Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Introduction to Philosophy: syllabus and schedule

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?

“Egoism in Nietzsche and Rand” now online

My journal article “Egoism in Nietzsche and Rand” [pdf] is now online here. The 43-page study was published this spring in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.

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

Keynote lecture in Argentina

I will be giving a keynote lecture in Argentina at the invitation of the Bases Foundation and the School of Economics of the Catholic University in Rosario. The event is the Third International Conference on “The Austrian School of Economics in the 21st Century,” which will be held August 5-7, 2010.

The title of my lecture is: “Austrians, Objectivists, and the Unrequited Love of Philosophy for Economics.” Here is the abstract:

The Austrian school of economics and the Objectivist school of philosophy have both been essential to the liberal/libertarian movement. Mises and Hayek did much work in political economy and explored relevant philosophical issues in metaphysics, epistemology, and values. Rand did much work in philosophy, which she then applied in fictional portrayals of mixed political economies in decline. Yet while there is mutual respect between Austrianism and Objectivism, there are also points of tension. My purpose in this talk is to discuss the key commonalities and differences. Much specialized work in economics and philosophy must be done, so there is a natural and important division of labor. But that work must also be coordinated in making a full and compelling case for the free society.

Thanks for the invitation to Federico Fernandez, the Bases Foundation, and the School of Economics at Catholic University of Rosario.

The Bases Foundation takes its inspiration from Juan Bautista Alberdi, one of the great nineteenth-century Argentine Enlightenment liberal political theorists.

Two lectures in Alexandria, Virginia

I’m giving two talks later this week in historic Alexandria, Virginia, at the Free Minds 2010 conference, co-sponsored by The Atlas Society and the Free Minds Institute.

On Friday I’ll speak on “Ayn Rand’s Entrepreneurial Ethic,” and on Saturday I’ll speak on “CEE’s Mission and Strategy.”

Kant and modern art

The poet John Enright has a post entitled “Kant and Abstract Art,” in which he takes up the claim Rand made in The Romantic Manifesto that “the father of modern art is Immanuel Kant (see his Critique of Judgment).” Rand does not elaborate, and Enright notes that some people scoff at the claim.

Rand’s claim is a strong one, in part because it makes intellectual-causal connection across centuries. How does one establish a fatherly connection between an uptight eighteenth-century philosopher and a sprawling twentieth-century movement? And in part Rand’s claim is hard to wrap one’s mind around because Kant’s philosophy is known to be turgid, arid, and highly rationalistic while modern art is known to be wild, weird, and wacky. How on earth could the Prussian lead to Pollock?

Is Rand right, and if so what is the connection?

I’ve been working on and off toward an essay on the topic of Kant’s influence on modern and postmodern art. Huge topic, so let me here give only some preliminary scholarly props to Enright’s post in the form of a few quotations from recent thinkers.

What have scholars after Rand said about the connection between Kant and modern art?

In a scholarly collection of essays on Kant’s philosophy, Eva Shaper writes that Kant is “the father of modern aesthetics” (“Taste, Sublimity, and Genius: the Aesthetics of Nature and Art,” in Paul Guyer, ed.,The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 368).

Harold Osborne, longtime editor of the scholarly British Journal of Aesthetics, writes of “Kant, who is rightly regarded as the founder of modern aesthetics” (Aesthetics and Art Theory: An Historical Introduction, E. P. Dutton, 1970, p. 153). And further Osborne claims of Kant’s analysis: “This theory is the most important anticipation of the modern aesthetic outlook in any philosopher before the twentieth century” (p.191).

Without the first part of Critique of Judgment, writes philosopher Roger Scruton, “aesthetics would not exist in its modern form” (Kant, Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 79).

Philosopher Arthur Danto agrees with influential modernist art critic Clement Greenburg on the centrality of Kant’s work to the modernist project:
‘“The essence of Modernism,” [Clement Greenberg in “Modernist Painting” (1960)] wrote, “lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” Interestingly, Greenberg took as his model of modernist thought the philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as the first real Modernist.” […] I suppose the corresponding view of painting would have been not to represent the appearances of things so much as answering the question of how painting was possible”’ (After the End of Art, Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 7).

