Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Philosophy of Art — syllabus and schedule

Here is the syllabus and schedule [pdf] for my Spring 2012 Philosophy of Art course.

More information about this and my other courses at the Courses page.

Philosophical Foundations of Education — syllabus and schedule

Here are the syllabus and schedule [pdf] for my Spring 2012 Philosophical Foundations of Education course.

More information at the Courses page.

See also my 48-hour Philosophy of Education lecture series on video, available free online.

Some related posts on education:

Locke versus Kant on motivation and discipline
Geniuses and their followers
Mathematics education
Adam Smith on accountability in education
Fichte on education as socialization
Dewey on education as socialization
Education and the National Socialists
Video interview with Jerry Kirkpatrick on Montessori and Dewey
How great artists become great
Sidney Hook on public education in New York in the early 1900s
Don’t know much about history — an anecdote
Women’s and men’s college graduation rates
Sir Ken Robinson on factory schools
Immigrant culture, race, and education
A complete listing of my education-related posts.

Business and Economic Ethics — syllabus and schedule

Here is the syllabus and schedule [pdf] for my Spring 2012 Business and Economic Ethics course. Core readings will be from the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time, Atlas Shrugged, and Kaizen.

More information at the Courses page. See also my Business and Economic Ethics page.

Rocket Singh, Salesman of the Year

Check out Rocket Singh, Salesman of the Year, an engaging movie with a healthy business ethics kick.

The main character is a young college graduate with mediocre grades who lands a job at a computer sales company. He is soon confronted with corrupt-but-usual practices in the company, and his naïveté puts him on the fast track to failure. And then the plot thickens.

Rocket Singh takes up negative themes of corrupt in sales, bribery, and conflicts of interest, but the emphasis is on the positive: the sources of self-respect, win-win business relations, and the spirit of entrepreneurship. I responded to the very human challenges of honesty, integrity, necessity as the mother of invention and ingenuity, growing pains, guts, and semi-redemption.

Stating the themes abstractly like that could make Rocket sound saccharine and didactic, but it works as a real movie, with engaging characters, tension, and drama.

Related:
My earlier recommendation of Guru: “A villager, Gurukant Desai, arrives in Bombay in 1958, and rises from its streets to become the GURU, the biggest tycoon in Indian history.”
Interview with Nimish Adhia on Bollywood and the new India.
Shikha Dalmia on India and Slumdog Millionaire.
Gurcharan Das’s India Unbound.

Why did Portugal become a great exploring nation?

I’ve been reading Eric Axelson’s 1973 Congo to Cape: Early Portuguese Explorers. It’s 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. In principle many people — European, African, or Asian — could have accomplished it. So why the Portuguese?

Here is Axelson’s explanation:

“It was no accident that Portugal became the first European country in modern times to explore and colonize beyond the seas. Her medieval wars of independence against Leon and Castile, and her campaigns against the Moors in the Iberian peninsula, had encouraged the growth of a national spirit by the time—in the middle of the twelfth century—Portugal attained what are essentially her present frontiers. Bounded by unfriendly and often actively hostile Spanish kingdoms and Muslim principalities, Portugal was forced to look to the sea not merely for communication with the rest of Christendom, but also for essential trade: the export of salt and oil, of wine and cork, and the import of most of the manufactured goods her people needed. Moreover, her pastures and her cultivated lands were infertile, and the sea provided necessary food. Her fishermen became consummate seamen, and out of their ranks emerged the crews of ships that sailed in the Middle Ages to the farthest parts of northwestern Europe and of the Mediterranean” (p. 19).

Comments?

My thoughts: Axelson’s explanation is a good start but more is necessary. Many medieval peoples fought wars to protect their independence, and many places with poor soil became good at fishing; yet very few generated great exploration cultures. Axelson’s middle point about trade is strong: the map at right (click to enlarge) shows that Portugal is at the fringes when it comes to trade with just about everyone and that the land trade routes were already controlled by others (e.g., the Venetians and Levantines). But it’s still a question in my mind why the Portuguese didn’t simply acquiesce to an isolated, marginal existence; after all, that’s what many peoples throughout history have done. So who were the key deciders who initiated and led and pushed the Portuguese into great activity and accomplishment?

