I’ll be giving an invited talk at the 25th anniversary of the Liberty Forum, the largest liberty-oriented conference in Latin America. The conference is to be held in Porto Alegre, Brazil on April 16 and 17.
The overall theme of the conference program is 2037: What Brazil will be yours? I’ll be speaking on Education: Obey, Think, or Create?
Tibor Machan is professor of philosophy at Chapman University in California. He was born in Communist Hungary, smuggled out as a teenager, and came to the United States, where he earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. A prolific writer, he has published over forty books and scores of essays. A recent collection of scholarly essays on Machan’s work, Reality, Reason, and Rights: Essays in Honor of Tibor R. Machan, edited by Douglas B. Rasmussen, Aeon J. Skoble, and Douglas J. Den Uyl, was published in 2011.
Why did you become a philosopher? [00:19]
You grew up in Hungary under communism. What was that like? [08:43]
How did you come to the United States? [00:09]
The practical differences between authoritarian and liberal societies are so striking, so does liberal society need a philosophy? [06:26]
Previous question continued [00:09]
Where did you get your academic degrees? [07:11]
Previous question continued [00:09]
What are the key themes of Classical Individualism: The Supreme Importance of Each Human Being (1999)? [00:09]
What are the key themes of The Promise of Liberty: A Non-Utopian Vision (2009)? [06:49]
What philosophers have you learned most from? [00:09]
What philosophers do you most disagree with? [07:46]
What is the hardest philosophical problem you are working on now? [00:09]
What is the state of liberal thought today among philosophers? [00:09]
To bring about a more liberal society, what key practical steps can and should be taken? [03:12]
Watch the next Profiles in Liberty with philosopher Douglas Den Uyl.
Previous Profiles in Liberty:
Philosopher Douglas Rasmussen.
Economist David R. Henderson.
Return to the Profiles in Liberty main page.
My full interview with Jay Lapeyre is now posted at the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship’s site. Lapeyre is the CEO of The Laitram Corporation. I met with him in New Orleans to discuss natural disasters and corrupt politics, leadership, and the state of American manufacturing in our global economy. A shorter version of the interview was published last month in Kaizen.
More of my Kaizen interviews with leading entrepreneurs are at my site here or CEE’s site.
Four breakthrough trends that will transform the next generation. An energizing talk by Peter Diamondis, founder of the X Prize Foundation and head of Singularity University: computing power and access to it, robotics, artificial life, and personal space travel. Plus how to leverage the unbelievable amounts of untapped human potential out there. (Thanks to R.L. for the link.)
I’m happy to announce that my Explaining Postmodernism is being translated into Persian by an Iranian sociologist and will soon by published by a firm in Tehran.
More information forthcoming.
From Wired magazine’s profile of Reid Hoffman.
I like this section where Hoffman says that each one of us needs to “think about our lives as entrepreneurs, 
using this playbook as a way five years from now to be in more control of my life, create more value in myself and the world around me, by proactively investing in growing my capabilities and adding more to society. People sometimes think it’s morally wrong to talk about investing in themselves. Absolutely wrong. In a flatter world with more competition, how do you succeed? How do you invest in yourself and gain those skills? You can’t do it accidentally.”
Indeed.
Further into the profile is a good discussion of self-care and other-care, involving Peter Thiel, another philosophy-major-turned-major-Internet-player: “The negative to being an anti-sociopath is you don’t care enough about yourself,” Thiel explains.
At Amazon’s Kindle books section, my Explaining Postmodernism holds two of the top six places for books on postmodernism. The first edition is now first, and the expanded edition is now sixth. [Update March 6: Now 1st and 4th.]
They are neck-and-neck with The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism and The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, two traditionally strong-selling series.
For those who prefer paper, there is the lovely hardcover edition, which is ranked in the top ten for print editions on postmodernism.
From Peter Gay’s brief biography, about the terrible brevity of life in Mozart’s time.
Wolfgang Mozart “was born in Salzburg on January 27, 1756, the seventh and last child of Leopold and Anna Maria Mozart. Of his siblings, five died in infancy, and only one sister, four years his elder, survived … . This appalling balance sheet was only too common in Mozart’s century, even among the prosperous; Edward Gibbon’s father, for one, gave each of his six sons the same first name, Edward, in the expectation—justified, it turned out—that only one of them would carry it to adulthood.”
In Europe and the United State in the eighteenth century, infant mortality rates were over 50%.
The great rise in life expectancy we enjoy (nicely summarized here) occurred as a direct result of the Enlightenment of the 1700s. Current OECD infant mortality rates are less than one-half of one percent.
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