In making her influential case for limiting the First Amendment and censoring porn, Catharine MacKinnon uses a combination of egalitarian and postmodern arguments. Here is my guided tour of her Only Words (Harvard U.P.) One can also follow Professor Hicks on X (@SRCHicks). Related: The full series of Philosophers, Explained episodes:
Catharine MacKinnon on censoring porn [Philosophers, Explained series] Read More »
I will be at the Academy’s impressive studio in Miami to record a new eight-lecture course on the philosophy of ethics. Here is the invitation to join the live studio audience. We will cover thinkers who made ethics modern (and highly diverse) — and those who resisted the modernizing trends — including John Locke, Jean-Jacques
Studio audience invitation for new Peterson Academy course: *Modern Ethics* Read More »
A new university will open in Britain in 2025. I’m happy to announce that I have joined its Board of Advisors. “The School of Innovation is aspiring to become the first independent university in Northern England since 1964. Based in Manchester, which was voted the 3rd best city in the world, has one of the
On The School of Innovation’s Advisory Board Read More »
A woman is told by her doctor that she has six months to live. “Is there anything I can do?” she asks. “Yes,” the doctor replies. “You could marry a tax accountant.” “How will that help my illness?” the woman asks. “Oh, it won’t help your illness,” says the doctor, “but it will make that
Philosophy humor — The relativity of time Read More »
According to Ernst Cassirer, Immanuel Kant was “the man who introduced anthropology as a branch of study in German universities.”[1] And anthropologist W. E. Mühlmann calls Kant “the founder of the modern concept of race.”[2] All humans are members of the same species, Kant argues, since members of the different races are capable of interbreeding.
Kant versus racial interbreeding Read More »
National Socialist ideologue Ernst Krieck had little patience for the claim that Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy was a forerunner of National Socialist politics. Frequently Nietzsche came up positively in Nazi speeches and writings. But Krieck scoffed: “All in all, Nietzsche was an opponent of socialism, an opponent of nationalism, and an opponent of racial thinking. Apart
Nietzsche, according to Nazi ideologist Ernst Krieck Read More »
The poet John Enright‘s “Kant and Abstract Art” takes up Ayn Rand‘s claim (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 scoff at the claim. Rand’s claim is a strong one, in part because it makes
Kant and modern art: quotations from artists and art critics Read More »
Some initial evidence for your consideration: paintings from Picasso, Duchamp, Dali, and de Kooning. At a TRAC conference in Ventura, California, I heard an intriguing talk by Kay Kane, professor of drawing at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Australia. Kane’s talk was based partly on (and partly diverged from) Wendy Steiner’s Venus in Exile
Were the Modernist painters especially misogynist? Read More »