland), where the workers can achieve their aims by peaceful means. However true that may be, we ought to recognize that, in most of the countries on the Continent, it is force that must be the lever of our revolutions.”[1]

Interesting exceptions. America, England, and Holland are, arguably, the countries in which capitalism had achieved the most development. Machan’s explanation is that Marx came to believe that in such advanced countries workers’ advancement could come about by gradualist methods: “Bit by bit, step by step, at municipal, county, state, and the federal levels of government, socialism can be instituted by democratic process.”[2]

(And adding up the bits, according to my math Marx was right and we’re over 50% there.[3])

Sources:
[1] Karl Marx, Selected Writings, second edition. Edited by David McLellan (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 643.
[2] Tibor Machan, Revisiting Marxism: A Bourgeois Reassessment (Hamilton Books, 2006), p. 156.
[3] “Marx’s 10-point plan 50% realized in USA.”
[4] And just to be clear: “Am I really a Marxist revolutionary?”

The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [EP audiobook]

Stephen Hicks — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 01:19:33 +0000

This is the third chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.

Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes]

Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition [mp3] [YouTube]
Setting aside reason and logic [mp3] [YouTube]
Emotions as revelatory [mp3] [YouTube]
Heidegger and postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
Positivism and Analytic philosophy: from Europe to America [mp3] [YouTube]
From Positivism to Analysis [mp3] [YouTube]
Recasting philosophy’s function [mp3] [YouTube]
Perception, concepts, and logic [mp3] [YouTube]
From the collapse of Logical Positivism to Kuhn and Rorty [mp3] [YouTube]
Summary: A vacuum for postmodernism to fill [mp3] [YouTube]
First thesis: Postmodernism as the end result of Kantian epistemology [mp3] [YouTube]

Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]

Forthcoming:
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]

Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.

Tragedy of the Commons [Business Ethics Cases series]

Stephen Hicks — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:29:26 +0000

My video lecture on the Tragedy of the Commons, part of the Business Ethics Cases series.

Contents:
1. What the tragedy is.
2. The free-market solution.
3. The socialist solution.
4. Comparing the two solutions.

The entire video (43 minutes total):

Supplements:
Garrett Hardin on “The Tragedy of the Commons” (at the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics).
Summary flowchart of the arguments.
Elinor Ostrom on “Ending the Tragedy of the Commons.” The Nobel-prize winning economist explains how, with proper governance, humans are capable of finding peaceful solutions to the problem of resource scarcity.

Go to the Business Ethics Cases series. Full playlists at YouTube.
Go to the Philosophy of Education lecture series.
Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.

Professor Robert Salvino to speak at Rockford College

Stephen Hicks — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 15:40:10 +0000

On April 23, Robert Salvino will speak on the topic of “Entrepreneurship and Public Policy.” Dr. Salvino received his Ph.D. from Georgia State University in 2007 and currently teaches in the Department of Economics at Coastal Carolina University, South Carolina. Contact Virginia Murr at CEE@Rockford.edu for more details.

The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [EP audiobook]

Stephen Hicks — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:04:24 +0000

This is the second chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.

Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]

Enlightenment reason, liberalism, and science [mp3] [YouTube]
The beginnings of the Counter-Enlightenment [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant’s skeptical conclusion [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant’s problematic from empiricism and rationalism [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant’s essential argument [mp3] [YouTube]
Identifying Kant’s key assumptions [mp3] [YouTube]
Why Kant is the turning point [mp3] [YouTube]
After Kant: reality or reason but not both [mp3] [YouTube]
Metaphysical solutions to Kant: from Hegel to Nietzsche [mp3] [YouTube]
Dialectic and saving religion [mp3] [YouTube]
Hegel’s contribution to postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
Epistemological solutions to Kant: irrationalism from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche [mp3] [YouTube]
Summary of irrationalist themes [mp3] [YouTube]

Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]

Forthcoming:
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]

Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.

Introduction: Case Study Method [Business Ethics Cases series]

Stephen Hicks — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:34:07 +0000

An introduction to applied case study methodology, part of the Business Ethics Cases series.

Total time: 17 minutes.

Next: Rent Control. Minimum Wages [forthcoming]. The Tragedy of the Commons [forthcoming].

Go to the Business Ethics Cases series. Or full playlists at YouTube.
Go to the Philosophy of Education lecture series.
Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.

Upcoming sessions at APEE

Stephen Hicks — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 02:01:35 +0000

This year’s conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education has plenty going on. Check out the program here.

On Monday morning I’ll be giving a talk entitled “What Makes Capitalism Good: Are Hayek’s, Rand’s, and Friedman’s Answers Compatible?” I’ll also be chairing a session on “Recent Work on Morality and Capitalism” with papers by John Thrasher (University of Arizona), Peter Martin Jaworski (Georgetown University), Douglas B. Rasmussen (St. John’s University), and Jared Meyer (St. John’s University).

I’m also looking forward to a Tuesday talk by entrepreneur John Chisholm, whom I interviewed for Kaizen in 2010 and who gave this fine TedX talk in 2011.

Audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism

Stephen Hicks — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 21:58:49 +0000

I’m happy to announce the audiobook version of my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. We’re releasing one chapter a week here and at YouTube. Thanks to Christopher Vaughan for his editing and production work. To begin, here is the first chapter.

Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]

The postmodern vanguard: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Rorty [mp3] [YouTube]
Modern and postmodern [mp3] [YouTube]
Modernism and the Enlightenment [mp3] [YouTube]
Postmodernism versus the Enlightenment [mp3] [YouTube]
Postmodern academic themes [mp3] [YouTube]
Postmodern cultural themes [mp3] [YouTube]
Why postmodernism? [mp3] [YouTube]

Forthcoming:

Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy

Related:
The Explaining Postmodernism page.

Business Ethics Cases — introducing my new series

Stephen Hicks — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 22:31:42 +0000

The Business Ethics Cases project is new for 2013.

The initial series contains cases on Rent Control, Minimum Wages, The Tragedy of the Commons, Laetrile and Experimental Cancer Drugs, and the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine,” as well as a short introductory lecture on case study method and a concluding lecture abstracting the common patterns of argument from the cases.

Much thanks to Christopher Vaughan, who filmed and edited the series, with support from the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. We will be publishing one new case every two weeks.

Each individual case includes my video lecture, recommended readings, and occasional supplemental charts and graphs.

To begin, here is Rent Control.