In my “Why Art Became Ugly,” I claimed that modern art’s trajectory was to abandon art for philosophy. In modernism, art becomes a *philosophical* enterprise rather than an *artistic* one. The driving purpose of modernism is not to *do* art but to *find out* what art is. Here’s a new-to-me datum about René Magritte, from […]
Was Magritte an artist — or a philosopher? Read More »
Who is more likely to cheat — those who play individual sports or those who play team sports? A fascinating experiment by Professor Sharon K. Stoll and reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education compared athletes in individual sports such as golf or singles tennis with those playing teams sports such as basketball or doubles
When Altruism becomes Pathological [Good Life series] Read More »
From Alex Von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire: Gandhi advised the British to give up the fight against Hitler and Mussolini, and he advised Jews in Germany to offer passive resistance to the Nazi regime: “Gandhi’s position on nonviolence was absolute. Aggression could never be returned. He did
Gandhi’s pacificism and the Nazi threat Read More »
My “The Deep Theory behind Stifling Speech” is now republished at Britain’s Church and State site: “The point is not that poverty and injuries are not real and serious issues to grapple with. The point is that the same tactics are at work in the Trigger strategy — the explicit use of weakness, trauma, victimhood
“The Deep Theory behind Stifling Speech” — now at Church and State Read More »
Immanuel Kant said: “Everything intuited in space or time, and therefore all objects of experience possible to us, are nothing but appearances, that is, mere representations, which in the manner in which they are represented, as extended beings, or as series of alterations, have no independent existence outside our thoughts.” For more on the meaning
Immanuel Kant in Explaining Postmodernism Read More »
My hour-long discussion with the energetic Ron Renaud: “Hang with me and super-hero philosopher Stephen Hicks talking about…” 0:00 minutes: Introduction 2:19: The evolution of socialist strategies and our culture wars 3:52: What a university should be 5:19: Rousseau, Marx, and one disaster after another 6:30: Feeling and rhetoric or logic? 7:50: Is Marxism a
Uncompromised Talk — discussion with Ron Renaud Read More »
Professor Stephen Hicks’s public lecture, “Postmodernism and the Verdict of History,” University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, March 9, 2018.
My *Postmodernism and the Verdict of History* public lecture Read More »
The old philosophy question — How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? — has gotten a bad rap.* Yet three important answers contest for dominance: 1. An infinite number of angels can dance on the head of a pin. As purely spiritual beings, angels do not take up physical space, so
So how many angels *can* dance on the head of a pin? Read More »