“Power gives the first right, and there is no right, which at bottom is not presumption, usurpation, violence.” Lecture Six: Predation and Power Themes: Gyges. Original Sin? Master and slave moralities. Slavery as natural and necessary? A new aristocracy. Texts: Nietzsche, “The Greek State,” Beyond Good and Evil, and The Will to Power About the […]
Source: Heidegger, Martin. “What Is Metaphysics?” [1929]. Related: On the fuller context of Heidegger’s provocative question: Related: On Heidegger’s place in the historical course of philosophy: Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (print or e-book), or audiobook:
Heidegger: “Why is there Being and not rather Nothing?” Read More »
From a 2020 interview: Jennifer Grossman [19:15]: Black Lives Matter. What’s your perspective? Stephen Hicks: The movement, the phrase? Jennifer Grossman: Well, I guess you could do both? The movement, I don’t think it’s a corporation, is just the insistence that there is structural and institutional racism, particularly with regards to police brutality, what are your
The two contradictory Black Lives Matters movements [interview excerpt] Read More »
The philosopher René Descartes in 1633: “I inquired in Leiden and Amsterdam whether Galileo’s World System was available, for I thought I’d heard that it was published in Italy last year. I was told that it had indeed been published but that all the copies had immediately been burnt at Rome, and that Galileo had
Descartes’ reaction to Galileo’s conviction Read More »
15-lecture series by Professor Stephen R.C. Hicks, Rockford University, USA Lecture 11: What did the major Existentialist thinkers—Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre in particular—believe and how they apply it to education? How are “Existence precedes essence” and “The Myth of Sisyphus” relevant to deciding our purposes in life? Previous lectures in the series: Part One:
“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.“ Lecture Five: The Greatest Happiness for the Greatest Number Themes: Hedonism. Epicurus. Utility. Bentham. Individual or collective? The problem of Casanova, de Sade, Sacher-Masoch. Text: Mill, Utilitarianism About the Instructor Stephen R. C.
Nietzsche on Kant’s fundamental correctness: “reason does not derive its laws from nature but prescribes them to nature.” Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, A Book for Free Spirits [1878]. Related: On the related context of Nietzsche’s provocative claim: Related: On Nietzsche’s place in the historical course of philosophy: Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism
Champion’s essay on Substack, “How Science Lost its Way: Karl Popper and Gordon Tulloch on the institutional malaise of science.” After World War II: “The philosophical diaspora in the US converted the philosophy of science into a wasteland of conceptual analysis and sterile probability theory instead of an introduction to the kind of imaginative and