An Urdu translation of my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault will be published in Pakistan in late 2024 or early 2025. An Urdu edition, translated by Dr. Nazir Azad, was published in India in 2023. Urdu is the first or second language of 230 million people in Pakistan and India, so […]
Pakistani edition of *Explaining Postmodernism* forthcoming Read More »
The ethics of altruism [from the Latin, alter-ism or other-ism] holds that others are the standard of value. One is good to the extent one puts the interests of others first, acts to achieve their interests, and, when necessary, sacrifices one’s interests for their sake. In The Fountainhead, Ellsworth Toohey is the major strategist of
Toohey’s five strategies of altruism Read More »
A good example of how political philosophy is driven by ethics. Here is Engels, Karl Marx’s collaborator in writing The Communist Manifesto and other works, criticizing liberals — despite nineteenth-century liberalism’s great accomplishment in reducing war and promoting peace between nations: You have brought about the fraternisation of the peoples – but the fraternity is
Friedrich Engels against liberal peace Read More »
Judith Shklar (1928-1992) was Professor of Government at Harvard University, the first woman to receive tenure in that department. Her perfect zinger capturing the essence and the appeal of Rousseau: My discussion of Rousseau is in “The Climate of Collectivism,” which is Chapter Four of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.
Rousseau: “the Homer of the losers” Read More »
[I use Ayn Rand’s classic The Fountainhead in my Introduction to Philosophy course, analyzing the five major characters as moral-philosophical types. Here is a digest of the novel’s brilliant-manipulator villain, Ellsworth Toohey.] The ethics of altruism holds that others are the standard of value. One is good to the extent one puts the interests of
Ellsworth Toohey’s five strategies of altruism [repost] Read More »
James Orr is professor at Cambridge University, England. In conservative philosophical lineage, Orr is very much in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Roger Scruton. Prof. Orr and I did a one-hour oral debate in London last year, and a more detailed three-round written debate between us has been submitted for formal publication. Here is
James Orr and J.D. Vance Read More »
John Dewey was one of the top two most influential philosophers of education in the twentieth century. Maria Montessori was the other. Dewey’s influence has been most strongly felt in the American public school system. In America, Montessori’s influence has mostly been grassroots and in privately funded schools. Montessori’s approach is highly individualistic and individualized.
John Dewey on education as socialization Read More »
Episode 50 in my Open College with Dr. Stephen Hicks podcast series. Many rejections of objectivity assume from the outset an impossible standard for humans to achieve. Don’t do that. “It’s often said that we live in a ‘post-truth’ age, that nothing can be known with any certainty, and that we must give up notions
Objectivity for Actual Human Beings | Open College No. 50 | Stephen Hicks Read More »