Another question: Axelrod gives one political and two economic motivations — were other factors such as scientific curiosity or religious evangelism significantly operative?

Here’s a list, adapted from this site, of key Portuguese names and dates:
1394: Henry the Navigator born
1419: Madeira Islands discovered by explorers Zarco and Tristao Vaz Teixeira
1427: Azores Islands discovered by Diogo Silves
1434: Exploration of the African coast begins
1444: Discovery of the Cape Verde islands
1484: Diogo Cao discovers the River Congo
1487: Bartholomeu Dias leads an expedition around the Cape of Good Hope
[1492: Christopher Columbus discovers the New World]
1498: Vasco da Gama reaches India via navigation around Africa
1500: Pedro Alvares Cabral discovers Brazil
1519: Ferdinand Magellan leads the first voyage around the World
1542: Portuguese explorers are the first Europeans to land in Japan
1569: Nagasaki, Japan is opened to Portuguese traders

Intellectual History page updated

Updated for the new year: My collected posts on key thinkers from Homer, Socrates, and Augustine to Descartes, Kant, and Rand.

Collected posts on the financial crisis

Links to my posts over the last three years on the causes of the crisis. This is an ongoing project, and I’ll add new items to the Financial Crisis page as they are posted. Ten posts:

1. What is the US economy? Introduction. Before blaming the economic crisis on either government regulation or free enterprise, we need to know what kind of economic system the U.S. had before the crisis. A survey of the relevant factors in identifying the degree of capitalism or socialism then in place.

2. Deregulation? The Federal Register’s size: Data on one measure of government regulation — page counts of its publication of new rules each year.

3. When was the financial sector deregulated? Data on two measures of regulation: The size of the federal government’s annual budget for regulating the financial and banking sector, and the total number of government employees regulating that sector.

4. The Subprime Mortgage Crisis: A simplified flowchart of subprime mortgages’ contribution to the crisis. Presidents, congressmen, Fannie Mae, and lenders’ changing incentives.

5. Pathologies of the mixed economy (or, How we got into this frackin’ mess): A big-picture overview of the development of our mixed economy. Integrating developments in ethics, economics and political history, and public choice. A video-lecture version.

6. Money and monetary systems: An introductory contrast of private/competing money systems to our government/monopoly money system. Includes an analogy of books to money: Books are to the intellectual realm what money is to the economic realm.

7. Has the Federal Reserve been a failure? A report on a conference paper given by economic historians George Selgin and Lawrence White comparing the Fed’s original mission with its track record over the twentieth century.

8. What is the OWS complaint? A question for those venting their frustration at Wall Street rather than Pennsylvania Avenue.

9. Warren Buffett and the power of corporations: On the crucial distinction between political power and economic power.

10. John Allison on the financial crisis: I can’t take any credit for this excellent talk, but the former CEO of BB&T had a front-row view of the events leading up to and during the crisis. I also can’t take any credit for economist George Reisman’s depressingly clear overview explanation.

[Return to the Financial Crisis page. Return to the Business and Economics page. Return to the StephenHicks.org main page.]

Fashion: white teeth — or black?

In Henry the VIII’s time, sugar became widely available in England. Those who could afford it used it on just about everything, and too much sugar causes one’s teeth to become black. But sugar was still expensive, so having black teeth came to be a symbol of wealth. Soon many of the English, women especially, were deliberately blackening their teeth as a fashion and status symbol.

To which I juxtapose today’s fashion of hyper-white teeth. (I vote for white — does that make me a culture-bound cretin?)

It makes me wonder why yellow teeth never became fashionable when smoking was trendy. And it reminds me of an earlier post on Adam Smith and slaves to fashion:

“Some of the savage nations in North America tie four boards round the heads of their children, and thus squeeze them, while the bones are tender and gristly, into a form that is almost perfectly square. Europeans are astonished at the absurd barbarity of this practice, to which some missionaries have imputed the singular stupidity of those nations among whom it prevails. But when they condemn those savages, they do not reflect that the ladies in Europe had, till within the very few years, been endeavouring for near a century to squeeze the beautiful roundness of their natural shape into a square form of the same kind.” (From Smith’s 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, IV.1, p. 326.)