Conservatives on the ‘right’ will say “Statecraft as soulcraft,” by which they mean that a function of government is to shape or instill moral virtue in its citizens so that they will live according to the government’s laws.[1] Note the parallel with the ‘left.’ Here is one of the original ‘left’ activists, St-Just: “The legislator […]
“Statecraft is soulcraft.” Shared ‘left’ and ‘right’ premises Read More »
By Professor Stephen R.C. Hicks, Rockford University, USA. Lecture 4: Free Will and Determinism, Reason and Emotion, the Mind and the Body. How are anthropology, biology, and psychology important to education? Previous lectures in the series: Part One: What is the purpose of education, and what is philosophy’s relevance? Part Two: Reality: Metaphysics and Education.
Robert Heilbroner was the most famous American socialist intellectual of the 20th century. His The Worldly Philosophers sold millions, making it the second-best-selling economics textbook of all time. In my Business and Economic Ethics course, we read and discuss one of his articles. Here is Heilbroner, writing in 1980, about who owns what under socialism:
Robert Heilbroner on socialism’s mandatory labor Read More »
John Dewey: “we have an explicit fear of the hampering influence of a state-conducted and state-regulated education upon the attainment of these ideas. But in less than two decades after this time, Kant’s philosophic successors, Fichte and Hegel, elaborated the idea that the chief function of the state is educational; that in particular the regeneration
From Kant to compulsory state education [Dewey quotation] Read More »
A good interview with philosopher of science Noretta Koertge. She was a student of Karl Popper’s at the University of London and became editor of the academic journal Philosophy of Science. She was also a member of my Ph.D. dissertation committee at Indiana University. Upon the publication of this excellent collection of articles — A
Koertge and the mis-uses of science Read More »
Ennui and emptiness. Meet Henri, le chat existentialiste. Revisiting this now-classic humor series. Related: My close reading of the most famous and un-humorous Existentialist:
By Professor Stephen R.C. Hicks, Rockford University, USA. Lecture 3: If education is about the transmission of knowledge, then what is knowledge? Or if education is about training young people’s habits of mind, then what about alertness to evidence, skill with logic, and a commitment to reason? Does faith work? Is everything just opinion? Previous
On the widespread phenomenon of frustrated and angry young men becoming hateful and destructive: “I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate” is a line from Mikhail Lermontov’s 1840 novel, A Hero of Our Time. I’ve frequently wondered, given the timing, how much the young
“I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate.” Read More »