Kant scholars Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer note that in the Critique of Judgment Kant “is entrenching the assumption of the subjective character of aesthetic judgment so strongly that by our own time it has become virtually an (unargued) commonplace” (Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 11).

And more sweepingly, Professor Denis Dutton, philosopher and author of The Art Instinct, writes that Kant’s Critique of Judgment is “the greatest work of philosophical aesthetics ever written” (Dutton’s website).

Enright notes that scholar Roger Kimball makes a point of connecting Kant and modernist art in an essay on Schiller.

So from Kant’s Critique to Christo — an interesting fill-in-the-blanks intellectual-history project awaits.

Voluntary human extinction

When I was teaching out east some years ago, I noted a Philadelphia Inquirer piece on the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. This organization, firmly in the grip of zero-sum anti-humanist environmentalism, was calling for the elimination of human beings by unspecified means.

I expect that VHEMT’s members are no longer with us, but somehow the desire to end the human species has survived and pops up in a Peter Singer piece at the New York Times site: “Should This Be the Last Generation?”

In the article, Princeton philosopher Singer asks us to consider sterilizing ourselves. Bringing no additional children into the world would improve things since (a) we are hurting the environment, and (b) life sucks anyways.

During his career, Peter Singer has always exhibited a great ability to take zero-sum thinking to its reductio ad absurdum limits. But since he accepts the premise firmly, he doesn’t see the absurdity as such (despite his tacked-on compromise conclusion in the NYT piece.)

Singer’s “life sucks” attitude is, as he points out, a re-statement of Arthur Schopenhauer’s strong pessimism. Reality, Schopenhauer wrote in The World as Will and Representation, is a “world of constantly needy creatures who continue for a time merely by devouring one another, pass their existence in anxiety and want, and often endure terrible affliction, until they fall at last into the arms of death” (p. 349). And more: “we have not to be pleased but rather sorry about the existence of the world, that its non-existence would be preferable to its existence” (p. 576). As for mankind: “nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist” (p. 605).

In his piece, Singer also mentions David Benatar, whom I discussed briefly two years ago in my “Worth Reading” for January 18, 2008:

‘A recent extreme anti-humanist manifesto published by Oxford University Press—David Benatar’s Better Never To Have Been: The Harm Of Coming Into Existence: “David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. Although the good things in one’s life make one’s life go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence. … The author then argues for the ‘anti-natal’ view—that it is always wrong to have children—and he shows that combining the anti-natal view with common pro-choice views about foetal moral status yield a ‘pro-death’ view about abortion (at the earlier stages of gestation). Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct.”’

Philosophically, Singer’s thinking rests on three beliefs:
1. Human beings are net destroyers (rather than net creators).
2. Human beings experience life in net-negative terms (rather than net-positive).
3. Humans should be selfless and sacrifice the lesser value of their own lives for the greater value of other beings (rather than pursue happiness).

Premise one is the standard Malthusian premise that many environmentalists and other doomsters find so seductive; the antidote is Julian Simon’s great work. Premise three is a strong form of altruistic collectivism; the antidotes are the life-affirming philosophies, especially, in my judgment, those of Aristotle and Rand. And premise two is will-to-nothingness pessimism; but there is no known antidote once that poison has taken hold.

In his Lysis, Plato has Socrates say: “I think you’re right, Lysis, to say that if we were looking at things the right way, we wouldn’t be so far off course. Let’s not go in that direction any longer” (Lysis 213e).

Egoism in Nietzsche and Rand

My “Egoism in Nietzsche and Rand” has come out in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Here is the abstract for my 43-page study:

“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.”

In the same issue, Professor Lester Hunt has a commentary on my essay and an independent reading of Nietzsche that is very valuable.

This entire issue of JARS is a symposium devoted to essays comparing Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. I haven’t read the other contributions yet, but it looks like a lively set.

Preview of exam questions for Introduction to Philosophy

Now that we are past Spring Break, here is a study aid for students in my Introduction to Philosophy course: a list of questions for the final exam [pdf] based on the four major authors we have covered so far.

Think big and think bold.