[This is Section 29 of Stephen R.C. Hicks’s Nietzsche and the Nazis.] 29. On contemporary Germans: the world’s hope or contemptible? While the Nazis put the German-Aryan racial type first, Nietzsche is almost never complimentary about his fellow Germans. In Nietzsche’s view, Germany has slipped into flabbiness and whininess. Germany once was something to be […]
Nietzsche on his contemporary Germans Read More »
An economic historian on socialist Russia after WW II: “The only sector of the economy which showed vigor was private farming: the 33 million private plots belonging to collective farm households, averaging 0.6 acre and constituting 1.5% of the country’s cultivated area, furnished the postwar Soviet Union with nearly one-third of its foodstuffs. In 1979,
Professor James Orr: “The atomisation of modern society, the tectonic contradictions of identitarianism, the shattering of civic and economic harmony, are not puzzling aberrations of liberalism but the outworking of its inner logic.” That is from Dr. Orr’s second essay, “A Conservative Critique of Liberalism,” in this Reason Papers three-round debate with Dr. Stephen Hicks.
Must Liberalism Fail? James Orr (Cambridge Univ.) debates Stephen Hicks (Rockford Univ.) Read More »
Notes on Punctuation By Lewis Thomas There are no precise rules about punctuation (Fowler lays out some general advice (as best he can under the complex circumstances of English prose (he points out, for example, that we possess only four stops (the comma, the semicolon, the colon and the period (the question mark and exclamation
Lewis Thomas’s classic-fun “Notes on Punctuation” Read More »
Juneteenth celebrates a great achievement. Slavery had existed for thousands of year in pretty much every culture in the world. But a few brave and lonely voices began to challenge it in the 1700s and within a century—almost a blink of an eye in historical time—it had been eliminated in the civilized parts of the
Juneteenth is day of honor Read More »
I’m delighted to announce my return to Peterson Academy. I will be teaching two separate courses, Philosophy of Education, on how major thinkers—from Socrates and Plato to Montessori and Foucault—shaped teaching and schooling, and Logic, on how to analyze arguments, spot fallacies, avoid bias, and understand reasoning. Filming in person in Phoenix, AZ. Spaces are limited. Apply
Studio audience invitation for live recording of two new courses Read More »
From Igor Stravinky’s Autobiography: “For me, as a creative musician, composition is a daily function that I feel compelled to discharge. I compose because I am made for that and cannot do otherwise. Just as any organ atrophies unless kept in a state of constant activity, so the faculty of composition becomes enfeebled and dulled
How great artists become great — Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky Read More »
Professor James Orr: “a society that prizes freedom above all else is a society that will, in time, descend into tyranny.” That is from Dr. Orr’s second essay, “A Conservative Critique of Liberalism,” in this Reason Papers three-round debate with Dr. Stephen Hicks. Orr advocates and defends Conservatism; Hicks does the same for Liberalism. Links