In 2016, Mark Michael Lewis interviewed me on a variety of topics, including the pronoun wars. At that point, Professor Jordan Peterson had recently taken a strong public stand against being required to use some newly proposed pronouns, and that refusal had generated controversy. Here is the transcript of my four-minute opinion on Peterson and […]
Hicks on Pronouns and Peterson — transcript Read More »
Ignasi Boltó, a.k.a. the Spanish Libertarian, asked me eleven questions (below or at YouTube): 1. What’s your intellectual evolution? 2. Why do you say that postmodernism is the evolution of Marxism? 3. What values define Western Civilization? 4. Why does the New Left fight nihilistically against individual rights and capitalism? 5. Does philosophy matter to
Spanish Libertarian interview on pomo, Jordan Peterson, and red-pilling SJWs Read More »
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 »