I’m re-reading some biographical material on Kant, the great counter-Enlightenment philosopher of Königsberg. (Apparently, the crooked-timber house that Kant lived in early in his career was subject to vandalism. A sublime and phenomenal critique of the critiquer.) With one exception, Professor Kant had no pictures hanging on the walls of his house. Kant had been […]
Immanuel Kant, portraiture, and I Read More »
Burke: “The French have rebelled against a mild and lawful monarch with more fury, outrage, and insult than ever.” About the Course In this eight-lecture course, Professor Stephen Hicks takes us through the development of political philosophy from the late 18th to the early 20th century, focusing on key thinkers and movements that shaped the
Pyrrhus, the great Greek general, is off to conquer the world — Italy, Sicily, Libya, Carthage, and beyond. Cineas, his eloquent adviser and ambassador, asks him: What will you do after you conquer the world? Pyrrhus answers that he will take his ease. Cineas replies, Then why not take your ease now? Source: Paraphrasing from
Cineas and the meaning of life Read More »
From a 2020 interview: Jennifer Grossman [27:04]: One thing I hear is when we talk about race, and this gets to sort of the metaphysics and epistemology of reality, it’s common refrain is, you have your facts, I have my facts, you have your reality, I have my reality isn’t, you know, possible to have
Standpoint epistemology and social fracture [interview excerpt] Read More »
. Reiterating that I’m a fan of C. Bradley Thompson’s America’s Revolutionary Mind. First published in 2019, it is a moral history of the founding era that will stand the test of time. Thompson is a transplanted Canadian and a Political Science Ph.D. now teaching at Clemson University, South Carolina. Related: Thomas Jefferson on Slavery.
Thompson’s *America’s Revolutionary Mind* Read More »
Defending Christianity—and the legacy of Abraham in particular—Søren Kierkagaard concludes (approvingly) that one’s accepting it means “to relinquish his understanding and his thinking, and to keep his soul fixed upon the absurd.” Source: Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling [1843]. Related: On the fuller context of Kierkegaard’s provocative claim: Related: On Kierkegaard’s place in the historical
In this eight-lecture course, Professor Hicks takes us on a journey through the evolution of modern political philosophies, from the cataclysm of the French Revolution to the Second World War. Major thinkers covered include: Edmund Burke, Georg Hegel, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, William James and John Dewey, Giovanni Gentile and Benito
Syllabus for *PHILOSOPHY of POLITICS: From the French Revolution to World War II* Read More »
Professor James Orr: “I am convinced where he {Hicks] is not that wokus pokus is liberalism on steroids.” That is from Dr. Orr’s third essay, “Conservatism: Final Thoughts,” in this Reason Papers three-round debate with Dr. Stephen Hicks. Orr advocates and defends Conservatism; Hicks does the same for Liberalism. Links here: Conservatism or Liberalism? A Debate