One question on the final exam for my Philosophy of Art course asked students to identify the best or worst theorist of art we studied this semester. We devoted significant time to five major philosophers — Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and Rand — and discussed a few others along the way more briefly. In deciding […]
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Entrepreneurial Research Science My full interview with physicist R. Paul Drake is now posted at the the CEE site. I met with Dr. Drake in Michigan to discuss the realities of professional science — multi-tasking, grant-writing, travel, and learning from failure — the adequacies and inadequacies of American science education, and the likely future of
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Jumping into the debate about “bleeding-heart libertarianism” (Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, Bryan Caplan and again, David Friedman, David Henderson, and others), which seeks to integrate libertarianism with social justice. “Social justice” is one of those vaguely-specified, usually suspect phrases, defined by one defender of BHL as the position that “the moral justification of our
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Three of my items are now in the top ten on postmodernism at Amazon Kindle: * The first edition of Explaining Postmodernism has dropped from first to second. * The expanded edition has dropped from fifth to seventh. Too sad. * But my essay on Free Speech and Postmodernism is now up to tenth. (The
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I was surprised by this from Lanny Ebenstein’s biography, Milton Friedman: “Neither historically nor in his time to the present has the political orientation of Chicago’s Department of Economics been mostly free market. In a 1991 article on Laughlin, the first head of economics at Chicago, Friedman writes that the department had always had ‘prominent
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My lengthy journal article entitled “Egoism in Nietzsche and Rand” [pdf] is now publicly available for free at the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies‘ site. The abstract: “Philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand are often identified as strong critics of altruism and arch advocates of egoism. In this essay, Stephen Hicks argues that Nietzsche and
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In this extended interview, philosopher Douglas Den Uyl responds to a series of questions about his life and work. Den Uyl is the author of many works. His latest book, co-authored with Douglas Rasmussen, is Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics. Why did you become a philosopher? [0:19] Where did you get
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In my Philosophy of Art course, we’ve been reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy for the last two weeks, and we can add him to the list posted here of intellectuals across the ages bemoaning the poverty of their own time’s culture. Nietzsche on mid-19th century Germany: “What else, in the desolate waste of
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