Intellectual History
Links to my publications and posts on major figures and movements in intellectual history.
Before Philosophy
Homer’s world.
Greek money and philosophy.
Anacreon and Simonides.
Archilochus.
John Hale on Themistocles and the Athenian navy.
The Ancient Olympics.
Thales
Why does philosophy begin with Thales?
Philosophy begins: Thales’ revolution.
Related: Medical politics in ancient Greece.
Kuhn on the Greeks and scientific culture.
Socrates
Socrates’ two bad arguments for not escaping.
Quotations from Apology and Crito on reason and character.
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Plato
Plato on censoring artists — a summary.
Plato on education: The Allegory of the Cave [video].
The Myth of Gyges [video].
Elizabeth Warren and the doulos [with connection to Plato's Crito].
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Aristotle
The scientific mind, according to Aristotle.
Philosophy’s longest sentences, Part 3.
Populists and tyrants.
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Augustine
Augustine on why babies are evil.
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Renaissance and Reformation
Reformation-era extremes, Alexander VI version.
John Calvin’s Geneva.
The great Renaissance medical bloodletting controversy.
Anatomy and philosophy.
Iatrochemists: why iron salts cure anemia.
Two cautionary tales about cholera, the plague, and politics.
Francis Bacon
Who is the real father of modern philosophy?
Anatomy and philosophy.
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René Descartes
Who is the real father of modern philosophy?
A stolen Descartes manuscript.
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John Locke
Education: Locke versus Kant.
Philosophy’s longest sentences, Part 4.
John Locke on education [video].
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment Vision flowchart.
Gannibal, “dark star of the Enlightenment.”
The Knife Man.
What Peter the Great saw.
The surprising origin of the dismal science.
English liberty and Mozart’s opera.
How great artists become great and More on how great artists become great [anecdotes on Beethoven and Liszt].
Coffee and the Enlightenment.
David Hume
David Hume’s current influence.
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Adam Smith on slaves to fashion.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment.
Rousseau’s collectivism and statism.
Rousseau and the French Revolution.
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Immanuel Kant
Kant’s skeptical conclusion. Kant’s problematic from empiricism and rationalism. Kant’s essential argument. Identifying Kant’s key assumptions. Why Kant is the turning point. After Kant: Reality or reason but not both. Kant on collectivism and war.
What Kant Wrought [at the TAS site].
Posts: Is commerce rendering war obsolete?. Education: Locke versus Kant. Philosophy’s longest sentences, Part 2. Kleist: How Kant ruined my life. On “giving back”. Kant and modern art. Is modern art too complicated for us? [with quotations from Kant's Critique of Judgment]. Heine on Kant: The Department of Great Putdowns. Was Kant really that skeptical?
Johann Herder
Herder on multicultural relativism.
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William Paley and the argument from design (the teleological argument) [video]. Contrast the argument from evil (the theodicy problem).
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Fichte on education as socialization.
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Georg W. F. Hegel
Metaphysical solutions to Kant: from Hegel to Nietzsche.
Hegel on dialectic and saving religion.
Hegel on worshipping the state.
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Arthur Schopenhauer
Pessimism [in connection with contemporary anti-humanism].
Schopenhauer’s sense of humor.
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Søren Kierkegaard
Epistemological solutions to Kant: Irrationalism from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche.
Philosophical style: Hegel and Kierkegaard.
Lecture clips [video]: Kierkegaard, Luther, and Tertullian. The story of Abraham. Kierkegaard’s lesson: Abraham as model of faith.
Karl Marx
Marx’s three failed predictions.
Lecture clips [video]: Marxist philosophy in historical context. The science in “scientific socialism”: Materialism; Environmental determinism; Economic forces as fundamental; Philosophy, art, politics, and religion as superstructure; Religion as an example. The socialism in “scientific socialism”: Necessary economic developmental stages; Capitalism’s dynamic: “The rich get richer …”; Revolution, not evolution; Religion as the opium of the masses; The role of teachers in developing revolutionaries.
John Stuart Mill
Is commerce rendering war obsolete?
Philosophy’s longest sentences, Part 1.
Haters.
John and John on liberal psychology.
Audacious historical cause-and-effect claims.
Friedrich Nietzsche
See the Nietzsche and the Nazis page for my book on this subject.
“Egoism in Nietzsche and Rand.” Published in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 10:2, Spring 2009, 249-291. 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.”
Nietzsche at Basel .
Sigmund Freud
Freud and original sin.
Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School [on the usefulness of Freud's theories to the Frankfurt School's social psychology and politics].
The best footnote ever [on micturation].
John Dewey
John Dewey on education as socialization.
Lecture clips [video]: Pragmatic philosophy: Evolution, skepticism, and democracy. John Dewey on education.
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Martin Heidegger
Heidegger and postmodernism
Cyberseminar notes on Martin Heidegger [at The Atlas Society site].
Heidegger and National Socialism.
Heidegger, anti-humanism, and the Left.
The Frankfurt School
Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School.
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The Existentialists
Lecture clips [video]: God is dead. Albert Camus and “The Myth of Sisyphus”. Jean-Paul Sartre and “Existence precedes essence”. Religion and science as dehumanizing. Authentic humanism.
C. S. Lewis
Why C. S. Lewis gives me the creeps.
Self-esteem in Walt Whitman and C. S. Lewis.
Freud and original sin [includes a comparison of Lewis's and Freud's views on human nature].
The Postmodernists
See the Explaining Postmodernism page for my book on this subject.
Lecture clips [video]: Introduction to postmodern philosophy. What modernism is. The Enlightenment vision. Post-modernism’s themes. Quotations from Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida. Problems from Marxism. Pomo: skeptical relativistic rhetoric against modern society. Henry Giroux on education.
Claude Lévi-Strauss and postmodernism.
Cyberseminar: Discussion notes on Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty [at The Atlas Society site].
Ayn Rand
“Egoism in Nietzsche and Rand” [pdf]. Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 10:2, Spring 2009, 249-291.
Ayn Rand and Contemporary Business Ethics [pdf]. Journal of Accounting, Ethics, and Public Policy 3:1 (2003), 1-26.
Ayn Rand [The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy].
The fiction: Roark and Keating: First meetings. Toohey’s five strategies of altruism. Gail Wynand’s power strategy: Part 1, Part 2. Gordon Prescott: Heidegger’s disciple? Marcel Duchamp and Lillian Rearden.
Letters from Mises and Rothbard to Rand.
Miscellany
What I Have Learned about the History of Philosophy from My Students.
Facial hair and philosophers.
Who is the most loathsome philosopher in history?
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