Stephen Hicks

The ethics of altruism holds that others are the standard of value. One is good to the extent one puts the interests of other first, acts to achieve their interests, and, when necessary, sacrifices one’s interests for their sake. In The Fountainhead, the character Ellsworth Toohey is the major strategist of altruism, and in my […]

The long march through the institutions in graphs. Check out series by data scientist David Rozado series on Twitter, especially the updated graphs posted in August 2022. * First, academic postmodernism’s high theory is developed in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, especially in philosophy. * Second, it spreads through other humanities fields (Literature,

I’m happy to be joining the faculty of the new Peterson Academy, launching November 2023. I’ll be teaching two courses: Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Philosophy. (Syllabi forthcoming.) They’ll be recorded before a live studio audience in Miami, Florida. To attend, register here: https://petersonacademy.com/hicks.

Löwy raises the right question about the generation straddling 1900: So much of understanding the past 100 years turns on getting the answer right. That’s my project in Nietzsche and the Nazis and Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.

I’m preparing a lecture on philosopher David Hume, who was ruthlessly skeptical about everything—causality, abstraction, induction, objective morality, the self, and the existence of God. And I remembered this amusing anecdote: Related: My Philosophers, Explained series of close readings of major texts.

Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of the Chicago Bulls and Chicago White Sox: “You’ve got to learn to lose. Most of the time in sports you lose. Only one team wins the World Series each year—29 of them don’t.” In Entrepreneurial Living, edited by Stephen R. C. Hicks and Jennifer Harrolle. In this volume of interviews with

Friedrich Nietzsche made this indictment and prediction about the effect of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy: “As soon as Kant would begin to exert a popular influence, we should find it reflected in the form of a gnawing and crumbling skepticism and relativism.” Strong language, and it goes against a popular interpretation of Kant as the savior