Stephen R.C. Hicks's Blog, page 13

How artists work: Leonardo anecdote

“A contemporary who saw Leonardo working on the Last Supper describes how he stayed on the scaffolding from dawn to dusk without putting down his brush, forgetting to eat and drink, painting all the time. Then for two, three, or four days he would not touch his work and yet be staying there, sometimes an […]

Idealism and Education: Plato and Kant [Lecture 7 of Philosophy of Education course]

By Professor Stephen R.C. Hicks, Rockford University, USA. Lecture 7: What did the great Idealist philosophers believe and how did they apply it to education? The associated reading excerpts are here: Plato (https://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-conte...) and Kant (https://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-conte...). Previous lectures in the series: Part One: Introduction: What is the purpose of education, and what is philosophy’s relevance? […]

WHAT IS the MEANING OF LIFE? LOCKE v. ROUSSEAU. Lecture 1 of Philosophy of Ethics course [Peterson Academy]

“We naturally, even from our cradles, love liberty.” Lecture One: What Is the Meaning of Life? Themes: Traditional Hierarchy? Liberty and/or Equality. Six Deep Questions about Ethics. What is ‘Modern’? Texts: Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality About the Instructor Stephen R. C. Hicks, Ph.D. is Professor of Philosophy […]

“There are two kinds of people. Avoid both.” Schopenhauer did not say this (but I kinda wish he had)

He did say: “The majority of men … are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and … are not accessible to reason, but only to authority” (Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851) [Alternative translation here: “For the average man has no critical power of his own, and is absolutely incapable of appreciating the difficulty of […]

SYLLABUS for my Philosophy of Ethics (Modern) course [Peterson Academy]

In this eight-lecture course, Professor Hicks takes us on a journey through the evolution of modern moral philosophy, from the Enlightenment to the 21st century. Major thinkers covered include: John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Auguste Comte, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ruth Benedict, A.J. Ayer, and Philippa Foot. For each, […]

The “viciousness and dishonesty” of our time’s political controversies

George Orwell in 1944: “The thing that strikes me more and more—and it strikes a lot of other people, too—is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time.” A perennial lesson: Useful political commentary is as much a matter of character as it is of informed intelligence. Source: George Orwell, “As I […]

Hegel: “The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth”

“The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth.” Source: Georg Hegel, Philosophy of History [1830/1831]. Related: On the fuller context of Hegel’s provocative claim: Related: On Hegel’s place in the historical course of philosophy: Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (print or e-book), or audiobook:

Grok vs. Hicks on Postmodernism

It would have taken me 30 minutes to write this. Grok did it in 20 seconds: Q: What is Stephen Hicks’s position on postmodernism? A: Stephen Hicks, a Canadian-American philosopher, is a prominent critic of postmodernism. In his book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (2004), he argues that postmodernism is a […]

Top salaries and countries’ population size:

Here are the 10 countries with the highest average salaries (2025): 1. Luxembourg: $89,767/year​2. Iceland: $87,421/year​3. Switzerland: $83,332/year​4. United States: $80,115/year​5. Belgium: $73,206/year​6. Norway: $71,972/year​7. Austria: $71,167/year​8. Netherlands: $70,185/year​9. Denmark: $69,525/year​10. Australia: $67,101/year​ ​Impressive. Yet consider also their population sizes: Luxembourg: 763 thousand. Iceland: 393 thousand. Switzerland: 8.9 million. United States: 340 million. Belgium: 11.8 million. […]

18th-century Russia as egalitarian paradise

I had no idea until I read this in Hugh Barnes’s Gannibal: The Moor of Petersburg: “Until the end of the eighteenth century, even houses of wealthy Russians were barely distinguishable from peasant huts.” Who knew? (File under Humor, Sarcasm.) More on Gannibal and Gannibal.