Stephen R.C. Hicks's Blog, page 18

Ethics and Education: What Is the Good Life? [Lecture 5 of Philosophy of Education course]

By Professor Stephen R.C. Hicks, Rockford University, USA. Lecture 5: If education is to prepare students for living the best possible life, what is that? Which values and virtues are essential? Previous lectures in the series: Part One: What is the purpose of education, and what is philosophy’s relevance? Part Two: Reality: Metaphysics and Education. […]

Foucault: “Reason is the ultimate language of madness”

“Reason is the ultimate language of madness.” Source: Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 1965, 95. Related: On the fuller context of Foucault’s provocative claim: Related: On Foucault’s place in the historical course of philosophy: Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (print or e-book), or audiobook:

Nietzsche as public choice theorist

Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Will to Power explanation for how the pathetic morality of the weak can prevail over the strong.  “The values of the weak prevail because the strong have taken them over as devices of leadership” (section 863). In the first essay of Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche raises a historical puzzle. He has contrasted […]

‘Deep Thought’ channel reviews my *Modern Philosophy* course

A nine-minute video review of Modern Philosophy. The course comes to an end with the death of Nietzsche in 1900, and the Postmodern Philosophy course then covers developments and dead-ends during the 20th and early 21st centuries. In this eight-lecture course, Professor Stephen Hicks guides us through the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment, including philosophers Francis […]

Mises on Anarchism

Five quotations from Ludwig von Mises from five works on his opposition to anarchism: “Society cannot do without a social apparatus of coercion and compulsion, i.e., without state and government.” The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, p. 90. “There are people who call government an evil, although a necessary evil. However, what is needed in order to attain […]

Roger Scruton’s Conservatism [Philosophers, Explained series]

“Conservatism may rarely announce itself in maxims, formulae or aims. Its essence is inarticulate and its expression, when compelled, skeptical.” My close reading of Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism, first published in 1980 and then in an updated edition in 2014, a few years before his death. In the Philosophers, Explained series: Related: John Stuart […]

“Statecraft is soulcraft.” Shared ‘left’ and ‘right’ premises

Conservatives on the ‘right’ will say “Statecraft as soulcraft,” by which they mean that a function of government is to shape or instill moral virtue in its citizens so that they will live according to the government’s laws.[1] Note the parallel with the ‘left.’ Here is one of the original ‘left’ activists, St-Just: “The legislator […]

Human Nature & Education: What is Human Nature? [Lecture 4 of Philosophy of Education course]

By Professor Stephen R.C. Hicks, Rockford University, USA. Lecture 4: Free Will and Determinism, Reason and Emotion, the Mind and the Body. How are anthropology, biology, and psychology important to education. Previous lectures in the series: Part One: What is the purpose of education, and what is philosophy’s relevance? Part Two: Reality: Metaphysics and Education. […]

Robert Heilbroner on socialism’s mandatory labor

Robert Heilbroner was the most famous American socialist intellectual of the 20th century. His The Worldly Philosophers sold millions, making it the second-best-selling economics textbook of all time. In my Business and Economic Ethics course, we read and discuss one of his articles. Here is Heilbroner, writing in 1980, about who owns what under socialism: […]

From Kant to compulsory state education [Dewey quotation]

John Dewey: “we have an explicit fear of the hampering influence of a state-conducted and state-regulated education upon the attainment of these ideas. But in less than two decades after this time, Kant’s philosophic successors, Fichte and Hegel, elaborated the idea that the chief function of the state is educational; that in particular the regeneration […]